Hip-Hop Intellectual

Michael Eric Dyson discusses hip-hop:

Commercial pressures mean that in some ways, rap is a victim of its own success. And critics shouldn’t forget that jazz, in its early days, was considered as scurrilous as rap is now. Hip-hop culture in general, and rap in particular, comes with an intricate embedded politics — and at its best, Dyson says, “hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.”

The reading of Know What I Mean? took place at the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.