Cant Stop, Won’t Stop: Hip Hop Journalist Jeff Chang at Tufts

We want to talk about the book, but before we get into that, just a couple questions about your background, both as a music journalist and scholar and also about your role in SoulSides. First, what led you at the beginning of the 90s to want to write about hip hop?
Well, it was a natural outgrowth. I had been DJ'ing at KALX as an undergraduate during the 80s. I was really lucky to be there because there was just a lot happening in Bay Area hip hop at the time. There were all these groups, you know Paris was getting started and Digital Underground -- I saw one of their first shows and we played their records on KALX. It was a very lively time, sort of the beginning of the blowing up of Bay Area hip hop. So I got to see all of that stuff happening from the grass roots level.

Then when I graduated from UC Berkeley. I went to Sacramento to work in the state legislature and hated it. So at night I would head down to Davis and I kinda talked my way into doing a radio show there. And through that I met all the guys who ended up forming SoulSides together. You know, DJ Shadow, Chief Xcel, Lyrics Born -- they were all freshman that year and we all ended up bonding. I was doing a lot of interviews with folks at the time for the radio show -- Michael Franti, Cyrpess Hill, and a whole bunch of other folks. Then in 1990 URB magazine got started in LA. We got a copy of their second issue and I was just blown away. I sent them an interview I did with Cypress Hill. I was called DJ Zen at the time and so it was like "DJ Zen Meets the Funky Buddhas." It was really off-the wall, but they loved it and offered me a column. So that’s how it all started.

Let's talk a bit about the book. There's obviously been a lot of hip hop scholarship and books written chronicling the history of the music and even looking at hip hop as a social movement or as popular culture. But you wanted to focus on what you define as the hip hop generation. Could you give us a nutshell version of how you define the hip hop generation and what role it plays in politics and culture as we move forward?
Well I deliberately avoided the question of in the book. I said the hip hop generation sort of begins sometime after the baby boom generation and ends whenever the next generation tells us. But the idea was to talk about hip hop not just as music, which is what most books talk about. And not even just about the four or five elements of hip hop, but as something that has become a world view for an entire cohort of people. You can kinda draw lines around when that begins and ends – like say, from born in the mid 1950's when Kool Herc and Bambaataa were born, up till maybe the mid 1980's. You know, you could draw specific lines around it. I don't. I just try to talk about it as how people identify themselves.

. . .

[following conversation about the new movement of socially conscious and progressive hip hop] ". . . and Boston is a player in that to some extent with artists like Mr. Lif and the Perceptionists. What do you think about the current Boston hip hop scene?
I love it. And you're right, [socially conscious hip hop] has always been there. There's a range of voices in the hip hop community, and there's always been that range out there. What happens I think in commercial hip hop is that a lot of money gets thrown to a very small segment of those voices in the community. So, you're much less likely to hear Mr. Lif and the Perceptionists out there on MTV or on Clear Channel as you are somebody else that may not be as socially conscious as somebody might like. . . . [but] man, Lif, you know Lif is one of my favorite artists and always has been one of my favorite artists. . . . So, yeah, I've got nothing but love for Lif. I've got nothing but love for the Perceptionists, and Edan and everybody else out there in Boston that's really doin' it up.

Are you familiar with any of the other Boston hip hop groups like Eclectic Collective, Audible Mainframe, and Project Move?
Actually, no, I'm not. I'd love to hear them. I'd love to hear more of them for sure.

One final question to get in: Do you read SFist and Gothamist?
Yeah. We did something with SFist last year that was a lot of fun. Just [a] straight email [interview]. I do read Gothamist every once in a while, but not regularly.

Look for more interview excerpts, including Jeff's role in forming SoleSides and thoughts about hip hop as a locally based, grassroots movement, in Bostonist's review of Jeff's lecture at Tufts.

Post contributed by Matt Durutti