Book dossier

Roc the Mic Right

by H. Samy Alim

Roc the Mic Right is the first in-depth, book-length analysis of the most pervasive yet least examined aspect of Hip Hop Culture - its language. Hip Hop Culture has captured the minds of youth "all around the world, from Japan to Amsterdam" (like the homie Kurupt say), shaping youth identities, styles, attitudes, languages, fashions, and both physical and political stances. Written in both "Hip Hop Nation Language" and "academic discourse," Alim takes the reader on a journey through Hip Hop's inventive linguistic landscape, deconstructing its discourse and poetics, while highlighting relationships between language, identity and power (from the groundbreaking exploration of the Muslim "transglobal Hip Hop ummah" to the critical study of Black Language in White public space). What sets this book apart from many on the subject is Alim's extensive ethnographic fieldwork and his close contact with the Hip Hop community, from multiplatinum superstars to street-level, underground heads. Drawing upon an impressively broad range of theories and methodologies, from sociolinguistics and anthropology to cultural studies and poetics, Alim places the Hip Hop artists - such as Mos Def, Pharoahe Monch, Ras Kass, JT the Bigga Figga, Eve and Juvenile - in the center by viewing them as interpreters of their own culture. The result is a fascinating insider's view of what can arguably be referred to as the most profound cultural and musical movement to rock the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.