In our interview I made reference to the 40th anniversary of the Notorious Black Spades who was the largest gang in new York during those early days. You can peep our interview below…Chang is currently working on a book about race and multi-culturlism as a follow-up to his excellent book.

The cult movie Warriors was inspired by this Peace Treaty.Ĭhang noted the 71 peace Treaty paved the way for Hip Hop as it allowed folks from all over to go in various neighborhoods and artistically express themselves via dance, emceeing and deejaying. In 1971 the gangs of the Bronx got together and forged a Peace Treaty. Should they make peace and transform the neighborhoods or continue down a path of destruction. The gangs grew in size and began to war against one another until it reached a critical point where folks reached a fork in the road. This in turn led to what Chang described as chaos which led to the explosions of gangs who attempted to create and enforce some sort of order. This left many of the areas impoverished with its decreased tax base.

Here we sit down and talk about his perspective on street gangs and how they influenced Hip Hop culture.Ĭhang talks to us about the culture of abandonment in the late 60s and early 70s when many whites fled the Bronx in what we call ‘white flight’. But that epic story has never been told with this kind of breadth, insight, and style.īased on original interviews with DJs, b-boys, rappers, graffiti writers, activists, and gang members, with unforgettable portraits of many of hip-hop's forebears, founders, and mavericks, including DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D, and Ice Cube, Can't Stop Won't Stop chronicles the events, the ideas, the music, and the art that marked the hip-hop generation's rise from the ashes of the 60's into the new millennium.Straight from the Davey D Archives, we pull out an interview we did with author Jeff Chang back in August of 2008 at the National Political Hip Hop Convention about his book ‘ Can’t Stop Won’t Stop‘. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview, and transformed American politics and culture. Can't Stop Won't Stop is a powerful cultural and social history of the end of the American century, and a provocative look into the new world that the hip-hop generation created.įorged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement.

Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang