The Come Up, Abrams, Jonathan Paul Daniel

The music that we would later know as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, its the most popular genre in America and its electric impact on contemporary music is likened to that of jazz on the first half of the twentieth century. And yet, despite its tremendous influence, the voices of many of hip-hops pioneers have never been thoroughly catalogued--and some are at risk of being lost forever.

Now, in The Come Up, Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hops rise, told in the voices of the people who made it happen. Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of an overlooked population amid the decay of the South Bronx, and from there how it overflowed into the other boroughs and then across the nation--from parks onto vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon line, to the West Coast through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations.