Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future

This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of hip-hop appropriation--allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and self-reference--inform the new millennium.

In Dead Precedents, Roy Christopher traces the story of how hip-hop invented the twenty-first century.

Emerging alongside cyberpunk in the 1980s, the hallmarks of hip-hop - allusion, self-reference, the use of new technologies, sampling, the cutting and splicing of language and sound - would come to define the culture of the new millennium.

Taking in the groundbreaking work of DJs and MCs, alongside writers like Burroughs, Dick and Gibson, as well as post-punk and DIY culture, Dead Precedents is a counter-culture history of the twentieth century, showcasing hip-hop's role in the creation of the world we now live in.

Dead Precedents uses the means and methods of cyberpunk and hauntology to thoughtfully remap hip-hop's spread from around the way to around the world. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop culture are the blueprint to 21st century culture, and that an understanding of the appropriation of language and technology is an understanding of the now. Memories once firmly rooted in places in the past now float free of historical context. We all share memories courtesy of the mass media, and its rampant reproduction of artifacts.

Author: Roy Christopher
Publisher: Repeater
Published: 03/19/2019
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781912248346

About the Author
Christopher is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at The University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the Adjunct Faculty at Loyola University Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a master's degree in Communication from San Diego State University.

His main project from 1997 to 2007 was frontwheeldrive.com (see below). With this site, he established himself as what Disinformation called, One of the Internet's leading interviewers of subculture and new-science icons.


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