Contemporary Black Urban Music

"Westray’s Contemporary Black Urban Music is a guide that musicians, teachers and students will want to keep close to hand. Westray’s historical survey provides brief but illuminating capsule portraits of more than a hundred major Hip-Hop artists and many of their predecessors. The book takes the classroom of a non-specialist university course as its source of orientation. Though not a theoretical work, for the student it offers a rich panorama of incentives to explore historical relations and critical issues. (Westray doesn’t take sides.) The abundant links to examples on the public internet guarantee that any reader who wants to study an artistic movement in Hip-Hop, a particular artist, or artistic controversy will have the needed resources. Westray often concludes his short chapters with ‘zoom outs’, adding context and perspective to this book about music that does not neglect associated Hip-Hop arts" — David Lidov, Professor Emeritus, York University, Canada.

 "I can imagine no better way to learn about Contemporary Black Urban Music: The Revolution of Hip-Hop than from Ron Westray's masterful book. Aimed at the uninitiated, students would gain more from this text through its thorough, concentrated, conversational approach than from any one or any way else. Masterful teaching through which students will become initiates and scholars" — Jerred Metz, author, The Last Eleven Days of Earl Durand, poet, Jackdaw: A Phantasmagoria; faculty, Strayer University and Coker College, USA.