Break Beats in the Bronx

“An excellent balancing act of writing an academic text and still making the book accessible to the lay hip hop fan as well. Anyone can read and enjoy and learn from this book.” —Scratched Vinyl

“Ewoodzie uses new data, evidence, and collected interviews in combination with a fresh pair of eyes to distill and analyze. He then blends it with forthright prose, clear explanations, and vivacious photographs to create a history that may present as academic, but doesn’t read that way.” —IndiePicks Magazine

“Break Beats in the Bronx . . . strives to tell a 'people’s history of hip-hop' that emphasizes how teenagers in the South Bronx formulated creative approaches in the domain of culture, criss-crossing social and aesthetic boundaries, and eventually establishing new ones around the genre of hip-hop. . . . This is a book in dialogue both with the history of hip-hop itself as well as with sociological theories of how new cultural forms come into being. Ewoodzie does an exquisite job combining the two.”—Society for U.S. Intellectual History

“Break Beats in the Bronx promises to be an important contribution to the social and cultural history of hip-hop. With zeal, rigor, and no small amount of style, Joseph Ewoodzie illuminates the defining moments and key personalities of hip-hop’s early years before they recede into shadow.” —Adam Bradley, author of Book of Rhymes and coeditor of The Anthology of Rap

“Break Beats in the Bronx will make a significant mark on how we think about the history of race, urban space, and popular culture in New York and, more broadly, on hip-hop studies.” —Gaye Theresa Johnson, author of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity

“In language that neither talks down to colleagues in the academy nor prevents educated laypeople from understanding his ideas and concepts, Joseph Ewoodzie contributes to a broader tradition of pop culture research in sociology and fills a surprising vacuum in the history of hip-hop, telling the untold story about its early days in the 1970s.”—Oliver Wang, California State University, Long Beach