BRIAN COLEMAN: I have to say, there’s a lot of stuff on XM and Sirius, and that really does level the playing field. So I think that’s one good development, but yeah, I agree with everything’s Jeff’s saying .
PHOENIX: Jeff, in your book you bring up this idea of a “dub history.” Is it more complicated when you’re talking about hip-hop history than it would be talking about rock history, where it’s more of an oral history as opposed to a written history?
JEFF CHANG: Yes and no. Most of the stuff is there, it’s just not understood for what it is. If people looked at raps as forms of oral history, we’d have a much different set of ideas to perceive when we talk about hip-hop scholarship or hip-hop journalism. You know what I mean? It’s like if you look at a song like NWA’s “F the Police” as a document of what was happening in Los Angeles during the late ’80s, as opposed to a gangster-rap text that raises issues of free speech, you get a much different look at what actually is going on. These raps all come out of a context. The kids that are talking hyphy-hyphy-hyphy-hyphy-hyphy out here in the Bay Area are the same kids that are getting chased out of sideshows and have no place to gather, and have created their own separate situations to be able to have their own parties because you can’t go to the clubs anymore. They’ve shut down all the clubs. So you know if you look at this hyphy thing as a way of folks talking about, “This is how we party, this is how we have fun” — same thing with the Houston stuff — it’s a much different thing than talking about it as, “Oh, here’s the latest trend,” or, “Here’s the latest dance.” What I’m saying is all the music and all the culture comes from a particular set of circumstances. So you can look at it that way and you can understand it in a much different kind of light.
PHOENIX: Jeff, there’s a wonderful section in your book about New York gang life. Can you talk about how you went about reconstructing that and what the challenges were to get that on paper?
JEFF CHANG: The main thing about Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop is that I had an amazing amount of luck and an amazing amount of mentoring through the whole thing. My name’s on the jacket but it’s really the product of literally of hundreds of people. I was living in New York at the time and I had been on the West Coast and in Hawaii my entire life, except for a summer I spent in DC. And moving to New York and living there, and being there on the street and part of the community, I began to realize just how much of hip hop is just the story of New York. It has to do with particular neighborhoods, their slang, the way they walk, the way they dress.
