To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic

vii In spite of and because of marginal status … John Edgar Wideman, “Introduction,” Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction, New York: Penguin, 1990.

vii You criticize our methods/Of how we make records … Stetsasonic, In Full Gear, Tommy Boy Records, 2001.

4 Before we arrive at the mandatory … Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1965.

4 Each generation is imbued … See also Brian Cross, It's Not About a Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles, New York: Verso, 1993.

6 But at the same time, hip hop is not fundamentally … Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in David Levering Lewis (ed), Harlem Renaissance Reader, New York: Henry Holt, 1993.

7 But this new multiculturalism is global and international… W. E. B. Du Bois “Criteria of Negro Art,” in David Levering Lewis (ed), Harlem Renaissance Reader, New York: Henry Holt, 1993.

8 The genealogy of the MC … Jim Fricke, Yes, Yes, Y'all: The Oral History of Hip Hop's First Decade, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002.

10 So this book aims for a different… Though most of the literature on hip hop has concentrated on its social politics, the aesthetic principles over the music have been ably discussed in Tricia Rose's Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994; Imani Perry's Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004; and scholarly articles—particularly Geneva Smitherman's “The Chain Remain the Same” (Journal of Black Studies,

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