Gil Asakawa's

WRITING SAMPLES

BOOK REVIEWS

Back to Index of Writing Samples

DREAMING OF RHYME TIME

Westside: Young Men and Hip-Hop in LA.
By William Shaw
Simon & Shuster, 333 pp. $22

Rap music and hip hop culture is the contemporary version of rock and hippie culture in the 1960s: Music that’s foreign, frightening and often repulsive to older generations, specifically parents. The music may be an expression of urban black culture, but it’s become the style and emblem for young America.

In "Westside," William Shaw, a British music critic and rap fan who has published portions of this book in the magazine Details, does a terrific job of connecting non-believers to the themes and day-to-day lives of hip hop stars. Though he may not win every reader to hip hop, he makes us realize that rappers are just people who want more than anything to become successful entertainers.

Shaw isn’t an insider, but an outsider granted a visitor’s pass to the hood. He spent a couple of years coming into Los Angeles’ tougher neighborhoods such as Compton, to interview both established stars and wannabes who see the entertainment industry as their own pass into glittering the galaxy of rappers and producers.

In the beginning of his research, he’s a foreigner with little knowledge of the world he’s about to be immersed in.

By the end, he’s still a stranger in a strange land, but he’s more connected to the beats and rhymes that drew him there in the first place. On his last trip to L.A., he hears a typically localized song about the scene, citing Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Ice-T and other successful stars on the radio.

"Out here, the record’s heavy-handed romance, its dewy-eyed vision of L.A. hip hop’s golden years draws me in. If I am cynical about why white boys like me like hip hop, I remain fascinated and seduced by the way it summons such a powerful image of these streets, whether a real one or a romantic one," he writes.

Shaw juggles the romance with the reality throughout the book, and tells the story of his subjects with warmth but not necessarily sentimentalism.

"Six years, he’s been doing this, and he’s never earned a penny from it," Shaw writes of Babyboy, the rapper he’s come to feel closest to. Babyboy hasn’t been as fortunate as some of the others trying to make their mark. He’s talked of big deals in the works, recorded an album and been involved in a movie project that never got distributed, but by the end of the book he’s still struggling, and isn’t working, not even selling marijuana. "The sad truth is that it’s the idea of N Entertainment that has sustained him all this time, not the reality of it."

The book begins with the cultural context that non-rap fans will need to make sense of the passion the music instills not only in its creators but in its increasingly suburban middle class teen audience.

To white teen-agers, he writes, "for whom rejection of their parents’ values is a ritual developmental phase they go through, the gangsta rap of the early ‘90s was perfect. It was the new punk rock. "And f--- you if you don’t like it."

To outline the roots of the culture, Shaw interviews Clive Campell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, the first DJ to "scratch records" to a rapped narration in the Bronx during the 1970s. He also interviews Grandmaster Flash and members of his Furious Five, other early stars of the genre, who were all based in New York City. Guy Williams, who was Rahiem in the Furious Five, explains, "Disco was too bourgeois for us. It was for older people. We couldn’t get into the disco clubs because we weren’t dressed properly. And disco was against everything we represented."

The book then hits its stride when it turns to the rise of the Los Angeles hip hop scenes and subsequent competition between the east coast and west coast rappers.

Shaw comes up with well-observed insights into the culture and community of hip hop, such as how groups form around street promotions - the stickering and postering of walls and lampposts with announcements for albums, concerts and even products from shoes to soft drinks aimed at the urban marketplace. He’s also mater-of-fact about the drugs and the crime and the jail time served by many of the characters in the story.

Then he weaves the compelling, and human narrative about a cast of street characters who are all trying to make it big as hip hop stars. Every chance encounter with a big star, every failed attempt to make a record and strike it rich, every lost life and ultimately every few steps toward success brings readers into the story.

By the end of the book you feel as close to these streetsmart wannabe stars as Shaw, and feel happy for the successes of rappers like Khop, who’s mentored by Ice Cube, even as you feel for Babyboy’s career inertia.

And, you feel like you understand hip hop music better. Next time a rap song comes on the radio, maybe you won’t yell at your kids to turn it down.

This review ran in the Denver Rocky Mountain News.