This reader brings together the best-known and most influential writings on hip-hop since the late 1970s. Spanning nearly 25 years of scholarship, criticism and journlism, this anthology showcases the evolution and continuing influence of hip-hop.

A history of black communities in America, which focuses on musical traditions from early jazz to hip-hop. The author also considers the social forces and organisations which countered these artistic movements, including the FBI and the Nixon administration.

Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most -legible- black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual,...