Shout out to author Adam Mansbach who pretty much ethers the Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam for his recent article that weakly attempts to skewers Hip Hop in Academia.. The article in question is called Meet the Rap-ademics..In it you’ll find missives like:

In the late 1990s, two California newspapers, the San Jose Mercury News and the Los Angeles Times, helped feed a conspiracy theory that the CIA had introduced crack cocaine into the state’s inner cities to keep African-Americans down.

No need! Rap and hip-hop, with their celebration of ignorance, gangster-ism — sorry, gangsta-ism — and violence against women are doing the job just fine. Forget the CIA. Rap moguls like Jay-Z and the businessman known as Diddy or P. Diddy (real name: Sean Combs) have got this one covered. continue reading HERE

Mansbach takes the columnist to task:
Dear Alex,

I wonder what you hope to accomplish with a piece like “Meet the Rap-ademics.” Why bother to write about the music or the culture at all, if you’re going to approach it with petulance, mockery, and ignorance? None of these is anything new, when it comes to coverage of hip-hop – not the shots you take, not the over-generalizations, not the factual errors (two glaring ones: Gates was in no way the first “rap-ademic” by virtue of his 1990 testimony; Craig Werner was teaching a course on hip-hop at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as early as 1985. And you misquote the Jay-Z lyric; it’s “rub,” not “run.” Even the Anthology gets this line right – this error is all yours.)

continue reading HERE