"In All About the Beat, John McWhorter celebrates hip-hop for what it is (feel-good, meticulously crafted music), while defining what it is not (useful political advice). It has become an effect of hip-hop for rappers to list in their songs pressing issues in black communities - from welfare to police violence to generalized oppression - but McWhorter argues that pointing to a problem is not the same as solving it. And hip-hop cannot offer meaningful dialogue because, by its very nature, it consists in quick-hitting snips of thought, not treatises on policy planning."--Jacket.
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