CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP by Jeff Chang - Powell's '50 Books for 50 Years'

Powell's | July 23, 2021

We've spent the past 15 months in the global equivalent of a diabolic Chuck E. Cheese ticket blaster. Locked in a quasi-preventable situation, the result of bad luck and worse decisions, we've been grasping at whatever will keep us safe, keep us sane, get us out, while being whipped by a virus, and often violence, that won't quit.

Some of us have been lonely. Others frightened, or angry. We're all exhausted. It's been a natural time to appraise how we got to this point of fracture and fragility, and how we heal; we want to know who we've been, and who we're becoming, and for that we've always turned to books. Which books have foretold the present, lit our paths, warned us back, egged us on? What books stand with us now, reflecting the present?

Our 50 Books for 50 Years list comes from this place of self-reflection, and is inspired by Powell's 50th anniversary year. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11; Edward Abbey's nascent environmental movement to Barry Lopez's luminous Arctic Dreams; Alice Walker's Celie and Shug to Jennifer Finney Boylan's groundbreaking work of trans autobiography; Jeff Chang's treatise on hip-hop to Patricia Lockwood's autopsy of Living Online, these 50 books not only show us who we have been as a country and a species and where we are going, but the power of the right words, at the right time, to act as a mirror and a beacon.

Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang
Journalist, historian, and music critic (and cofounder of one of the greatest hip-hop labels of all time!) Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is a sweeping cultural, political, and musical history of hip-hop (now the globe’s most lucrative genre). Spanning over three decades from its humble beginnings to the start of the new millennium, Chang’s comprehensive account of hip-hop culture has become its definitive text. As much a sociological examination as a proper historical account, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop situates a burgeoning musical movement within its contextual milieu of race, economics, disenfranchisement, social change, unrest, political policy, art, and more. Like an unforgettable novel with an exceptionally well-drawn cast of characters, Chang’s book isn’t just about hip-hop, it’s the story of late 20th-century America writ large.

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