Cant Stop Wont Stop: A Hip-Hop History by Jeff Chang

Cant Stop Wont Stop: A Hip-Hop History Reviews

• 
  Toni

  I am not much of a music fan and really not into rap, however this book totally awed me. I have a whole new respect for rap and the people who perform it. I love how this book uses the history of a music genre to explain important historical events and allows the reader to see these events through a different lens than mainstream media provides. I will definitely be purchasing this title for my library and encouraging my students to read it.
• 
  Staci Vought

  This got off to an incredibly slow start for me. I almost gave up on it, but I’m glad I didn’t. After listening for around 3 hours, the history started to be more compelling and focused on more than hip hop. While my engagement slipped on and off after that, I was much more engaged and was VERY engaged for the last 1/4 of the book. The interplay of history and music were wonderfully done, and the focus on race was compelling and comprehensive. I think it will take students quite a while to initially engage unless they are history buffs AND die-hard hip hop fans. 3/4 of the musicians and time periods focused on in this book are before they were born.
• 
  Laura

  The content is super great and I learned so much about not just hip hop - but so many cultural moments attached to the music genre.
  
  I didn’t read the original, so I don’t know how adapted to the YA audience this is. Seems to me this could be a bit dense for that age group. There are some interesting parts but overall it’s a lot of info to cover in a relatively short timespan. The ending has been edited to be up-to-date with the current BLM movement as well as other current events.
• 
  Bridget

  Okay, now that I'm finished, I think this is a great choice for teen and adult readers with TONS of details and interesting stories. It's also complex enough and trusts readers to make connections in a way that feels best suited to a high school audience rather than a middle school one, but I think I might still bring it to our 8th graders. There's so much history that weaves around the details about hip-hop, providing context, grounding a reader who wasn't alive for most of this. It's not a light read, but it is an amazing story of art, history, and culture, and I think it will resonate for tons of readers. The audiobook is wonderful, and I highly recommend it for adult readers as well as teens.
  -------
  I borrowed this from our library on audio, partly because it says that it's been "adapted for a young adult audience." It's a fascinating book so far, but it definitely reads like adult non-fiction in the amount of detail and depth of the history. I think this updated version would work great as a crossover for adult readers, and I'll wait til I finish before I decide what age I might booktalk this for at schools. Right now I'm leaning high school only, but I'm only a handful of chapters in so far.
• 
  Zoey P

  **I received a copy of this book in exchange of an honest review.
  
  I so enjoyed reading this book. To preface, I rarely read nonfiction. I've never really found it my thing. Part of that might go back to being a history major in college. I always felt like I "knew enough." However, one of my favorite things is learning more about something that I thought was just common knowledge. Obviously, this book taught me more than I ever thought!
  
  Hip Hop and the creation of rap music is so incredibly interesting. Chang does an excellent job of taking readers through the entire story. Throughout the book, he explains the origins of artists, movements, and how gangs and inner city clubs created hip hop. I found myself pouring over this book and trying to retain as much information as possible. The language in the book is easy to understand for me and probably most YA readers. I also felt that I gained a new appreciation for hip hop music in general. As some who grew up in the late 90's and early 00's, I could connect a lot of what I listened to to the overarching ideas and concepts. I liked knowing more about where the music I enjoyed came from.
  
  This is definitely a book that should grace the shelves of libraries with students or readers who love hip hop and rap music or our current culture. The last section will tie everything together for our generation z readers and honestly everyone else as well.
• 
  Ivy Digest

  I love hip-hop. I listen to it and dance it, so I was excited for this edition. But I was so disappointed that there was not a single picture. Hip-hop is so visually vibrant so why didn't they put in pictures of the Greats?
  
  This was written so dryly, like a police report, that it seems the author doesn't even like hip-hop. It was also physically hard to read as the leading (the space between the lines) was so small that the text looked too crowded. There wasn't even any space between paragraphs!
  
  If this is geared for teens, it won't hold their attention. I tried it with my breakdancing rapper teen but he stopped at the first page. I'm so disheartened that hip-hop was presented so dully. Reading it deadened my interest as well.
  @IvyDigest
  
• 
  Beth Revelo

  My reasons:
  1. Unless you have some background knowledge of this topic, this will go right over your head. Not enough definitions as well. Becomes very overwhelming very quickly and makes it very hard to read.
  2. This is a failed young adult adaptation because it goes through way too much material way too fast - while still dragging on for the first 70 pages.
  3. It gets to the point too fast, while it doesn't have any repetitive parts which is good for a young adult adaptation, it goes through too much, too fast, too soon.
  4. This book could have benefited from maps, defining regions of the United States or the neighborhoods of NYC for various chapters. For example, a map of the gangs living in the boundaries of NYC with maps and boundary lines in Chapter 1, would have been very beneficial instead of throwing me for a loop in the first 10 pages.
  5. It does widen the historical figures for students to read about - but I would say it did it too well, by providing too many people and names with not a single picture. It could have benefited from pictures of the rappers it talks about to put a face to a name.
  6. It could have benefited from a visual timeline as well, even though the book is written chronologically.
  7. The font makes it hard to read because while it is modern, it's not spaced out to my liking.
  8. It does display the same breadth and preview that the adult version boasts, however which is good.
  
  As a young adult adaptation, I would say it was failed adaptation because it moves too fast and young adults or kids may not be able to keep up with the pace of the book. It does take out slurs but not taking out context so you're not leaving you in the dark. Some parts could have been cut to make it more to the point. It would still be a good benefit to high school libraries because it doesn't contain too much explicit language for high school students and does have A LOT of good information for any student to do research or a research project with or on. I would also say it's credible for any student to use this book to source information from.
• 
  Jamie

  15 years ago I reviewed the original for SLJ's Adult Books for Young Adults. I loved it! I wish I could have found that copy to compare it with this one. This one fell flat for me, and to tell you why, I'm going to have to break the cardinal sin of "reviewing" - reviewing the book I wanted rather than the one I got.
  
  I questioned why we would update a 15 year old book instead of writing a new one. I still question that. This is a lifetime for the target audience. So why not write a new one? Because the end result to this one was that it felt too stuffed.
  
  Hip hop is now 50 years old, and trying to tie not only 50 years of hip hop but its cultural relevance into 300 pages is too much. As a result, some things aren't given the attention they need, or even an entire sentence. These things include sentence fragments about :
  
  -Afrika Bambaata's sexual assault allegations (despite the fact that his entire chapter remains.)
  -Grime (despite the fact that there is an entire chapter based on international hip hop and Grime is as big as any subset of hip hop right now)
  -Soundcloud rappers
  
  There are 500 stories in this book that could warrant 300 page books on their own. Unfortunately, 50 years of history ends up reading like sentence sentence sentence, this happened then this. It ends up feeling overstuffed and superficial at once.
  
  
• 
  Angie

  "Hip hop had always been there right at the Nexus of violence and creativity, a place where young people could choose to continue the division since segregation they had inherited or to instead transform their own lives and others, whether the few around them or millions around the world."
  
  I have always loved hip hop and could never quite put into words what it was about the music that spoke to me so much. Upon finishing this book, reading the history of the music that spoke to me so clearly, I can see and understand what it was the resonated with me. Hip hop has the magic of expanding borders and creating and sparking connections between people who may be in different places and different situations that have the same feelings at their core. This book was well written, thoughtful, and empowering.
• 
  Jared

  Incredibly informative and well researched. Beyond being just a book about hip hop artists, Jeff Chang and Davey D build a comprehensive narrative of the birth and proliferation of hip hop culture through the lens of the continual systemic racism against and exploitation of black and coloured people in America; an ongoing feature of it’s economic policies and policing from the civil rights movement until today. Can’t stop, won’t stop tracks hip hop from its beginnings in block parties as a culture and expression of the working class and oppressed, to the multimillion dollar empire it has spawned in the early 2000s, to the Soundcloud generation of rappers today.
• 
  Brooke Nadzam

  I’m not sure if it’s my age or what, but I found this fascinating! Oddly, about 3 months ago, a colleague and I were trying to figure out the difference between hip hop and rap. Now it know! It was a readable history of what hip hop is and what its goals are. This is one of those books that I read and start bringing up the “did-ja-knows” in conversations.
• 
  Brenda

  What a compilation of Bronx gang info, hip hop artists and their pieces, graffiti artists....my! The research that must have gone into this! It's a history of hip hop...but so many names for all of the above that it's different "reading". I wonder, too, what makes this the YA version. Look forward to discussing all of this at the Children's Literature book club later this month.
• 
  Thuanhnguyen

  A perfect adaptation of the original book for young audiences. It's written so that young adults can really understand the history of music and activism. It would be a great companion with a soundtrack.
• 
  Tonya

  The Roxanne Wars. Breakin'. Break dance contests. I was in intermediate school, but my friend's middle school sister kept us informed of the drama and happenings, and would play hip-hip records when she could get them. This was a fun, informative listen.
• 
  Carrie

  This book did a really good job of placing hip hop music within its larger cultural significance. It's a pretty lengthy young adult edition, so I wondered how much got adapted from the original.
  
  My only complaint is that I hated the font the whole way through!
• 
  RyReads

  A little too convoluted for my taste and, in my opinion, definitely too convoluted for a YA audience.
  Definitely full of information, though! Worth the read if you can get through it
  
  3 stars
• 
  Mahmutcans

  
  https://www.lizyum.com