This is a collection of fifteen essays divided into two distinctive parts: the first concentrates on “hip hop culture and rap music in the U.S.” and the second takes a global perspective of the music from “Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands” (p.6).

One of the first essays is by the political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been on death row since 1981 for the alleged shooting of a policeman.  This is an extremely insightful piece stripped of traditional academic conventions which undoubtedly gives it greater clarity and impact.  Abu-Jamel gives a lineage to hip hop that goes back to “ancient African oral traditions” and to “bluesmen who transmuted their pain into art” and later contextualizes rap in the “dog eat dogism” of the Reagan era and the right-wing resurgence that reflected “a harsher reality of lives lived amidst broken promises” (p.23).  Indeed, directly critiquing the misogynistic elements of rap music, Abu-Jamel declares that this is “profoundly American” as the USA is “one of the most violent nations on earth, and has a barely suppressed hatred of women” (p.25).  It would have been extremely interesting for the author to have pursued this point further.

Other essays in this US section also describe the American music industry in relation to black artists and state that “Black visibility is not Black Power” (p.39).  This section also investigates women and hip hop by interviewing the director of the rap music documentary Nobody Knows My Name (1999), Rachel Raimist.  One of the more interesting essays is by Adria L. Imada who describes hip hop as a form of political expression used by the indigenous Hawaiian group Sudden Rush who “explicitly promote resistance to U.S. annexation and the continued occupation” (p.88).  In this way Imada captures the manner by which Sudden Rush as members of a disempowered minority in their own land use hip hop as a vehicle for political protest and cultural activism.  Imada states that by “making connections with other colonized and indigenous people, Hawaiians became part of a global political struggle and resisted the construction of themselves as isolated dots in the Pacific Ocean” (p.95).

The second section of the book deals with “Rap and Hip Hop Groove Globally” (p.117) signifying that the music form is “a vehicle for global youth” (p.120).  Essays are on the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Cuba, Japan, South Africa, and Tanzania.  This certainly shows how diverse the music has become, yet with the common themes of oppression and poverty and, indeed, of the globalization of Black culture.  The essay on France highlights this common thread with the flavour of a particular nation’s history and culture: “Immigration, racism, and the exploitation of immigrant workers have logically become some of the major themes of French rap” (p.156).

Overall this is a helpful book in explaining the appeal of hip hop and rap across the world to those who are dispossessed and have no other voice.  It would certainly gain a wider readership beyond the academic community as many of the essays consciously eschew an academic framework which helps the reader to appreciate the political and social aspects of rap not only in the United States but across the world with the perspective that “hip hop speaks the language of the world’s ghettos…but with cultural twists” (p.4).