excerpt from a great fucking book......

"i hope this book enters into the mix, bringing academics, performers, and all who care about a society in a postmodern, postindustrial world together, dropping some knowledge and breaking down some barriers. i hope, too, that it does something to dispel the pernicious notion that rappers are somehow non- or anti-intellectual, or that in describing the crises facing urban American and the world they are somehow glamorizing or advocating the conditions of which they testify. On the academic side, i hope that no one will any longer be able to think of music or poetry in the late twentieth century without assigning rappers a primary place, both out of an awareness of the urgency of their message, as well as on account of the tremendous poetic power and variety of their expression. and for rappers themselves, and everyone in the vast and growing hip-hop nation, i hope this book will help make evident the mulitiple connections between hip-hop's insurrectionary knowledges and the historical and societal forces against which they are posed, and in so doing expand and strengthen the depth of our determination to 'fight the powers that be'."
-Russell A. Potter
Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism