Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation

by Sujatha Fernandes

At its rhythmic, beating heart, Close to the Edge asks whether hip hop can change the world. Hip hop—rapping, beat-making,b-boying, deejaying, graffiti—captured the imagination of the teenage Sujatha Fernandes in the 1980s, inspiring her and politicizing her along the way. Years later, armed with mc-ing skills and an urge to immerse herself in global hip hop, she embarks on a journey into street culture around the world. From the south side of Chicago to the barrios of Caracas and Havana and the sprawling periphery of Sydney, she grapples with questions of global voices and local critiques, and the rage that underlies both. An engrossing read and an exhilarating travelogue, this punchy book also asks hard questions about dispossession, racism, poverty and the quest for change through a microphone.

Genres: Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Kate Pfaff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book for class. I ended up really liking it a lot and I probs wouldn’t have picked it up before only because it’s nonfiction and that isn’t really my vibe but it was really engaging and I didn’t dread having to read it for class

[University of Chicago Magazine]

Sujatha Fernandes, AM'00, PhD'03
Author

From our pages (Nov–Dec/11): "Part memoir, part academic study, Sujatha Fernandes's book covers youth street-culture movements from Sydney to Havana to Chicago. She works to understand the global hip-hop scene—including rapping, deejaying, beat making, and graffiti—the art incited by anger toward dispossession, racism, and poverty."

[Esther · Rating 2 out of 5]

described as "part memoir", but might wanna rejig that to 85-90% memoir. Didn't really get anything from it as it was all me, my and I. and there was a lot about how the author-cum-rapper was Indian-Australian-Portuguese, so where did she fit in etc etc...

[Mclaughlin175]

Just got this in the mail this week. I'm really excited for it, both for content and to see how Fernandes writes for a non-academic press. Verso looks like it offers some good stuff.

[Buddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very into it as a reflection and travelogue. Academically, maybe I wanted a little more.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed this- an interesting window into some of the hip hop scenes in Havana, Caracas, Chicago and Sydney.

[Erica LaValle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for school

[Todd Ligas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sujatha Fernandes seems particularly interested in how hip-hop, politics, and community activism intersect. To do this she takes the reader to locations that were not chosen for the purposes of the book, rather, she used past personal travels as her guide. In doing this Fernandes book is lacking academically and is more of a personal memoir. What does emerge is her struggle to make the connection on how hip hop and the global community and how they fit together. The problem with the evidence she uses is she did not acquire it from during her travels to the cities of Havana, Caracas, Chicago, and Sydney with these questions at hand; instead, she was asking these questions to herself looking back depending on memory for her analysis.

However, Fernandes does do a brilliant job of painting a picture of how the Hip hop—rapping, beat-making, b-boying, deejaying, graffiti artists were navigating their within their individual society. She also made some very acute observations throughout the book. One example, during one of her many trips to Havana, while at a club with a friend, she observed the whole crowd was “…dancing and singing along…” with the band; and they were repeating the chorus “The idiot paid out.” This phrase was about Cuban's taking advantage of foreigners; and suddenly it donned on her that to her friend, she was “The idiot paid [who] out.”
While engaging, the issue I have with this book is was written by a Sociology professor at the University of New York, is lacking academic flow, facts, and use of sources. In chapter one alone her second source did not appear for 31-pages, and with her background, she could have taken this book in a much different direction while keeping her personal touch.

One question that arises with so many quotes from individuals makes readers, like myself, wonder if many of these conversations, while entertaining, were real or just made up by the author to help with the flow of the book. Another example of a missed opportunity in sourcing is when she writing about the decline in “the 1980s in the industrial base of the South Side” of Chicago; Fernandes could have easily found multiple sources to support this. The most intriguing aspect of this book was how with each location, Fernandes examines what drew individual artists to hip hop, and what their personal struggles have been through the journey. She then takes each particular experience and compares them to the larger scale of what is happening in each city, and comes out with a complete view of what each hip hop scene has in common, and how they are different.

In the end this would be a great book to use in the context of high school. It could help get students engaged during a sociology class; this topic I feel would be fun and engaging and could help broach the generation gap and make the comparison to the hip-hop music of the day to years gone by entertaining. This could also engage students to attempt to analyze if hip-hop still intersects with politics and community activism and crosses ethnic boundaries to this day.