| Title | : | The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1984825135 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781984825131 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 576 |
| Publication | : | Published October 4, 2022 |
The music that we would later know as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it's the most popular genre in America and its electric impact on contemporary music is likened to that of jazz on the first half of the twentieth century. And yet, despite its tremendous influence, the voices of many of hip-hop's pioneers have never been thoroughly catalogued--and some are at risk of being lost forever.
Now, in The Come Up, Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop's rise, told in the voices of the people who made it happen. Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of an overlooked population amid the decay of the South Bronx, and from there how it overflowed into the other boroughs and then across the nation--from parks onto vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon line, to the West Coast through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations.
In more than 300 interviews conducted over three years, Abrams has captured the stories of the DJs, label executives, producers, and artists who both witnessed and made the history of hip-hop. He has on record Grandmaster Caz detailing hip-hop's infancy, Edward "Duke Bootee" Fletcher describing the origins of "The Message," DMC narrating his introduction of hip-hop to the mainstream, Ice Cube recounting N.W.A's breakthrough and breakup, Kool Moe Dee elaborating on his Grammys boycott, and many more key players. And he has conveyed with singular vividness the drive, the stakes, and the relentless creativity that ignited one of the greatest revolutions in modern music. The Come Up is an important contribution to the historical record and an exhilarating behind-the-scenes account of how hip-hop came to rule the world.
The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop Reviews
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This is such a mega book. Massive in scope and super impressive. Overall I was really taken by the book. A few sections were too long.
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A must-read for fans of rap, regardless of how avid or casual your fandom. You’re going to want to keep your Spotify app open while you read this book because it’s impossible not to want to listen to the rap as you work your way through this oral history.
Abrams worked on this project for 4 years, and it shows. It’s meticulous, accessible & well crafted.
Solid 5 stars, huge thanks to Netgalley & Penguin Random House for the ARC -
Despite nearing 50 years of existence, hip-hop has very few authoritative histories, and the personal stories of the trailblazers and early innovators are at risk of being lost as many early pioneers start receiving their AARP cards. New York Times reporter Jonathan Abrams attempts to fill this gap with his new hip-hop oral history The Come Up and does a fantastic job.
I’ll get this out upfront: I’ve been reviewing books for about ten years now and I haven’t ever been as excited for an advanced copy as I was for The Come Up. I absolutely loved Abrams’ previous books Boys Among Men and All the Pieces Matter and I’m a huge hip-hop fan from Aceyalone to Zev Love X to AZ. And I’m pleased to say that Abrams delivers on this remarkably-personally-compelling premise.
The book’s foundation comes from more than 300 interviews conducted over 4 years. Abrams sits down with DJs, rappers, producers, label executives, reporters, and more, giving a full view of the history of both hip-hop music and the culture surrounding it. Like all oral histories, participation matters. Even the best writer is going to be hamstrung if they can’t get the right people with this. And thankfully Abrams is able to largely deliver on that front, with genre icons and pioneers across all eras covered. You get Kool Moe Dee, Kurtis Blow, Russell Simmons, Ice Cube, Killer Mike, Bun B, and loads more from all cities and eras. And sure, some luminaries like Chuck D and Rakim don’t make an appearance but both artists are covered well through people very close to them like Hank Shocklee from the Bomb Squad and Marley Marl. This helps ensure that no key topic gets short shrift in the narrative. I also thought it was neat how Abrams includes interviews from artists from all eras and cities to show how they influenced each other.
The Come Up proceeds in a largely chronological fashion, hitting on all of the major moments and players that you’d expect. It begins in the early 1970s and continues through roughly the early 2000s. There is some brief coverage of major events from the last 20 years like DAMN by Kendrick Lamar winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 and hip-hop becoming the top genre in the US according to Nielsen in 2017 but those passages are largely to illustrate where the genre has gone since rather than analyze recent history in-depth. If you view Eric B and Rakim’s 1987 LP Paid in Full as a dividing line between “early hip-hop” and the start of its “golden age” then about the first third of The Come Up is devoted to that early, pre-1987 era when the rhymes and production were generally simpler. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of early releases from artists like Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, and the Sugarhill Gang (especially the latter), compared those who followed, but it’s still fascinating to learn about the genre’s roots and early stages when there was so much freewheeling innovation going on and no codified “rules.”
The remaining two-thirds of the book feature Abrams hopscotching across boroughs and regions to illustrate the genre’s spread, still largely chronologically. Some major luminaries like Russell Simmons/Def Jam get entire chapters devoted to them that cover longer timeframes, but it never comes off as disorienting. The book is well-structured overall. Abrams intersperses helpful context between many passages and the reading experience flows very smoothly and Abrams never overshadows the interviews. There are also no awkward transitions or interview non sequiturs that plague some oral histories. Everything fits together like a perfect mosaic, not too dissimilar from the production on Paul’s Boutique or 3 Feet High and Rising (before sample sources got extra litigious). Abrams’ focus extends beyond the music to hip-hop as a cultural phenomenon, with extended coverage of films like Wild Style and the controversies surrounding 2 Live Crew and Ice T that also helped mold all aspects of the genre.
While there haven’t been any oral histories of hip-hop at the scale of The Come Up, the book is going to cover some stories and moments that a fan of the genre will be familiar with. Outside of some southern rappers (I’m not hugely into the Houston scene, mea culpa) I had at least passing familiarity with every artist/album/event that garnered a decent amount of mentions. But, I acknowledge I’m in my early 30s now and have devoted over half my life to inhaling every possible shred of content about hip-hop, and Abrams unearths some entertaining new insights about material I was quite familiar with and fond of. Case in point: I’ve listened to Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest billions of times but I had no idea that their record label Jive were so amused by Industry Rule #4080 (record company people are shady) from the song Rap Promoter that they created their own t-shirts celebrating it.
There are way more interesting nuggets like that, such as how legendary producer Pete Rock’s poorly-scheduled barber appointment nearly scuppered a recording session with Will Smith. And how Peanut Butter Wolf (founder of the legendary underground label Stones Throw Records) opened for a young Jay-Z and predicted Hov would never amount to anything. And how Q-Tip got his name, and how Chuck D wrote much of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back on the Long Island Expressway going back and forth from the studio, how (the apparently super-elusive?) Pete Rock flat-out missed recording with Shaquille O’Neal because he just wasn’t home when they came to his house and couldn’t be found anywhere. And and and.
If I haven’t made it abundantly clear how much I liked this book, then I should just hang up my reviewing keyboard and give it up. But yes, I really enjoyed this. It is one of the top 3 (out of many, many, many) books about hip-hop that I’ve ever read. I don’t have any big quibbles with it. I would have appreciated a bit more of a focus on production throughout (though there is a late chapter going into some dedicated detail on the craft of beatmaking), I’m a bit bummed that some of my favorites like De La Soul didn’t participate (but again, the roster of participants is massive and very strong), and I thought the Roots probably warranted more than about half a page (but they’ve always been a sorta self-contained group that is hard to link to other artists/cities outside of I guess the brief-lived Soulquarians) but those are tiny nits that all have parenthetical caveats. If you have no interest in hip-hop whatsoever I guess you won’t get a ton out of The Come Up. But you also wouldn’t have read this far if that was the case, or read this review at all. Simply put, if you like hip-hop at all you owe it to yourself to check this out and you should find it to be outstanding.
9/10 -
I recently read "Dilla Time" and "Rap Capital" and I think I prefer those intimate, scene-specific explorations of hip-hop to one that goes this big. I loved listening to a lot of the early NYC stuff and a lot of the Southern stuff that I'd missed (Houston, NOLA, Miami).
He unsurprisingly can't get a lot of the biggest characters in hip hop for this and some of the smaller ones just seem kind of salty that the most popular rappers are not very good... -
4/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Finished January 10, 2023
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Extensive oral history collection regarding the past, present, and future of the hip-hop music genre.
I learned so much from this book. Stuff I knew some about and then stuff I had no clue about. Very knowledgeable. Very well structured. I listened to this book, which I feel may account for my date confusions. It did jump back and forth a little with dates, but that might be the nature of the interviews. As the book progressed, it became less linear. I chose this on a whim and for the oral history, I’m so glad I did!
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Audio - Non-Fiction - 2022 -
Really great listen! Loved the historical aspects and hearing the first hand accounts from so many different artists. The only thing that could make this better is if they could sample some of the music that was referenced, like you could push play and hear the song. There’s no way they could do that financially because it would cost so much but it would be cool!
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This book was masterfully put together, not once did I get lost. The soundtrack to this book is amazing. The stop and start of reading and listening brought it to a whole different level, one I highly recommend. My only wish was more female representation, luckily I had read God Save the Queens first.
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4.5 rating! A great, informative history of the Hip-Hop genre!
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This was a phenomenal look at the origins of hip hop told by those who created it. It’s a massive book, but we’ll worth the time it will take to read.
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The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop by Jonathan Abrams came out in October from @crownpublishing.
Format — Oral histories read differently than other nonfiction. This book is pieced together by over 300 interviews conducted over three years. Those include DJs, music executives and producers, and artists themselves. Also includes several pages of high quality photos.
As the title suggests, the overall theme of the book is the history of hip-hop & rap’s rise to prominence, especially in the pre-internet, mixtape and underground scene era. The Come Up takes the reader to several influential communities, such as hip-hop’s roots in South Bronx and other boroughs of NY, to the south of the Mason-Dixon Line and further west to Los Angeles and beyond.
Highly identifiable interviewees include Run-DMC, Ice Cube, Kool Moe Dee, Russell Simmons of Def Jam, and members of 2 Live Crew.
Thoughts — I read a lot of hip hop history books. This one is a huge undertaking of the golden era of rap + HH’s roots. 4 stars from me.
Things covered ⤵️
🎧 Geographic Areas of Interest: New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Philly, Compton, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans, the Bay, the Midwest — all the styles and figures that encapsulate each area
🎧 Timelines: 1970s to 2010s and a nod to the current times
🎧 Figures (random selected, mentions or at discussed at length): Andre 3000 + Outkast, Beastie Boys, Big Daddy Kane, Biggie Smalls, Mary J. Blige, NWA, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, DMC, Dr. Dre, Drake, Eazy-E, Eminem, Jay-Z, LL Cool J, Lil Wayne, Three 6 Mafia, so much more
🎧 Specific Songs + Lyricism
🎧 Influential Record Companies and Producers
🎧 Different Styles & Cultures Surrounding Each
🎧 Pushback + Obstacles
and so much more. At almost 500 pages, this book covers so much detail and ensures to mention a rich variety of sources + important people who influenced the scene and had a role in hip hop’s rise. The readability is great for any level of interest, but I’d recommend for the very passionate in music history or HH history due to the unmatched attention to detail.
Out now! A good Christmas gift idea :) -
Good, but not exactly what I wanted. The parts it covered, I quite enjoyed, but there were people I wanted to know about who were left out. And it’s more of a survey than a deep dive. Still, if you’re a fan, you’ll enjoy it.
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let's get complaints out of the way: the a-tier names in hip-hop are not heard from directly. it's interviews with c-tier and unlisteds. in this sense, hearing from mostly behind the scenes gives 'the come up' a hint of 'a people's history...,' but also kind of felt like: well... this is the best abrams could come up with. regardless if that's actually the case or not, this work was quite the undertaking, and the most modern effort of its kind, to give a definitive history of hip-hop. we hear from a lot of producers and djs, and perhaps most interesting, workers from the record labels who would chase and try to get their labels to sign artists; crazy to think how the genre would have changed if certain artists were signed elsewhere from the start. hip-hop is rooted in disco and reggae, with a totally diy bend, cutting lamp post wires for electricity, kids who couldn't get into the patti labelle show partied in the park for free, where the djs were the stars, finding beats and break beats to switch up and scratch. the mixes from parties would be sent to relatives in the military overseas-- hip-hop allegedly named after the military marching cadence, hup, two, three, four. an interviewee later on also breaks down the word, hip: cool in the present, hop: changing from time to time, hip-hop will always be a young people's genre and evolve accordingly. the '77 blackout in ny was the catalyst, dj equipment was expensive, but after the blackout, everyone had brand new setups, more creation all over the city. we see corporate america get involved, trying to sell a sanitized version, will smith their literal poster child. more sexually explicit music was coming up from the miami bass scene, while rakim was changing the lyric and rhyme game from a party genre to competitive art. tipper gore and conservative groups got pissy, 2 live crew were first amendment warriors. rightfully so, explicit versions outsold clean 9 to 1. politicians knew ice t was justified hating cops, so they went after labels like warner bros instead. meanwhile in houston horrorcore was rising, nobody signed major, and indie labels/artists were making more money than platinum selling rappers on majors. "music with hats sell: cowboy or sideways." jay-z rewrote brooklyn's finest in 20 minutes, leaving space for biggie who took the song home for two months to perfect it. the california rap scene is fully covered, atlanta, memphis, new orleans. also wild just how young most of the rappers were when blowing up and signed. some scenes focused more on unity, others competitive. i've just grazed the content, there's too much to even attempt to summarize. good read for any fan of hip-hop. abrams said his original text was three times as long, and honestly i'd read that too.
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This book was so good! Abrams is 2/2 for oral histories with me, after loving his oral history of The Wire. I love good oral histories because you get such a variety of perspectives. There's an art to making an oral history flow well and have the people speaking complement each other and Abrams is fantastic at it.
There are so many cool things I didn't know in here. From the very origins of DJing and scratching and how it started the movement, how the commercialization of rap affected the genre and subculture, to the origins of the west coast vs east coast feud (main sparks: Suge Knight and.....Outkast!?). I thought the book was pretty comprehensive and gave due to artists who don't get a lot of recognition outside of hip-hop circles for their contributions to culture. I have so much homework now. I also have a much deeper appreciation for the different styles of rap and how the genre has overlayed on top of each other in response to other regions/rappers trying something new and levelling up what people thought could be done and the influences that could be brought in. As an aside, it always makes me sad when people dismiss rap as people just talking fast. Rap is art, rap is poetry, it's storytelling and it's culture. And I think this book does an outstanding job of celebrating it in all of its forms, even if I'm not a fan of certain subgenres.
Also, while I knew it intellectually, seeing just how many incredible rappers are mentioned in this book just made me realize how deep the bench is for phenomenal talents that don't get enough appreciation. Highly recommend this book for hip hop-heads but also just for anybody who wants to dig deeper into a subculture, especially one that has influenced our modern era of music so totally. -
The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, by Jonathan Abrams, is a wonderful look at the history through the recollections of those involved.
Many oral histories, no matter the subject, consist of a collection of accounts, each told by a participant (or large excerpts from the people grouped thematically). I find the approach here to be both very effective and a lot of fun. Abrams offers the structure through paragraphs that set up what is being discussed. Then shorter but very on-point quotes are used to almost simulate a conversation. So rather than just reading about the history or reading what would amount to several versions of the history if each person was included separately, you feel like you are listening to all of these icons sitting around and remembering what happened.
The one thing this does require of the reader is keeping the various people straight. Abrams includes their roles each time and after a few pages you begin to just follow naturally. So, if you are initially unsettled by always switching speaker, give it time. You'll get used to it and once you do, you'll be well rewarded for the effort.
No matter how well you know the history of hip-hop, this book will offer new information and great perspectives on things you knew. Even having read a couple of other books and taken a MOOC, this volume still both educated and entertained me.
Highly recommended for those with an interest in hip hop and music history more broadly. Many of the insights also speak to how the music industry itself has changed.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. -
I'm a fan of hip-hop, but by no means a superfan or a historian of the craft. I picked up The Come Up expecting a primer on the genre, with amusing anecdotes mixed in. For the most part, that's what I got. But aside from some gripes with the structure, I had a surprisingly humbling and earnest experience.
For this book, Abrams has collected a LOT of testimonials from the earliest days of hip-hop up until the mid-2000's. The text is 80-90% composed of these accounts, edited for clarity and brevity and organized into chapters and sub-sections that Abrams provides a few paragraphs of context on before sharing the relevant testimony. The result is a book that feels like a documentary, which is appropriate given its objective.
The drawback of this approach, however, is that it sometimes feels abrupt and disjointed. Individual chapters are fairly cohesive, with the odd sub-section that stands out as an opportunity to jam in some of the more amusing stories. But the chapter structure struggles especially early on, creating a sense of sequence between events that unfolded largely in parallel. The book is strongest when comparing the development of hip-hop across regions, and complimenting that with testimonials that bring to life the clashes between them.
Aside from structure and format, the total package here is excellent. This book is greater than the sum of its parts, and by the end of it you really appreciate hip-hop's cultural significance and the artistic intelligence and vulnerability exhibited by its most formative practitioners. -
The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop will be released on October 18, 2022. Crown Publishing provided an early galley for review.
Some of my earliest exposure to those early rap records was local college radio in the early 80's. I owned the 45 of Blondie's "Rapture" in 1980. By the time I got to college in 1983, I would hear tracks like "Rapper's Delight" and "The Message" at parties on campus. I was very much a fan of this new music genre even though I had no idea of the stories behind its roots (which I would learn years later). Abraham's book does an outstanding job detailing all of those stories in one place along with the history of East Coast, West Coast and all points in between.
I really like the format that this book takes. I encountered this style of taking many interviews and weaving them into a seamless narrative previously in Dylan Jones' 2020 book Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics. I think this works incredibly well, especially when discussing the cultural changes in music. It allows for many facets to be touched upon and placed together to form a cohesive picture.
I kept a scratch page handy so I could jot down the titles and artists of some mentioned tracks with which I was not so familiar. Being able to pull those up to listen to really enhanced my reading experience. -
Hip-hop, to many in the study of it, was born just over two years before I was. I grew up with an awareness of it but limited exposure to it until I moved into Junior High and High School. Reading this incredible historical account of it was like reliving the world of my childhood but through the eyes of so many others who were living vastly different lives. Hearing these first-person accounts from each and every place hip-hop spawned, adapted, transformed, and exploded was mind-growing and mind-blowing at the same time.
I took this book out of the library, which means I get to give it the highest praise. I'm gonna buy a copy for myself. :) -
3.5 probably for me! Writing style wasn’t my favorite — it’s truly just journalistic and veryyy thorough. Maybe what sticks out the most is how little I knew about the first decade of rap — the innocence of it, how it was championed by teenagers creating just for fun, and how it only existed in the ‘party’ context. Virtually every genre of music today was pioneered by black folks, and the author did a good job at capturing that broader narrative. No genre has continued to evolve and influence everything around it like rap music. Very fun history read!
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I am big fan of Abrams, starting with his oral history of The Wire (the greatest TV show in history). This book was a great review of the history of Hip Hop, putting a context around how the music was shaped and changed over time. Having started listening in the early Run DMC days thru modern artists, there were so many interviews and stories that made me smile, remembering how the music has mapped across the key milestones of my life. I definitely recommend for any Hip Hop fans!
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A fantastically thorough book, however it drags on too long and Abrams packs in the quotes of many of his interview subjects to the point that some of his overarching points get lost in the redundancy of multiple people commenting on minutia.
That said, this is an exciting tome that captures a lot of the early history of hip-hop and if it had focused on that particular era, it would have been far shaper and more interesting. By the time Abrams gets into the mid-90s, everything starts to speed up and the focus is lost. Yet, somehow, the book keeps going and going. -
The audiobook was 18 HOURS!! (I think my longest ever?!) But I loved all of it. I hope they make a multi-part documentary. I enjoyed all the people narrating the quotes about this rich history but I’d love to SEE the interviews and hear the actual people. So so so many amazing things learned in this book. What an incredibly well woven narrative. Definitely recommend.
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This was truly an accomplishment. Listening to it as an audiobook was great, because there were different narrators for the various speakers that this author interviewed for this book. The way that it is structured as an oral history sourced straight from the folks that lived it kept this book from feeling like just another stuffy history book. Would recommend
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A very in depth view of hip hop. Perfect for any fan. Very well researched and a great read. Thanks to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for the arc of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on this review.
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Abrams is tireless and it shows in the depth and breadth in his account of a multigenerational community’s telling of the history of hip hop. I’m thankful for this book - it fills a void and it shares a multitude of voices.
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Really great oral history of hip-hop. Super organized and lots of the early voices are a part of the storytelling. Really long, comprehensive read. Would've liked a bit more after 2000, but that's a small quibble. Solid read.
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I received this as an eGalley from NetGalley.
Best fact learned from this book:
Pharrell Williams' early rap name was....."Magnum the Verb Lord." -
Well researched and organized like a dream. I loved this book.
