Jason Tanz – Other People’s Property

I admit I’ve been fairly consciously ignoring the existence of Jason Tanz’s Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America, even when writing about nerdcore and glam rap.  Which is kind of funny because Donnell Alexander says that Tanz starts off with nerdcore in his review of the book.  The truth is, I’ve avoided it because I generally don’t find much of interest in discussions of whiteness in rap, mainly because it rarely gets past the superficial and even more rarely goes anywhere of interest.

Don’t get me wrong, I think lots of folks in hip hop are quite strong at critiquing the bad things white people do.  But that’s a far cry from critiquing the concept of whiteness itself, a concept that is taken for granted as a natural state of being when it is anything but.

That said, I really want to check out this book because Alexander seems to be saying that he plays around with a lot of theories and literary approaches that interested me greatly during the 90s and I have to see what he did with them.

Since this is ProHipHop, I also have to find out what he’s written that led to this review from Publishers Weekly posted at Amazon:
Tanz is most successful when he lets himself get tangled up in the complicated tendons of mass culture: his chapter about hip-hop marketing and commercialization displays a keen understanding of the advertising forces at work without ever devolving into simplistic damnation.

[Snicker.]

I can’t wait!

In related news, Donnnell Alexander is the coauthor of
Rollin’ with Dre: An Insider’s Tale of the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of West Coast Hip Hop coming in September.