CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY: MUSIC AS RESISTANCE
AUTHOR TALK: JONATHAN ABRAMS
PBS Books, in collaboration with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and WTTW/Chicago PBS, is pleased to host a program with award-winning New York Times staff writer Jonathan Abrams, who is the author of The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop. This program is offered in connection with Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, which just premiered on PBS earlier this year and can be streamed at PBS.org (check your local listing). Join us to learn more about the birth of Hip Hop culture and its impact on society.
This program is also being offered in collaboration with ASALH’s Black History Month Festival, which is focusing on Black Resistance. The program will explore Hip Hop as music as resistance.
ABOUT THE BOOK: THE COME UP: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE RISE OF HIP HOP
The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country’s youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.
And yet, the stories of many hip-hop pioneers and their individual contributions in the pre-Internet days of mixtapes and word of mouth are rarely heard—and some are at risk of being lost forever. Now, in The Come Up, the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop’s rise, a multi-decade chronicle told in the voices of the people who made it happen. In more than three hundred interviews conducted over three years, Abrams has captured the stories of the DJs, executives, producers, and artists who both witnessed and themselves forged the history of hip-hop. Masterfully combining these voices into a seamless symphonic narrative, Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of a neglected population in the South Bronx, and from there how it flowed into New York City’s other boroughs, and beyond—from electrifying live gatherings, then on to radio and vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon Line, west to Los Angeles through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JONATHAN ABRAMS
Jonathan Abrams is an award-winning staff reporter for The New York Times. He is the bestselling author of two previous books, Boys Among Men and All the Pieces Matter. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Abrams was formerly a staff writer at Bleacher Report, Grantland, and the Los Angeles Times.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR: ANGEL IDOWU
Angel Idowu currently serves as the JCS Fund of the DuPage Foundation Arts Correspondent for WTTW’s Chicago Tonight, Black Voices and Latino Voices. A Chicago native, she is also VP of Archives for the National Association of Black Journalists Chicago Chapter, a mentor with LINK Unlimited, a developing screenwriter, runs her own production company, FoomiLOLA Media, and heads a nonprofit geared toward art education resources. . She received her Master’s in Journalism from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.
ABOUT THE SHOW: FIGHT THE POWER
“Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World” is an incredible narrative of struggle, triumph and resistance that will be brought to life through the lens of an art form that has chronicled the emotions, experiences and expressions of Black and Brown communities: Hip Hop. In the aftermath of America’s racial and political reckoning in 2020, the perspectives and stories shared in Hip Hop are key to understanding injustice in the U.S. over the last half-century.
