DJApe: First of all, I would like to give you props for doing so many inspiring things for 'anyone who is down', with Can't Stop Won't Stop being just the tip of the iceberg representing the totality of your activities in and for the hip hop. As for this interview, through the following questions I would like to concentrate on your writings and to capture the moment of the transition between Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation and your new book Total Chaos which covers, as I have understood, narratives in the hip hop culture studied from the aesthetics' point of view. Now, I have come to believe that there is a vivid, fundamental and (still) somewhat implicit insight in your work on the tension between, say, the 'activist' and the 'aesthete' perspectives among both hip hop headz and hip hop scholars. I do not want to impute to your studies any intention of exposing 'the system of hip hop' but that insight is something which, in my opinion, could serve as the foundation for some kind of a systematic exposition of the hip hop's concrete whole. So, it is the well known dichotomy between the message and the style which I would like to discuss here in the light of things said in some of your previous articles, interviews and Can't Stop Won't Stop of course.

Also, considering you the most influential hip hop scholar of our time and one of the hardest working hip hop activists in the U.S.A., I think you are the right person to answer the question about the possibilities for the hip hop generation to connect globally (and especially about connecting the U.S. hip hop generation with the rest of the world). As for my questions, in conceptualizing some of them, I have exercised the position of 'the devil's advocate' to make this conversation dynamic and to emphasize some quintessential things about hip hop. Apart from those general topics mentioned, I have prepared questions on miscellaneous facts concerning your work and hip hop culture as well, so let's cut the long story short and rock some bomb diggity hip hop scholar thang...

DJApe: Let me start with some remarks on your historical approach. I do not know if you are familiar with Marx' and Hegel's dialectics and their theoretical approach to the exposition of the historical process but there is, in my opinion, one important thing in Can't Stop Won't Stop which invokes their theories. A few friends of mine who have read your book, as well as myself, have experienced that the narration remains 'open' at the end of the book. I’ve mentioned those two famous philosophers because of their somewhat similar insights on the requirements for the theoretical exposition of the history of the subject matter which I will say now in Hegelian words - there is a necessity for the historical process of the evolution of an idea to be ended (which means that the idea had realized all of its potentials) so it could be exposed in theory. Hence the famous Hegel's notion that 'the philosophy always comes too late', where instead of 'philosophy' you can use 'the theory of the historical process of the evolution of the idea'. Have you experienced the same quality – namely, that the narration in Can't Stop Won't Stop is not finished in a strong sense and, if you have, will your book then live up to its title and keep on evolving with its subject matter (e.g. in a form of an 'amended version' in a few years of time)? Do you believe that the final exposition of the idea of the hip hop generation is going to be possible only after 'the next generation tells us it's over'?

Jeff Chang: First of all, wow, you and your friends have done a very close reading of the book. I'm flattered that you all consider the book worthy of such serious study. I did intend in constructing the narrative for it to be able to read on multiple levels. I wanted the book to be accessible first of all to my homies—close friends whom I respect and who have inspired me by their life and practice like Chief Xcel from Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, and DJ Shadow. I knew they would not tolerate any kind of bullshit from me. I wanted to respect their concept of ‘real talk’. Far too many of my more scholarly colleagues have written or are writing books that go over the heads of the people for whom they hope to believe they are writing for. But I felt my book would be useless if it could not be read by lovers of hip-hop. Perhaps it's my training in community organizing, or simply the fact that while I love theory, I love hip-hop even more.

With that said, I did face some conceptual problems in constructing a hip-hop historical narrative. I did not want to reify the essentialist and consumerist mythologies around hip-hop, particularly those around rap music. That is to say, I had no interest in arguing that hip-hop culture represented something reductively and narrowly ‘black’, although I am actually quite sympathetic to such arguments. To quickly backpedal here, I wanted to honor the blackness of hip-hop culture—but to decenter a narrowly North American conception of blackness, and to welcome in Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latino influences. Once I did that, the narrative began to write itself—and a whole range of astounding connections opened up to me. These are connections that have always been there, and that many scholars much smarter than me have recognized for a long time, but that I didn't appreciate until I went through the process myself. This process affirmed how central the African American experience is to hip-hop culture, while suggesting why hip-hop has developed something approaching universal appeal, such that an Asian-Pacific Islander and a Serbian can be having a profound conversation about it in 2006.

Secondly, I wanted to leave behind the ‘great recordings’ version of history—which I think can often become a commodified version of the ‘great men’ version of history: here are the 101 hip-hop records you must buy before you die. I feel that hip-hop can now be considered a philosophical question—it seems like something that describes a generational worldview.

And yet these are all constructions of a social imagination—hence my first three words: ‘Generations are fictions’. As such, it would have been intellectually dishonest to end the book by saying, ‘and then they all lived happily after.’ We have to work at creating these fictions that can sustain our imagination. I did not want the book to foreclose an active process of engagement. When a reader puts the book down, I hope that they will then go out into the world to change it for the better. You flatter me by calling that Marxist or Hegelian. I just think that theory is nothing without the practice.

DJApe: There are more good points to your approach. The first thing which I really liked about your book is that, as early as in the subtitle of the book ('A History of the Hip Hop Generation') and in the prelude ('It's but one version, this dub history... There are many versions to be heard. May they all be'), you’ve established the possibility of different accounts of the whole thing. Secondly – there is really a lot of suspense, particularly in the first half of the book. I also have to say that your approach to the historical process in general praises the free will of the people involved with the evolution of the subject matter. I would like to know whether your approach was premeditated in these respects or your narration flowed naturally in making all of the mentioned qualities - in the first place the affirmation of the rational agents' free will - just the collateral advantages of your exposition?

Jeff Chang: I think that I've been very aware of historical contingency, and of the play of force and will. I think this is partly what I meant about getting away from an essentialist narrative, in which all ends seem predetermined by their precedents. Hip-hop remains a vibrant dynamic culture, and so while I have sympathy for hip-hop heads who believe in ideas like a ‘Golden Age’, these ideas also suggest what you alluded to earlier—the idea of hip-hop has reached its limit and is no longer evolving. Certainly that is not what I see happening around me every day, and so that is not how I choose to write.

I also appreciate the Jamaican idea that infinite numbers of versions of a track can exist at any one point, and none or all have the right to be definitive. A riddim like Never Let Go can be interpreted and reinterpreted in a thousand ways for a thousand contexts, and each can potentially bear many layers and meanings.

And finally, through the process of researching the book, I had to humbly recognize that my interview subjects held many kinds of interpretations of the same sets of events. Just because mine ends up in a book doesn't mean my own interpretation should have any more weight than theirs.

DJApe: I also see the anti-deterministic quality of your study in the first part of the book where you implicitly brought to the fore the question of 'Why was it the Bronx where hip hop came to be?' I used to ask myself, times and times before, 'Why hip hop did not come out, in its '4 elements' form, from some of the big Brazilian favelas or, why not from Kingston, when there were also a lot of U.S. soul & funk records around, turntables, mixers, microphones, ... and poverty stricken people who at least had a similar way of having fun?' Then, when I read your book, I realized that there is no point of asking that question if you are looking for a straight answer. 'Why did not reggae come out of the Bronx?' It is the same type of question – rhetorical in a sense. At the same time, by asking the mentioned question, you are acknowledging ingenuity of individuals – for example, Kool Herc's - by emphasizing him as the inventor of breaks and as the man who is the link between the Jamaican soundsystem-based concept of culture and the hip hop's block party as the community’s gathering place.

Jeff Chang: These are all actually great questions to ask. I think the simple answer is in New York City's juxtaposition of extreme poverty and wealth, the promethean creativity of the individuals I named and many more whom I didn't, and the means to disperse the fruits of that creativity through the media. These are the factors that make the story inherently an epic one.

DJApe: Having in mind everything said above about your anti-deterministic standpoint, I would like to move forward. When you write about the engagement of the legislators and the law enforcement apparatus in the U.S.A. in the last four decades, you talk about the creation of the conceptual and factual framework for the realization of many phenomena. You are also keeping the anti-deterministic course of the exposition side by side with the assignment of the rationality to the historical process (the rationality is a necessity if the exposition is to be considered theoretical). That is a great achievement, in my opinion, because you have managed to do it with the minimum of required correlations of the legal acts and the law enforcement actions to the things which had taken place in the streets. Also, you made it with a loose 'suggestive' ordering of those correlations, suggesting only considerable probability of the occurrence of the phenomena in the proposed order. So, I would like to know, did you come across some points in the evolution of the hip hop generation at which life was moving faster than the legislation, at which there was some extraordinary revolutionary potential? If you did, and I believe you did, then can you recognize any of those points as the points at which hip hop generation did not use the revolutionary potential of the moment to the fullest? If there are such points, can you speculate on the reasons why did the hip hop generation fail to do it proper?

Jeff Chang: I am not sure I understand the question. I think that legislation always moves at a slower rate than culture. Indeed, legislation is the last codification of a sentiment, after it has passed through levels of power, ideology, and the like. People believe that crime is a problem, right-wingers insist that graffiti writers are the first stage of that problem, so a law is made to expand penalties against graffiti writers. Once these political victories are secured, right-wingers advance the ideological frame—until we reach a point where youth of color, then all youth are the targets, not merely taggers.

As far as whether hip-hop has unexplored revolutionary potential, yes, I think that may be self-evident. The recent elections indicate changes are afoot amongst the hip-hop generation. They were able to shape very close races that tipped to Democrats. Looking back in two or ten years, our judgment may be that the 2006 elections represented a tipping point. But it is too early to tell.

DJApe: I would like to ask you also a few things about the definition of the hip hop generation as 'anyone who is down' as presented in Can't Stop Won't Stop and the book-related writings. On many occasions you stressed that 'the book moves back and forth between hip-hop's content and hip-hop's context' and you emphasized the point that the understanding of hip hop and that of the U.S.’ history in the last three decades are interdependable. Do those statements represent your implicit shift towards rigid definition of the hip hop generation which excludes from the hip hop generation, among other groups, all non-U.S.A. citizens (similar to Bakari Kitwana's definition)?

Jeff Chang: No, not at all; I think the story I've chosen to tell simply reflects one facet of the "definition" I've set forth. Another thing that I've written in the ‘Prelude’ and often repeated in interviews is that what I've written reflects just one view, and is one story among millions. In this sense, a narrative can never expect to foreclose all theoretical possibilities. I wanted to make that point clear from the outset.

DJApe: Could it be that the concept of the hip hop generation, as the vast majority of theoretical concepts, is open to revision in relation to the things happening in the 'real' world? Does the difference between your and Kitwana's definitions appear because of the globalization of hip hop - with your definition being the one that 'saves the new data'? Should we expect more and more new definitions of the hip hop generation until the end of its time?

Jeff Chang: I would say a firm 'yes' to the first and third questions. As to the second question, I can't speak to my friend Bakari's intention. I can say that I hoped to account for the globalization of hip-hop in my own definition, but that a deliberate contingency was inserted into the definition.

DJApe: Should your definition be regarded as the abbreviation of 'anyone who is down with some particular goals, methods, strategies, principles…' and by no means referring to race, citizenship, gender, sexual preferences, etc. of the people included? Can you tell me of any method or goal which could’ve been perceived as endemic for the hip hop generation? Could it be that the genuine goal of the hip hop generation is just having fun, making hip hop hedonistic in itself?

Jeff Chang: I have said before that it's key to understand that hip-hop did not begin as a political movement per se, that there was no manifesto announcing its arrival. But, Predrag, these seem to me to be profound philosophical questions. Is a desire for the 'good life', to 'have fun' a hard-wired, instinctive motor of collective human activity? Does that same desire generate a particular set of goals, methods, and principles? I have to admit I never considered these questions seriously or consciously with respect to Can't Stop Won't Stop.

DJApe: Does your definition have any intended function of cohering a number of human beings as an autonomous group which is to fight for its interests?

Jeff Chang: Outside of the book, I definitely believe in the importance of articulating a new generational social movement, here in the U.S. and globally. I'm certain that this particular disposition of mine filtered into the way I structured the narrative. That is, I was consciously working in myth-making for an American post-Boomer generation as I wrote Can't Stop Won't Stop. But neither is Can't Stop Won't Stop meant to be a manifesto. I do deeply hope it may open up possibilities for those in social movements and arts movements who might do so, but I also realize it could just be a good story for many, and that's enough for me.

DJApe: In your article 'Stakes Is High': Conscious Rap, Neosoul and the Hip Hop Generation there is, in my opinion, one very strong, interesting and important statement – 'For a generation that has made a defensive virtue of keeping it real, the biggest obstacle to societal change may simply be the act of imagining it.' I will return later to the propositional content of that statement, but now I am interested in the characterization of the principle of 'keeping it real' as the defensive one in relation to the 'social' sense of that term. I presume that you are familiar with the one of the main principles of the Black Power movement – 'Before a group can enter open society, it must first close ranks' as formulated by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton (Black Power, 1967.) Let me make a short digression and notice that, in relation to the aforementioned Black Power principle, we can not say that the principle of 'keeping it real' is the genuine invention of the hip hop generation (except for the verbal formulation) – there is a transgenerational drive to 'keep yo' peeps down for the cause'. Is it really necessary for the hip hop generation to close ranks before it starts working on achieving its goals? (There’s an interesting chapter named ‘Black Solidarity After Black Power’ in Professor Tomie Shelby’s book We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (2005) which should be viewed as talking about the Black population of hip hop generation in the U.S.A.)

Jeff Chang: No I think the idea of closing ranks has always been a rhetorical fiction of leaders, a way to insert urgency and cohesion into a movement. The fact is that any movement is always working on both achieving its goals and organizing itself at exactly the same time. We tend to understand social movements by moments in which they seem to flare up into the larger body politic. Often these are the crucial moments at which an identity seems to cohere, only to inevitably disappear, but the work of drawing people into the fold is ongoing. If you live by the ocean, like I have most of my life, you know what I mean instinctively. The water always moves. When it hits a reef or a shallower bottom, it surges into a wave which then crashes. But once the wave breaks, it doesn't mean the ocean has disappeared. It is getting ready to form into the next wave.

DJApe: If 'generations are fictions' why should we then establish the legitimate sociopolitical interest of the group of people on a mere fiction – wouldn’t we be better-off if we were to identify ourselves as a community through our mutually similar interests? Who - if anyone - inside the hip hop community is entitled to decide does someone 'keep it real' – is someone 'down' in the right way?

Jeff Chang: Fictions, constructs, interests—I think these are all inter-related. The question of who determines how these fictions and constructs either include or exclude wasn't entirely what I was interested in talking about in Can't Stop Won't Stop.

DJApe: Are young people from the US inner cities aware of the global problems and what do they think about them? (I have read about the STORM organization reaction to 9/11 but my question is about the wider population.) I see many young people in my country who do not pay any attention to the global issues – do you think that young people globally stand on the standpoint which O.F.T.B., rap band from Watts claimed back in '92 in the song Blacks Divided by Tracks – 'Worldwide problems, we leave 'em alone, we got enough problems to face here at home'?

Jeff Chang: I think people in the U.S. — not just young people — at this particular historical moment are beginning to recognize our place in the world is crucial to the major issues of our time — finding peace, resolving our environmental crisis, preventing genocide. However, it's also very important to understand the context of an overdetermining media that very much is geared toward obscuring the realities of what happens outside of our borders. What you get as the garbage we beam overseas via satellites is reflective of the smokescreen we have.

DJApe: In one of your interviews, you said that the thing which is constant for hip hop is its quality of being 'local'. How can hip hop generation transcend the local level, in the activist side of things, and go global? How can the activism go global when it Operates From The Bottom?

Jeff Chang: For those concerned with social movements, this is the most important question. I think it requires us to imagine what the world would look like if there were truly a bottom-up revolution. The Zapatistas have provided one answer. The question is: Can hip-hop provide another?

DJApe: Ok, I am moving now to the question of dichotomy between the message and the style which I have set forth in the introduction. I have cited above your characterization of the dictum of keepin' it real as the 'defensive' one and, related to it, the problem of hip hop community in imagining societal change because of its concern with the preservation of status quo. But growing up with hip hop made me realize one more dictum to keep in mind when gettin' down – it is the dictum of keepin' it fresh. I believe that these two dictums, two principles, incorporate the years old tensions in hip hop between the 'form' & the 'substance', the message & the style, the activism & the aesthetics, and - why not - the politics & the culture (although it is dubious if this last pair of concepts stands in the same analogy as the previous ones). I emphasized those two principles because it looks to me that it is easier to grasp the implications of the phenomenon which we call hip hop if we try to analyse it through keep it real/keep it fresh than through the other related pairs of concepts. Maybe we can start at the level of those principles taken abstractly and ask – what is the relation between realness and freshness? It looks like 'keep it real' tends to preserve something good which is already in possession (it might be different things to different people) while 'keep it fresh' heads forward to the future, to new things. So, what do you think, can someone in hip hop be 'real' without being 'fresh' or vice versa or do these attributes only come in pair? Is it the problem of the hip hop generation that it can not come up with some 'fresh' methods and/or goals to make societal change?

Jeff Chang: I am not sure I would agree with your dichotomies. I think the understandings of "real" and "fresh" change in the context of hip-hop. Keeping it real hasn't necessarily always pertained to a sense of political and keeping it fresh hasn't always pertained to a sense of aesthetics. One reason you heard so many rappers in the early 90s talking about 'keeping it real' was that they were taking an aesthetic position that hip-hop needed to cross over to the mainstream on its own terms. This was inherently a protective stance, a defensive stance that essentially crumbled in the face of commercial breakthroughs. 'Keeping it fresh'—to the extent that people even use the terminology anymore… that is the notion of 'keeping it real' can be linked in time to the early 90s just as much as the notion of 'keeping it fresh' can be linked in time to the mid-80s—could be seen as a political position insofar as it argued for representation of innovative voices.

DJApe: Here is an article which raised many controversial commentaries in hip hop forums on the Internet. Do you share the fundamental point of the article that the people outside US inner-cities do not understand the criteria of realness and freshness shared by the members of US ghetto communities and, consequently, that the global hip hop community perceives hip hop differently? The point from the previous questions in this context would be – is it possible for the different local communities of the hip hop generation across the world to find common language and standards – in the aesthetic as well as in the activist aspect of hip hop?

Jeff Chang: I'm one who believes in possibility, so I certainly embrace the bridge-building potential of hip-hop. The author is certainly pointing out to the different quality of experiences that those in North American communities of color, and other local communities may indeed have. There often can be a romanticization of the poverty and racism that affected the communities that produced hip-hop in the first instance, and I think the author of the piece is interested in blowing apart this illusion. But I think there are just as many people from those communities who might disagree with his particular point of view. Consensus is often elusive.

DJApe: Journalist Tamara Harris asked you in the interview - 'As far as the merging of hip-hop and commerce, do you think that African American culture has something already built-in that makes it prone to branding?' and you dissented. But in the interview with Dennis Romero you said – 'The biggest names in hip-hop are brand names. Jay-Z and P.Diddy. It is a process almost built into hip-hop from the beginning.' I think that I have made preparations with the previous questions to raise that question again here. I take as the self-evident truth that the hip hop generation, through its culture, requires battle ethos from its members if they are to reach self-affirmation. Do you think that the battle concept which is intrinsic and endemic to hip hop, makes it more marketable in relation to other (sub)cultures because it enables hip hop to deliver artists and fashions as tested, readymade brands or styles to the industry of the mass culture?

Jeff Chang: Is African American culture, or Asian American culture or hip-hop culture inherently prone to branding? The answer is no. There is only a capitalist imperative to transform culture to a commodity. Branding is one strategy by which culture is transformed into goods that can be sold. Hip-hop's aesthetic of battling lends itself to constant stylistic change, and capitalists have been able to figure out how to turn this process to their advantage. It's likely that there may have been historically less resistance in hip-hop to this particular process than in other cultures.

DJApe: (This question is related to the point raised by the question about the moments in the history of hip hop generation with the extraordinary revolutionary potential) The one of the most important and the most interesting narratives in your book in my opinion is the one about the rap music's accommodation to the music industry's format. You have shown how, before the Sugarhill Gang made their debut with Rapper's Delight, the music of the hip hop generation was conceived as an hours-long performance. The reaction of Chuck D when he heard, as a young mc back in 1979, that there was a first hip hop music out on wax (Rapper's Delight), says it emphatically – 'I'm like, record? Fuck, how you gon' put hip hop onto a record?... How you gon' put three hours on a record?'. And your comment is – 'the ironic twist is not how long that record was, but how short it was.' (the first version of Rapper's Delight was almost 15 minutes long) About that revolutionary point in the generation's history, you stated that 'one future offered a nicely trimmed path to folk art museums and cultural institutions that might nurture hip-hop in a small, safe world and the other was a bumpy, twisting road which might lead to cultural, economic and social significance but also to co-optation, backlash and censure.' From this perspective, can you tell – both from the activist's and the aesthete's point of view – could've hip hop music been more revolutionary and still have kept its mass appeal if it had been developed in different format, e.g. in a form of something like Frank Zappa's rock-opera? (Note that this proposed counter-factual is just for the sake of argument. It is about whether rap music could've been more revolutionary had it been presented in an 'organic' form (the artwork's parts and the whole being more interdependable – the Adorno's point). I am aware of the fact that the people who started recording rap music at the start of the 80s had the idea of getting into the music industry and big money and were not thinking the same way as armchair critics and historians think of revolutionizing the format. Rap music had its fair share of revolutionizing popular music but I think that by asking this kind of question (as well as other questions of this conversation, for that matter) we can make sketches of the hip hop's whole by pointing out to the possibilities which have never been realized. So, provided that, for example, Frank Zappa had really transcended the division between the 'elite' and the 'popular' culture, it becomes the question of the possibility of rap music to go beyond the Adornian criticism of the 'standardized' music as one of the appearances of the capitalist culture industry by presenting its art in the form of the 'hip hop opera' or some new but similarly strongly integrated format of the artwork in music. It is the question of whether rap music could have maintained the stronger organization of its artworks, improving the expression of the style and the message while staying in the realm of the 'popular'.)

Jeff Chang: I think the evolution of hip-hop from a 3-hour performance to a 15-minute single record down to a 3-minute curse-edited radio-friendly song to its current incarnation as a downloadable mp3 files is a story of hip-hop's commercialization. Its distillation for a commodity function precedes the transformation of the form. Here's where Adorno was right, in other words. Now, the point to make is that there are operative forms which are compatible with the commodity function - they might be called Death Certificate or It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back... - but the content then is made subservient to the function. Historically, the primary alternative we are offered is hip-hop as a live performance. In this context, we see both the possibility of making money co-existing with other possibilities. From a theoretical point of view, this is why many of us champion understanding hip-hop as a lived experience, as an alternative, highly localized cultural space. In this sense, geography, individuality, and social conditions can be reintroduced into arguments about hip-hop culture. That's why Total Chaos focuses so much on hip-hop arts that have not yet been commodified in the globalized sense - we can decenter a strictly capitalist frame for the culture. The contradiction we face is that the globalization of hip-hop commodities provides the context for local movements to appear as alternatives. It's a frustrating theoretical quandary I've stared down quite a bit, and haven't yet been able to figure out!

DJApe: The relation of the style and the content is, in my opinion, the most intriguing in the political or conscious rap. I will stay on the example of Chuck D and Public Enemy although the insight which I will be claiming is applicable to any artist representing the genre. Chuck D and P.E. came up keepin' it fresh by combining: 1.) Chuck's boomin' voice, 2.) new flows[i] which sounded dope on different bpms (which is mostly due to Chuck's voice), 3.) shocking and genuine insights in Chuck D's rhymes even more emphasized by counter-positioning to Flavor Flav's cold lampin' rhymes, 4.) The Bomb Squad's frantic riot-starting beats and, last but not the least, 5.) visual imagery (logo, fonts, photos, videos) which linked all of the elements into one big powerful style. But, many would say that their time had passed. – Has style overshadowed the message in the case of P.E.? Or is it that P.E. has totally exhausted its potential to shock people, so that their excess had been assimilated and eliminated by the pop culture after some time? Did P.E. deplete the potentials for being spectacular and fresh in the realm of conscious rap even for those rappers who got in the game after P.E.?

Jeff Chang: I think style has been privileged over message by those with commercial interests in hip-hop. Hip-hop's autonomous, self-re-creating imperative still thrives, as in the folkloric ways that b-boys and b-girls or graf writers pass on their culture one-to-one to the next generation. Here is the reason why hip-hop remains such a vital and viable movement; at its best, it still speaks truth to people's basic needs. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina showed that the hip-hop community can rally together in times of trouble, and that many—like Kanye West and Juvenile—still feel the responsibility to represent the voiceless. So Kanye's words—'George Bush doesn't like Black people'—still represent a major shock to the system. At the same time, commercial interests have far more control over the image and words of hip-hop that is transmitted in a mass way than they did when Public Enemy was at its peak. So we must look for the breaks in the system such as this.

DJApe: When I was 17, 18, I used to be all about political rap. I was into Paris (The Devil Made Me Do It used to be my favourite rap album), also Kam, Ren, P.E... But, I figured out that political rap is, in a sense, self-contradictory when you relate its goals to its means. When Paris dropped his Guerrilla Funk in 1994. I was like: 'Whoa – this is great! People will get down to this in the club and eventually they'll get the message!' The key word here is 'eventually'. It almost rhymes with 'collaterally' and not without reason. I believe that in any political or conscious rap with the ideological content the problem is that the artist is communicating the ideology to the listeners in a non-rational way. You do not get an mc in the position of power – holding the mic on the stage, that is – without him/her having battled his/her way onto the stage. And in hip hop the battle for the position of power is done and won with the style (no puns intended :). Do you think that conscious rappers are more prone to create a mass of followers who are repeating their rhymes or the group of individuals who are ready to rationally, critically evaluate the content of their favourite artists' lyrics?

Jeff Chang: Praxis will not be sold to you. If you're looking for liberation in a set of lyrics that you must purchase from a media monopoly, then perhaps you've missed the point. Change is a process that begins with community. Public Enemy and Rakim and Paris and others represented a physical community, this is what gave them their cachet. The lyrics and the music and the art and the performance and their reception—all those together formed the beginning of praxis. At the same time, I won't wait for a rapper to become my political leader. That's the other part of praxis and it comes from the personal enactment of politics.

DJApe: How do you perceive from the aesthete's and how from the activist's standpoint the phenomena portrayed in the last year's intriguing hip hop documentaries – the crumpin'/clownin' dance (as shown in the movie Rize) and the queer hip hop scene (as shown in the movie Pick Up the Mic)?

Jeff Chang: I never saw Pick Up The Mic although I know Tim'm and other Homohoppers. I think these are representations of actual and vital local scenes. These artists have created communities around them, and again, I find this the most powerful aspect of hip-hop. They have created their own ways of performing the self and have enlisted many others in the same process.

DJApe: In the interview which Sabrina Ford made with you, you said: 'Within hip-hop you come up against questions, 'Well, can you write this history, are you empowered to write this history?'' Relative to that statement I would like to know if there were any problems for you from any of the hip hop people during writing or after the completion of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop?

Jeff Chang: Oh sure. It comes with the game. But I never live in fear. That's not me.

DJApe: I would like to ask you a question about the rap music and the way it sounds for more than 30 years now. For the long time now, in my opinion, hip hop has the ‘fetish’ thing goin’ on about the 4/4 beats. The breakbeats being the very heart of the whole culture since day one, being that distinctive quality of rap music in relation to other genres, I know it’s hard to imagine rap music without them. But the beats itself and the making of beats seem to me like limiting the development of rap music. What do you think - is there a chance to develop the mcing and rap as well as popular music in general, by introducing unaccompanied guitar-played themes - not in 4/4 measure but some unorthodox like 7/8 or 5/4 - as the instrumental for rap lyrics? (I am proposing the guitar because it sounds more 'natural' than a beat out of 4/4 measure so it could more easily be accepted leaving rap's mass appeal relatively untouched)

Jeff Chang: I don't think it's fetishizing the beat at all. The beats themselves say very important things about hip-hop itself. The breakbeats that have become the canon relate to a specific moment in which rhythms scattered throughout the African diaspora came back together in the funk. So there's a reason that such breakbeats still remain the backbone of the music, and why that music has remained so powerful and popular over such a long period of time. The breakbeat is literally the foundation of hip-hop music.

All that said, many artists have and are experimenting with presenting the music in different times and measures. The Freestyle Fellowship began breaking rap out of 4/4 time back in the late 80s and early 90s. Producers such as DJ Shadow have also been doing the same for years. It's intriguing to hear rap from east Africa or Cuba, for instance. The rhythms are far afield from the hegemony of the 4/4. There's really so much work going on here.

DJApe: Thank you very much for answering these questions!

Jeff Chang: Thanks once again for the intriguing, difficult and amazing questions!

P. S.

After the completion of the conversation I have found in the Internet an article written by Peter J. Furia – ‘What Makes an Emcee Dope: The Art of Emceein’ & Authenticity in Hip Hop‘ which is a welcome change in the theoretical writings on authenticity in hip hop. It accords well with my main thesis in this conversation – namely, the relation of the style and the content (‘the content’ in a broad sense – not just lyrical but the ethical, political, economical, racial principles – the factors included in Kembrew McLeod’s distinctions of meanings in ‘keep it real’ as presented in his article McLeod, K. (1999) ’Authenticity Within Hip-Hop and Other Cultures Threatened with Assimiliation’. Journal of Communication, Vol. 49, Issue 4, p. 139)

The theoretical writings on the subject of authenticity in hip hop has been one-sided for a long time now, being developed by the authors who, I presume, haven’t been personaly involved with the hip hop. The vast majority of the authors on the subject have been analysing exclusively the concept of ‘keep it real’. My emphasis on ‘keep it fresh’ can be viewed as the reaction to those works and as an attempt to emphasize dialectics of style and content in the context of hip hop.

I believe that hip hop has blessed the people of the world with the different and ever evolving ways of ‘performing the self’ as Mr. Chang has put it in this conversation, and so I believe that the concept of style should be taken as the focal point in the discussion of the authenticity.

Predrag DJApe Vukcevic