Boxed Review

Hip-Hop Is History

Roots drummer Questlove (Music Is History) lays down a kaleidoscopic chronicle of hip-hop’s 50-year history of “diversity and vision... flummery and flaws,” beginning with the 1973 Bronx party during which DJ Kool Herc began isolating and repeating songs’ beats on turntables. From there, Questlove recounts how the Sugarhill Gang differentiated their sound from disco music by telling “comic stories over the groove, at great length and with great enthusiasm”; documents how the rise of such star producers as Dr. Dre shifted hip hop’s center of gravity from the East Coast to the West in the 1990s; and claims that the popularity of drug-related songs in the 2010s marked a cultural moment of “willful numbing” by hip-hop artists disillusioned with the lost promise of a “better future led by a Black president.” Throughout, Questlove interweaves sharp and lyrical analyses of hip-hop’s evolution with fascinating, up-close recollections of the genre’s turning points, noting, for example, that Eminem’s 1999 album The Slim Shady LP released on the same day as the Roots’ Things Fall Apart, and provoked questions about what it meant for a “white rapper in a mostly Black genre” to “bea[t] sales records left and right.” It’s an exuberant account of a dynamic musical genre and the cultural climate in which it evolved. (June)