Jeffrey G. Ogbar

On his book Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap

Cover Interview of September 29, 2009

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“Laypeople will be surprised by the very diversity of the hip-hop community.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“I look at the ways in which hip-hop’s demands for authenticity are centered on particularly salient tropes of race, class and gender.”

On the second:

“I devote an entire chapter to how prison narratives first emerge and evolve in hip-hop, while also providing a wider picture to the expansion of prisons in the U.S. in general and the effects on black folks in particular.”

media studies / america / race / everyday existence / musicology / pop culture / african american heritage / prisons /

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011