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Fear of a Hip Hop Planet: America's New Dilemma
Fear of a Hip Hop Planet America's New Dilemma Author:Donald M. Jones Obama's ascent to the presidency is vivid proof that the color line is largely a thing of the past. But the color line has been replaced with the line between the suburbs and the inner city. Race has become "spatialized." Once we step across that line, we move into a danger zone where baggy pants and gold teeth equate with "super-predator" and t... more »hug. Fear of a Hip Hop Planet: America's New Dilemma calls attention to the moral panic about Gangsta Rap, and other aspects of urban culture. The book is organized around three themes. The first is that the same fear that attached to race has now migrated to the precincts of cultural difference. The second is that while race has become increasingly invisible, structural inequality in the inner city has deepened: work has disappeared, failure has been normalized in schools, and the drug war has become a war against the urban underclass. The third theme is that Gangsta Rap plays a critical and complex role both in interpretation and in resistance. Throughout this carefully considered and researched work, the author shows how the transformation of urban music mirrors the transformation of the inner city itself.« less