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Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World. Edited by Alain Philippe Durand. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002. [xviii, ?50 p. ISBN 0-8108-4431-1. $49.50 (hbk.); ISBN 0-8108-4430-1. $24.50 (pbk.).] Illustrations, index.
On his scooter, Roger Chamberland was crossing Quebec's bridge, as he did every evening on his way back home from the university. Suddenly, he had a flat. He fell and died in a coma a few days later. Chamberland's contribution to this collection of essays on Francophone rap music was his last one, but not his least. By helping to bring Quebec's rap music a little more to the fore, he was able to attain one of his academic goals, a goal shared by all contributors to Black, Blanc, Beur: to relate "the emergence and growing notoriety of rap music and hip-hop culture in France and the rest of the Francophone world" (p. xiii), as the book's editor, Alain-Philippe Durand, simply puts it. "But why did a book as important as this take so long," asks Adam Krims in his foreword to the book (p. vii)? "Never mind," he answers; the book approaches rap in a refreshing way: "Far from the shopworn notion of hip-hop as quintessential urban guerrilla practice, the [ten] essays collected here allow for subtle mappings of the intertwined structures of urban form, cultural production, class, and ethnicity" (p. viii). Another contributor, Andre J. M. Prevos (1948-2002), author of the first essay, died just before the publication of the book, and it is dedicatecl to his memory.
Of course, academics studying hip-hop culture have mostly focused on the American scene. But this situation is gradually changing, as demonstrated by recent studies by Tony Mitchell, Andy Bennett, or Krims himself: Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop outside the. USA, ed. Tony Mitchell (Middletown, OT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Andy Bennell, "Hip hop am Main: the Localization of Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture" (Media, Culture, and Society 21.1 [1999]: 77-91); Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). This collection is the first book in English devoted entirely to Francophone rap, and as such aims at filling an important gap. But does it? In many respects, yes, even though some essays just skim...