ABSTRACT
The first edition of Kinderculture forwarded several groundbreaking ideas about the role and importance of popular culture and education. Popular culture has become a key site of "cultural pedagogy," where curricular "power is organized and deployed". No cultural movement marks these various tensions as clearly as hip hop. Hip hop music has emerged as perhaps the pre-eminent cultural movement of time, the profoundest statement of the complexities of this generation of youth and young adults. Todd Boyd argues throughout his book that hip hop music and culture attempt "to navigate the world in a very different way." Boyd's comments clearly dovetail with Afeni Shakur's on the need not to lodge critiques from previous generations but perhaps to listen and learn as well. Mark Anthony Neal discusses how hip hop provides the cultural soundtrack to his own life and the lives of his students. He discusses, as well, the ways both try to unravel some of its complexities and contradictions.
