The surgical separation of hip-hop and politics effected by its insertion into the mainstream has had a wounding but not dispiriting effect on hip-hop activist-intellectuals of color like Chang. Like him, many of them have carried the political passions engendered by agitprop avatars PE, KRS-One and NWA into adulthood, academia and street action on both coasts. It may be for this reason that Chang ends his book in 2000, with a report on a live hip-hop rally against Proposition 21, the draconian Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act. That demonstration culminated in a rainbow coalition of black, brown, yellow and white fists raised to the sky against the powers that be--clearly meant as an antidote to the hypersexual, ultraviolent image that commercial hip-hop cultivates today, partly in service to its corporate masters. This parting shot from life before Bush also allows Chang to skirt the obvious question that hip-hop politics, like all progressive movements, faces in the wake of 9/11--how to utilize its cultural and technological savvy to awaken the digitally narcotized and dramatically intensify the terms of American political debate.

In a landscape where thoughts of grand action are overwhelmed by fears of what Bush, Blair and bin Laden might do tomorrow and how Fox will spin it for the masses, the notion that today's machine-programmed hip-hop nation will once again sing of fighting the power can seem quite quixotic. But as Bakari Kitwana argues in Why White Kids Love Hip Hop, there is an organizing potential in the interracial millennium generation for whom hip-hop is still a centrifugal force, and who continue to draw sustenance from those aspects of hip-hop that aren't corporate controlled. Kitwana, a former editor at The Source, is the author of The Rap on Gangsta Rap and the Hip Hop Generation. He was also co-founder of the National Hip Hop Political Convention, established in part as a response to what some saw as the co-optation of hip-hop activism by Russell Simmons's Summit Action Network. In many ways Kitwana's title is misleading, since the book is largely about the potential for future coalition-building among hip-hop activists across class and age lines. Despite its promise of prescriptions, it's a reflection on the hip-hop progressive's internal strife rather than a battle plan, proving that hip-hop activism already suffers from that uneasy middle-age condition common to the left, whose time and energy are vitiated as much by the war within as by the war without.

S. Craig Watkins's Hip Hop Matters covers everything from hip-hop's relationship to the 1990s war on youth civil liberties that emerged in various California crime bills, to the emergence of Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick as the nation's first self-proclaimed hip-hop mayor, to Sean "Puffy" Combs's glammed-out Vote or Die youth registration drive in 2004. If Chang's book is the best to date on hip-hop's social, political and aesthetic history, Watkins's study is the best yet on the hip-hop industry. Watkins has provided nothing less than a political economy of hip-hop, one that doesn't shy away from the dirty business hip-hop has become--especially as the shift from selling dope beats and rhymes to the selling of ass and overpriced leisurewear became the movement's primary (and, not incidentally, most lucrative) focus. He's also attentive to the way hip-hop was affected by the appalling rates of incarceration and AIDS in black communities.

People tend to get a bit heated if you don't distinguish between hip-hop and the hip-hop industry. What's often forgotten is that hip-hop used the evil empire of the industry to further its own ends--subverting the mechanisms and formulas of pop to forge platinum hits with little or no airplay, music video or promotion--as witness the rise of Public Enemy. But hip-hop also paid a price for the ticket of inclusion. By making a devil's bargain with hyper-capitalism, hip-hop lost not only its freedom of speech but its powers of speech: the gift it once had to artfully and hypnotically articulate the social fallout from public policies that have consigned one in ten Americans to poverty. Watkins adeptly frames and critiques the gulf that hip-hop's ascension to a $12 billion-a-year market has inevitably opened between urban reality and hip-hop-derived ghetto fantasies like the Xbox game Grand Theft Auto.

One day a book will be written about the continuities between the Harlem Renaissance era, the Black Arts Movement and hip-hop. When that epic gets written, one of its ur-texts will be The Black Arts Movement. James Edward Smethurst's scholarship makes it abundantly clear that the precedent for cutting-edge African-American musical and poetic forms and politics was established, respectively, by Langston Hughes in the 1920s, Richard Wright in the '40s and Amiri Baraka in the '60s; the book also reminds us that, as with hip-hop, the center of gravity of the black radical cultural movements of the '60s swung from the North to the West Coast to the South. As it happens, the Black Arts Movement came into being between 1965 and 1973, when much of the first hip-hop generation was busy being born. The question of who belongs to that generation is up for grabs--many of the founding fathers, like Herc and Bambaataa, were born in the late '50s, while its core audience today was born between the mid-'70s and early '80s. Most of the hip-hop audience barely (if ever) experienced it as a radicalizing political force, and for new listeners it's merely another Internet menu item.

My own definition of a hip-hop generation is generous and circumspect: anyone who between the years 1977 and 1998 caught the fever for the flavor of the culture, and believed it was going to change the world against the naysayers and nabobs who thought it wouldn't last. For a brief moment we got to stand on top of the mountain and pop Cristal or organic cranberry juice, as the case might be, when it did bum-rush the record industry. Where we are now is somewhere on the other side of that mountain--a place where the big question on the table for hip-hop's progressive wing is whether a generation that came to politics through a pop-music subculture can continue to run with that subculture at a time when politics is increasingly defined by what the right does with military power rather than by what oppositional citizens do with their own.

Neither Chang, Kitwana nor Watkins discusses Iraq, 9/11 or the Patriot Act, or how any contemporary discussions around race and racism must include South America, Asia and the Middle East. Du Bois's observation that the problem of the twentieth century was the color line still stands for the twenty-first. But the hip-hop generation's notion of American racial politics is in need of a little post-9/11, post-Patriot Act color correction. Kitwana and his cohorts envisioned a hip-hop-generation takeover of the Democratic Party during the last election's youth-voter efforts. Romantic as that was, today's progressive politics have never hurt from a blushing ardor for the sleeping dragon of people's power. And if hip-hop culture, more politically asleep now than ever before, can produce a few more active dreamers with the wit, realism and enthusiasm of Chang, Kitwana and Watkins, progressive politics might not have to seem as Jurassic as the Bushies have made it appear to America's vast, Twin Tower-traumatized daydream nation.

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