Making some noise: the academy's hip-hop generation: scholarship on the genre moves beyond a project of legitimization into a more self-critical, challenging realm

Black Issues in Higher Education, April 22, 2004 by Kendra Hamilton

"One of the reasons that hip-hop is such a vital mode of African American cultural expression is its immediacy and its insistence on lived experience as a requisite for authority to speak in and about the culture. If you listen to rappers, it's always about where they were, what they did, that they will never leave.

"I believe that makes hip-hop an area where we might see theory and practice coming together inside African American intellectualism, where we might see an attempt to develop innovative approaches to using hip-hop as a method for organizing African American youth around issues that are important to their survival.

"There's new ground to be broken, and it's being broken," he says.