Q: To what extent have the last three decades in American history shaped hip-hop and to what extent has hip-hop shaped American history?

Hip-hop shows how deeply the last thirty years of American history have been affected by the politics of abandonment. These inner cities where hip-hop took root were abandoned by government, business, and frankly, the white middle class. What comes out of that is this intense mass longing to create history, to paraphrase Don Delillo, a deep desire to crush invisibility, to make culture that impacts the world and says "we're here". That's hip-hop.

In the mid-80s, there are little bans on breakdancing and boomboxes. Kind of a joke, really, but then they start adding on curfews, anti-cruising ordinances, and sweep laws against young people who have literally taken over public space with hip-hop. A decade later, there are vast gang databases that might include the names of two-thirds of a city's black youth males, and unconstitutional anti-loitering ordinances that go back in spirit to slavery and Jim Crow. After the politics of abandonment have turned inner cities into places where all the rot and horror of American Cold War militarism comes home to roost, a politics of containment takes shape. One way to understand the hip-hop movement and the hip-hop generation is to put it back into the space and time of the politics of abandonment and the politics of containment.

Q: I was watching an MTV clip where P-Diddy was rolling through town in a Bentley encouraging people to vote, and Trick Daddy was registering voters in Florida. To what extent do you think hip-hop is a force for political change?

A: Without question, hip-hop is a political force. The question is: what kind of political movement are we looking at? Media will focus on celebrities. They'll say that when you stand Russell Simmons and P-Diddy and Trick Daddy against Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. there's no comparison. There isn't. It's comparing apples to oranges.

In my book, I focus on the grass-roots movements. Hip-hop activists and organizers have elected and deposed politicians, stopped multimillion-dollar juvenile jails from being built, convinced taxpayers to vote for millions in youth services, and much more. They're just not marching on Washington. Hip-hop activists and organizers fight below the radar, at the local level, and the mainstream media never talks about it. So there's a false perception that the only political actors in this generation are the visible millionaires. How progressive politics is being remade day-to-day, block by block, city by city, is another great untold story of the hip-hop generation.