On Wednesday night I went to hear Jeff Chang read from his book "Can't Stop Won't Stop" in an itty-bitty gallery space in the West Loop. I got there about 20 minutes before it started and took a folding chair a respectable distance from the handful of other people there. I was complimenting myself on having such great taste and being so cool as to be one of the few people there...this lasted about ten minutes and then 75 or so people came in, jammed into the doorway, sitting on the floor and otherwise making the gallery staff nervous with the way they would brush up against some of the art.

The book is subtitled "A History of the Hip Hop Generation" and it is a big, nerdy wet dream. Scholarly without being a Greil Marcus wankfest, Chang begins the narrative not with DJ Kool Herc DJ-ing in a Bronx rec room but with post-colonial politics and music in 1960's Jamaica.

One thing that I thought was especially interesting was what he had to say about the non-comprehensiveness of the book. Some might ask-what about all the activity in Atlanta/Philadelphia/Miami/Brooklyn/Insert Geographic Locale Here...how could you leave THAT out of this history??? The answer is that he set out to write a history from the street level that looks up, rather than a view from the top down. And to do that, you have to limit the geographic focus.