Award-Winning Hip Hop Historian to Speak at SUNY Cobleskill

Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: The Definitive History of the Hip Hop Generation, will speak at SUNY Cobleskill on Wednesday, March 26 at 8 p.m. in the college’s in SUNY Cobleskill’s Bouck Auditorium.  The event is free and open to the public as part of the college’s Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes Cultural Arts Series.  Chang has been described as one of the country’s most incisive cultural journalists who has written the definitive portrait of the most influential youth movement in the world today.

The New Yorker called Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop “one of the most urgent and passionate histories of popular music ever written.”  Jeff uses hip-hop as a window through which to explore the cultural, social and political history of late 20th Century America and shares how a generation of neglected kids from The Bronx reinvented—through speech, music, fashion, dance and art— first their world and, eventually, our world.  He demonstrates how the history of hip-hop is really a people’s history.  Drawing on economics, geography, demographics (and some funky music), his talk will take the audience through the tumultuous period in which hip-hop came into being, and follow it through the post-baby boom, post-civil rights generation as it moved from the margins into the mainstream.  

Jeff Chang is the founder of the SoleSides (now Quannum) record label and was an organizer of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention.  His writing has appeared in Mother Jones, The Village Voice and Washington Post, among other publications. He has just edited Total Chaos: The Art & Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, a groundbreaking collection that showcases the voices of hip-hop’s pioneers, innovators and mavericks as they trace hip-hop’s influence on other mediums, such as theater, poetry, photography, literature, and the visual arts.  Can’t Stop Won’t Stop won the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award.

Born of Chinese and native Hawaiian ancestry, Jeff Change was raised in Hawaii and now lives in California.  He received a bachelor’s degree from University of California Berkeley and a master’s degree in Asian American Studies from the University of California at Los Angeles.  He was the founding editor of ColorLines magazine and a senior editor/director at Russell Simmons’ 360hiphop.com.

SUNY Cobleskill’s Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes Cultural Arts Series uses lecture and performance to ignite discussion on how current cultural norms and phenomena have been influenced by the historical events of the second half of the 20th century.  The series has previously presented a lecture by Minnijean Brown Trickey of the Little Rock Nine and a one-woman performance by slam-poet and performance artist Lenelle Moise.  The series will continue in April with a lecture by Adam Werbach, a consultant on corporate environmentalism and former president of Sierra Club.