Jeff Chang publishes 'Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation'

Why it matters

Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation came out January 11, 2005, from St. Martin's Press. Jeff Chang is the author. The book is 500 pages, runs from the 1970s Bronx through 2005, and is constructed as much like a piece of long-form journalism as like an academic history. The book won the 2005 American Book Award. It is, by general critical consensus, the most-cited single secondary source in hip-hop scholarship and journalism for the last two decades. Chang's chapters on the 1520 Sedgwick party, on Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, on the Bridge Wars, on Public Enemy's reception, on Tupac and Biggie, on the rise of the South are the chapters you will find quoted in basically every later book about the genre and most of the substantial magazine pieces. Chang did the kind of primary-source interview work (with Herc, Bambaataa, Caz, KRS, Chuck D, etc.) that no academic study of hip-hop had quite consolidated before. You should read Can't Stop Won't Stop if you have not. It is one of the foundational documents of how the genre understands its own history.