This discussion was designed to help educators understand the history of hip-hop, the way hip-hop has shaped history, and how it can help make our classes more relevant to our students’ lives. Detailing hip-hop’s rise to global prominence - with attention to dynamics of race, class, gender - Chang and Davey D explain how young people - especially BIPOC youth - over generations have utilized the culture to express themselves and make their needs understood in a country that has abandoned and denigrated them.ĭespite the importance to youth and its immense impact, in too many classrooms hip-hop gets excluded.
This seminal account of the music and culture situates the rebellion of hip-hop as a reaction to the neoliberal economic and social order that snuffed out the great social movements of the 1960s and 70s. The young adult edition of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is an essential guide for not only understanding hip-hop music and culture, but also a critical analysis of the last few decades of U.S. This session was part of the Zinn Education Project’s Teach the Black Freedom Struggle online people’s history class series. On September 13, 2021, co-authors Jeff Chang and Dave “Davey D” Cook were interviewed by Jesse Hagopian about their young adult edition of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Hip-Hop History.