Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future

This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of hip-hop appropriation--allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and sampling--inform the new millennium. Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, uses the concerns and conceits of cyberpunk to thoughtfully remap hip-hop's spread from around the way to around the world. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop culture are the blueprint to the 21st century, and that an understanding of its appropriation of language and technology is an understanding of the now. This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of hip-hop appropriation--allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and sampling--inform the new millennium.