Review
17 out of the 18 BookBrowse readers who read Losing My Cool
rated it either 4 or 5 out of 5 stars!
Compelling, honest and insightful
"This is an important book. Williams chronicles his life in hip hop culture and his eventual break from that culture as he moves away from negative values (empty materialism, denigration of women) into a life of self examination. Along the way he becomes a philosophy major and is particularly gifted at explaining difficult concepts in language that make them seem quite simple. Although this is not an introduction to Heidegger or Hegel, you will walk away understanding the ideas they propound. The book is filled with extraordinary insight about the values hip hop culture promotes, what it is like to grow up middle class and black in America and how pernicious the hip hop values are for...
Beyond the Book
Hip hop, as a cultural movement, had its origins in the New York City Bronx in the 1970s, mostly among African Americans, with some Jamaican and Latin American influences.
Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins (of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five) is often credited with coining the term
hip hop in 1978 while teasing a friend who had just joined the army by singing the words "hip/hop/hip/hop" in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers. The name was originally meant as a sign of disrespect, but soon came to identify this new music and culture.
What started as an underground style has become commercialized in the USA and, to varying extents, across the world.
The four traditional pillars of hip...
