Preface It is always difficult to attempt to capture a complex social phenomenon in a few pages, let alone to explain what it means in many different cultural are- nas. Hip-hop was something I grew up with as a child in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Hip-hop was popular in my neighborhood, College Park, which was racially diverse. It sits roughly at the corner of three cities (Virginia Beach, Norfolk, and Chesapeake), so movement between different peoples with different experiences and different music preferences was the norm. Virginia Beach is a transient city with large populations of military personnel and tourists, making music and change a daily occurrence because music seemed to always inspire the rhythm of the region. I grew up with the mid-1990s hip-hop, which includes the Fugees, Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, No Limit Records, Cash Money Records, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and other artists. The Hampton Roads region was and remains a hotbed of hip-hop activity, producing Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Nottz, Pharrell Williams and the Neptunes, and many other lesser known but still important artists. These artists played regularly in bars and clubs and on the radio. It would have been difficult to grow up in Virginia Beach and not be exposed to hip-hop. My father grew up in Pittsburgh, exposed to a complex racial and ethnic environment where different racial and ethnic groups often found them- selves in conflict for housing, jobs, and social services. Pittsburgh, a city of vibrant ethnic and racial minority communities, was a city very much in the center of hip-hop’s politics even though we tend not to think of it as a hip- hop city. My father listened to the Motown greats and introduced me to them at an early age. I knew Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye early. Ray Charles was common as well. This may have been what most profoundly shaped my hip-hop listening experience. I understood, or at least thought I did, the tremendous problems with urban poverty, violence, and selective policing. Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” told such a captivating story that it was
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