Youth music is the most creative and contested location on the cultural landscape. It is a vehicle 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 main stream narratives of thought and behavior, and one of the corporate state's main theaters for national moral panic.

Tricia Rose is Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at New York University. Andrew Ross is Director of the American Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University.

Introduction, Andrew Ross; Part 1 Histories & Futures; Chapter 1 We Know What Time It Is, George Lipsitz; Chapter 2 Same As It Ever Was, Susan McClary; Chapter 3 Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care?, Lawrence Grossberg; Chapter 4 Excerpt from Altered Spade: Readings in Race-Mutation Theory, Greg Tate; Part 2 Locating Hip Hop; Chapter 5 A Style Nobody Can Deal With, Tricia Rose; Chapter 6 Puerto Rican And Proud, Boyee!, Juan Flores; Chapter 7 The State of Rap, Jeffrey Louis Decker; Chapter 8 Contracting Rap, Tricia Rose; Part 3 The Dance Continuum; Chapter 9 In the Empire of the Beat, Walter Hughes; Chapter 10 Hello, Lady Kier Kirby; Chapter 11 Not a Mutant Turtle, Willi Ninja; Chapter 12 Nobody Wants a Part -Time Mother, Tricia Rose; Chapter 13 Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave Culture, Sarah Thornton; Chapter 14 The Funkification of Rio, George Yúdice, Hermano ViannaJr.; Part 4 Rock, Rituals & Rights; Chapter 15 Rah, Rah, Sis-Boom-Bah, Robert Christgau; Chapter 16 Border Crossing in the U.S.A., Donna Gaines; Chapter 17 Highbrow, Lowbrow, Voodoo Aesthetics, Robert Walser; Chapter 18 Smells Like Teen Spirit, Joanne Gottlieb, Gayle Wald;