"In 2005, Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop did for hip-hop scholarship what Hercules did for the Aegean stables: flushed out all the bullshit by redirecting the flow. Throughout the previous decade, most hip-hop writers had not so much stood as crouched on the shoulders of their predecessors, revisiting the same points on a well-worn timeline and mouthing the same reductive formulations. Chang’s history was broader, more incisive; it replaced uninterrogated truisms with hardnosed research, big-picture analysis, poetic philosophizing. Just as importantly, it freed other writers to specialize. Summarizing the culture suddenly seemed ridiculous: you weren’t going to do a better job than Chang, and even his book, at five-hundred-plus pages, had to flit from one tipping point to the next. Instead, a spate of excellent, tightly focused books emerged, on topics like hip-hop dance (Joseph G. Schloss’s Foundation), hip-hop as a political football (Tricia Rose’s Hip Hop Wars), even individual albums (Born To Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic, edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai) and the notion of a hip-hop aesthetic (Jelani Cobb’s To The Break of Dawn)."

"Dan Charnas’s massive and meticulous new book, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip Hop, synthesizes these two approaches to great effect. Chang-like in scope but intent on following the money trail, it reframes the culture by trading philosophy for structure, why for how. Charnas chronicles every aspect of hip-hop’s march, from the rise of independent labels to the complexities of pop radio incursion, the genesis of hip-hop print media to the nuts and bolts of distribution chains and the politics of corporate buy-in. The drama is constant, the corporate beef just as consuming and compelling as the artistic. Not only does Charnas move elegantly from one critical moment to the next, he manages to make the story entirely character-driven, whether the moment’s protagonist is a pioneering radio programmer you’ve never heard of, or a mogul you thought you never needed to read another word about."