Jeff Chang's Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop

Total Chaos - Edited by Jeff Chang

I recently received a review copy of Total Chaos edited by Jeff Chang that looks at some of the places that hip hop has gone while displacing the central role of the rapper, i.e. it's a collection of essays and interviews intended to reveal certain aspects of hip hop culture beyond rap music.  As such, it might be described as a multicultural resource book that is not intended to be complete but to juxtapose diverse voices in a cacophonous dialogue befitting the term chaos.

But, of course, it's also a well-organized collection of writings that are quite coherent as individual pieces and that support one of Jeff's core arguments that hip hop is much bigger than rap music and, by implication, much bigger than the African-American experience.  Which, of course, it is, cause everyone's in now so the boundaries can't be drawn by a particular group's experience, no matter how much that experience defined the actual creation of the arts in question.

This approach leads to some interesting phenomena in Total Chaos.  For example, though African-Americans were cut off from West African religions, forced to become Protestants and, in some cases, eventually began embracing Islam in large numbers, the one chapter that explicitly examines religion focuses on Yoruba.  However, this choice does not come across as a statement about which religions are important but offers a concrete example of the unique paths taken by hip hop culture and by this anthology.

Though I certainly haven't read the whole book, it appears that the Internet is largely absent as a significant social force.  It's fine that bloggers are only mentioned in passing but the fact that most of us now find out about hip hop's worldwide spread through the Internet, often directly contacting people in other countries who were previously inaccessible, makes leaving that out rather bizarre.

I dropped a note to Jeff about the religious question and also about what he's hearing about hip hop book sales so I'll update when I get that.

Available from Amazon:
Jeff Chang - Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop

Update 1:
The more I think about the missing Internet piece of the puzzle, the stranger it gets.  To some degree, the introduction and general vibe I get from Total Chaos is one in which decentralized, liberatory hip hop arts are juxtaposed to big media's dominance and compartmentalization of cultural expression.  That being the case, the radical undermining of big media by web publishing should be seen as a key to the changes I imagine Jeff and co. would like to see in the world.  Yet, to be perfectly frank, although the focus on hip hop is relatively unique, most of what I've gotten from this anthology so far is pretty similar to what I was getting from similar politically minded radical culture anthologies of the 80s and 90s.  That's not a good sign for projects with revolutionary intent.