Youth music is the most creative and contested location on the cultural landscape. It is a vehicel for generational moods and aspirations, a public refuge for fantasies outlawed in daily life, a testing ground for technical ingenuity, an enormously profitable commercial channel for mainstream narratives of thought and behaviour, and one of the corporate state's main theatres for national moral panic. Today's sounds and the debates about their various forms, are inseparable from teh social conditions of the last two decades: class polarization, racial marginalisation, and economic violence enacted to a degree that has left youth, as a whole, with drastically reduced opportunities in life. Youth culture is still responding to these uneven developments with a passion that has been romanticised by some critics as a significant form of resistance, and denigrated by others as an avoidance of direct and political protest.
Microphone Fiends, a collection of original essays and interviews, brings together some of the best known scholars, critics, journalists and performers to focus on the contemporary scene. It includes theoretical discussions of musical history along with social commentaries about genres like disco, metal and rap music, and case histories of specific movements like the Riots Girls, funk clubbing in Rio de Janeiro, and the British rave scene. The contents of the volume engage with the broad tradition of cultural studies and sociology of youth music and culture, but it is also designed to address audiences reached by mainstream music journalism and fans of any musical taste. responding

Hip-hop is in crisis. For the past dozen years, the most commercially successful hip-hop has become increasingly saturated with caricatures of black gangstas, thugs, pimps, and 'hos. The controversy surrounding hip-hop is worth attending to and examining with a critical eye because, as scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose argues, hip-hop has become a primary means by which we talk about race in the United States . In The Hip-Hop Wars , Rose explores the most crucial issues underlying the polarized claims on each side of the debate: Does hip-hop cause violence, or merely reflect a violent ghetto culture? Is hip-hop sexist, or are its detractors simply anti-sex? Does the portrayal of black culture in hip-hop undermine black advancement? A potent exploration of a divisive and important subject, The Hip-Hop Wars concludes with a call for the regalvanization of the progressive and creative heart of hip-hop. What Rose calls for is not a sanitized vision of the form, but one that more accurately reflects a much richer space of culture, politics, anger, and yes, sex, than the current ubiquitous images in sound and video currently provide.

In a culture driven by sexual and racial imagery, very few honest conversations about race, gender, and sexuality actually take place. In their absence, commonly held perceptions of black women as teenage mothers, welfare recipients, mammies, or exotic sexual playthings remain unchanged. For fear that telling their stories will fulfill society’s implicit expectations about their sexuality, most black women have retreated into silence. Tricia Rose seeks to break this silence and jump-start a dialogue by presenting, for the first time, the sexual testimonies of black women who span a broad range of ages, levels of education, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Both brilliantly conceived and sensitively executed, "Longing to Tell" is required reading for anyone interested in issues of race and gender.