Hip Hop Heresies

Winner of the 2022-2023 New York City Book Awards!

SPECIAL MENTION, 2023 IASPM Book Prize, given by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music

SHORTLISTED, 2023 Ralph J. Gleason Book Award, given by the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame/Clive Davis Institute

Unearths the queer aesthetic origins of NYC hip hop

Hip Hop Heresies centers New York City as a space where vibrant queer, Black, and hip hop worlds collide and bond in dance clubs, schools, roller rinks, basketball courts, subways, and movie houses. Using this cultural nexus as the stage, Shanté Paradigm Smalls attends to the ways that hip hop cultural production in New York City from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century produced film, visual art, and music that offer queer articulations of race, gender, and sexuality.

To illustrate New York City as a place of experimental aesthetic collaboration, Smalls brings four cultural moments to the forefront: the life and work of the gay Chinese American visual and graffiti artist Martin Wong, who brokered the relationship between New York City graffiti artists and gallery and museum spaces; the Brooklyn-based rapper-singer-writer-producer Jean Grae, one of the most prolific and underrated emcees of the last two decades; the iconic 1980s film The Last Dragon, which exemplifies the experimental and queer Black masculinity possible in early formal hip hop culture; and finally queer- and trans-identified hip hop artists and groups like BQE, Deepdickollective, and Hanifah Walidah, and the documentary Pick Up the Mic.

Hip Hop Heresies transforms the landscape of hip hop scholarship, Black studies, and queer studies by bringing together these fields through the hermeneutic of aesthetics. Providing a guidepost for future scholarship on queer, trans, and feminist hip hop studies, Hip Hop Heresies takes seriously the work that New York City hip hop cultural production has done and will do, and advocates a form of hip hop that eschews authenticity in favor of performativity, bricolage, and pastiche.

Shanté Paradigm Smalls is Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy at New York University.Shanté Paradigm Smalls is Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy at New York University.

Mikal Amin Lee:
Whether looking at the various sharing and appreciation of other cultural ideals (Afro-Asian, for example) to the direct contributions of particular identities in seminal moments and waypoints within the culture, Hip Hop Heresies is a meaningful and powerful look into a history of Hip Hop that further cement the belief of Hip Hop's universal appeal, power, and influence on the world at large.

Quite simply a tour de force. Like Tricia Rose's classic Black Noise, this book is a field-defining game-changer. Challenging hip hop’s traditional origin story, Smalls tears down, brick-by-brick, the well-worn narratives about the genre's relationship to blackness, masculinity, and heterosexuality. In innovative readings of film, visual art, and music, Smalls takes us into the formative spaces where people of all genders, sexualities and races co-mingle and co-create. In the process, Smalls constructs a new archive in which queer aesthetics, gender play, and categorical instability fuel hip hop's more transgressive tendencies. Highly readable, theoretically sophisticated, and utterly persuasive, Hip Hop Heresies is essential reading for hip hop fans and critics, as well as anyone interested in U.S. popular culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Finally (deep heavy sigh of relief, followed by loud cheers of ‘yes, yesssss, y’all’) we have a book about NYC hip-hop culture that is as queerly heretical as the genre itself. Challenging the cishetero masculinist narratives usually projected onto hip-hop culture, Shanté Paradigm Smalls beautifully and heretically mashes up Black aesthetics, queer aesthetics, and hip hop aesthetics. Hip Hop Heresies is poised to irrevocably change the parameters of hip-hop scholarship.