As hip-hop grew between the 1980s and 1990s, rising from a set of small regional aesthetic and cultural practices, it slowly turned into fodder for billion-dollar businesses, broadening from music to include fashion, film, and television. This chapter explores the configuration of white business interests, the creativity of working-class communities of color, and the investments of avant-garde artists who created hip-hop as a commercial art form. These circumstances extended what was initially a regional set of expressions and practices of youth subcultures into a globally celebrated aesthetic. Cinema was central in the transitioning of street art forms like graffiti and vernacular dance into a set of codes and practices shared by practitioners around the world.

The siege of Paris, which began soon after the Emperor's surrender at Sedan and the declaration of a republican government, brought great disruption to daily life. Business was impossible to transact in normal terms and Emile and Isaac Pereire thus found themselves confounded in their various attempts to find solutions to the problems of the Credit Mobilier and Compagnie Immobiliere. The Pereires' major shareholding in the Austrian railway was another useful tool in restoring the family's position. While Isaac was attempting to keep the family businesses afloat throughout the difficult time, ordinary life in Paris was challenging. Despite the collapse of the Credit Mobilier and the eventual demise of the Compagnie Immobiliere, the Pereires had left a considerable legacy in public infrastructure and iconic companies. Many of the remaining Pereire businesses stayed afloat until well into the twentieth century.

Hip-hop’s relationship to disability has been as long and complex as the culture itself. This chapter discusses the multiple ways that disabled artists and audience members have engaged, remixed, and transformed hip-hop through their work, activism, and building of communities. It considers prominent disabled hip-hop artists (like Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys), the presence of disability-specific aesthetics and imagery in subgenres like hyphy or “mumble rap,” and tenacious questions of ableism within the music (and the music industry), and it explores the work of disabled people outside the commercial music industry to expand and redefine the culture. Most specifically, it traces the development of Krip-Hop Nation, which emerged from linked movements for racial and disability justice to gain an international presence for disabled rap artists and fans.

Within a half century the Pereires had gone from poverty in the Jewish quarter of Bordeaux to enormous wealth and luxury among the grande bourgeoisie of Paris. The experience of the Pereire family, privileged and wealthy, inconsistent in its religious devotion or affiliation, sheds light on the rapid changes in Jewish community life which occurred in nineteenth-century Western Europe. As leaders of industry, the Jewish Saint-Simonians had attracted anti-Semitic vitriol from an early time and the Pereires' prominence reinforced and invigorated prejudice. Modesty and simplicity were said to have characterised their private lives and manners, but the Pereires' public face was impressive. The private sphere they built around them thus sustained Emile and Isaac Pereire, the family providing them with the social and emotional space and support necessary to maintain their considerable enterprises.

This chapter begins the analysis of how American society prepared a space for someone like Trump to dominate public life. The major symptom was that citizens failed to not elect Trump and therefore twice elevated to be president a man who had no qualifications to administer the Executive Branch of a democratic government consisting of more than 4,000,000 employees and multiple responsibilities. He was, however, a “populist,” who promised to act on behalf of “the people” as if the people were entitled to throw off rule by “elites.” And together, he and his associates admired what scholars call “neoliberalism,” whereby many traditional, and democratic, political practices are overridden in favor of unleashing “private innovators” – such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – to acquire enormous wealth and influence. Assuming that Trump is a populist, we should observe that America’s crisis is not so much a failure of democratic “institutions” – agencies, procedures, etc. – as it is that “citizens” have failed to vote to support those institutions. Thus Defending Democracy is about how citizens must do their job – their “vocation” – more and better.

There are many ways to define the “hip-hop novel,” each with its limitations. This omnibus review-essay considers titles from the past half-century of American fiction in which hip-hop intervenes as plot device, as character affinity, as author affiliation, as compositional logic, or as a way of limning the targeted readership. It investigates the culture’s representation in literary fiction, from its undigested appearance in the work of authors like Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Percival Everett, to its deeper integration into novels by Adam Mansbach, Paul Beatty, and Sean Thor Conroe. It also examines the street lit genre initiated by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, with books that count hip-hop artists as authors (C-Murder, Sister Souljah) or publishers (G-Unit Books). Finally, it looks to young-adult novels by Angie Thomas and Tiffany D. Jackson as a space where a reconciliation of these threads might be possible.

The book opens with an overview of the tensions that increasingly define hip-hop’s role in contemporary culture, namely the way that the music continually shifts between complicity and critique in its assessment of capitalism and racialized inequality. This ambivalence is related back to the currents of pleasure and pain that run through the work of such rappers as Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, and to the usage of hip-hop in a recent film soundtrack. After briefly discussing the editor’s own position in relation to the culture, the introduction moves on to an overview of the collection’s general aims. These include the attempt to reflect both the diverse styles and regions of contemporary hip-hop, and the political commitments of the contributors. A short discussion of editorial conventions follows, as well as an account of the book’s approach to hate speech. The section ends with a brief overview of each of the nineteen chapters.

Emile Pereire was never in doubt that he and Isaac Pereire would enter business together. Family business was the norm in Sephardic Bordeaux when the Pereires were growing up. An element of Saint-Simonian vocabulary which remained constant in Isaac Pereire's rhetoric, for example, was the concept of 'association'. Luc Marco describes how the Pereires used the finance function to pioneer innovative approaches to company management, maintaining fixed capital at a minimum and circulating capital at a constant level. The Pereires recognised that education alone was insufficient to prepare their sons for the responsibilities they might assume, and actively encouraged them to augment their studies with practical experience. At the most profound level their businesses depended on trust, the core of which lay between Emile and Isaac. Trust extended to many former Saint-Simonian colleagues who were associated with Pereire businesses.

This chapter offers a condensed history of the relation between jazz and hip-hop. Framing the argument with reference to poet-activist Amiri Baraka’s 1967 essay “The Changing Same” and 1972 album It’s Nation Time, it examines the development of “jazz rap” and the use of direct references to jazz in “Golden Age” hip-hop. During this period, the chapter argues, jazz’s ambivalent position within hip-hop reflects the political ambivalence of the post-Fordist era and the defeat of the revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s, an ambivalence musically indexed in the melancholic use of jazz samples in records made in the immediately after the Golden Age. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which contemporary hip-hop and jazz might maintain an underground ethos closer to the radical political edge that Baraka saw in free jazz: noisy, disjunctive, experimental, and focused on change.

Emile and Isaac Pereire were controversial figures in their own time and they remain so. In their relationship to Judaism, Saint-Simonianism, socialism, their partnership, the broad scope of their businesses, their business practices, their political allegiance, they have been subjects of criticism, comment and analysis by historians and others. Four pillars conceived as essential to banking reform were achieved either with the Pereires' direct intervention or attempted by them. It includes day-to-day banking for small merchants, for mortgage finance, for large-scale investment, and for investment finance for small business. Saint-Simonian ideology was filled with references to morality and high principles, at variance with the recurring criticism of the Pereires' financial rectitude which appears in some of the literature. The legal morass within which they were ensnarled from 1867 needs also to be considered as another dimension to their business practices.

Comics provide an essential, alternative visual space to expand hip-hop style and narratives – and even have a claim as the essential vehicle for the visual representation of hip-hop today. The visual and lyrical comic art of Ronald Wimberly is exemplary of the productive and critical relationship between comics and hip-hop. This chapter puts his collaboration with M. F. Grimm (on 2007’s Sentences) into conversation with his largest solo work, Prince of Cats (2012; rereleased 2016), to demonstrate how Wimberly’s stylistic renderings and linguistic experimentations with the sounds of hip-hop create a parallel – if absurd and satirical – historical perception and critique of the visual registers of Black life in American politics and popular culture, even as (and because) the comic form depends on the visual and the lyrical.

Much of the most commercially successful hip-hop of the 2010s reveled in the ephemerality and hype of digital cultures. This music jettisoned “street” poeticism for an improvised palette of garbled Auto-Tune experiments, hyperactive ad-lib flurries, and absurdly persistent repetition. This chapter offers a panoramic survey of the aesthetic development of this “mumble rap” in the context of streaming services and social media, briefly examining work by Lil Wayne, Future, Young Thug, Chief Keef, Migos, Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. Stylistic links are located across this dizzyingly diverse and amorphous genre, foregrounding rap vocals that assume an (in)authenticity fostered in “techno-human syntheses.”

In the wake of the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine conflict, NYC-based graffiti bomber Miss17 visualized her solidarity with the Palestinian people by filling her tag name with the colors of the Palestinian flag. In 2024, the largest all-woman graffiti crew in the United States – Few & Far – completed a mural with a feminist take on the “Forbidden Fruit” idea, which gave the grrlz the space to publicly claim their opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by painting watermelons – a symbol of Palestinian resistance similar in effect and meaning to the flag. In this chapter, visual arts scholar Dr. Pabón-Colón examines these works, the sociopolitical context in which they were made, and their reception on social media to argue that by performing their feminism in their graffiti these grrlz rejected US imperialism in favor of modeling transnational feminist solidarity.