Library Rock's Backpages

Nelson George: Hip Hop America/William Shaw: Westsiders/Cathy Scott: The Killing Of Tupac Shakur

Ian Penman, The Wire, May 2000

HIP HOP NEEDS its users' manuals. How many of the millions who bought their in-vogue Fugees CD, say, could untangle the dialectic that daisychains together Frederick Douglass and Dolomite with Dick Van Dyke and Elliot Ness? Or caught the melancholic pulse behind the hedonistic liquor fumes when Pras says: "I pour a sip on the concrete for the deceased".

Total word count of piece: 1690

Subscribe

Becoming a member is easy. Membership gives you access to all the thousands of articles in the library.

Click here to go to Subscribe page.

Click here for academic and other group subscriptions.