Boogie Down Predictions

Essays that explore the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture.

"This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny--a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you're the superhero. Enjoy the journey."--from the introduction by Ytasha L. Womack

Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective."Boogie Down Predictions offers new ways of listening to, looking at, and thinking about hip-hop culture. It teaches us that hip-hop bends time, blending past, present, and future in sound and sense. Roy Christopher has given us more than a book; it’s a cypher and everyone involved brought bars."
--Adam Bradley, author, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop

"The study of hip-hop requires more than a procession of protagonists, events, and innovations. Boogie Down Predictions stops the clock—each essay within it a frozen moment, an opportunity to look sub-atomically at the forces that drive this culture."
--Dan Charnas, author, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop and Dilla Time: How A Hip-Hop Producer Reinvented Rhythm and Changed the Way Musicians PlayRoy Christopher is an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid--that's how he learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. He has since written about music, media, and culture for everything from self-published zines and personal blogs to national magazines and academic journals. A Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, he is the author of Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future.