BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS:
Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism
(Strange Attractor Press)
Through essays by some of hip-hop’s most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.
Featuring contributions from Omar Akbar, Juice Aleem, Tiffany E. Barber, Kevin Coval, Samantha Dols, Kodwo Eshun, Chuck Galli, Nettrice Gaskins, Jonathan Hay, Jeff Heinzl, Kembrew McLeod, Rasheedah Phillips, Steven Shaviro, Aram Sinnreich, André Sirois, Erik Steinskog, Dave Tompkins, Tia C.M. Tyree, Joël Vacheron, tobias c. van Veen, K. Ceres Wright, and Ytasha Womack.
Praise:
“Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Boogie Down Predictions is a symphony of voices, beats, and bars messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.” — Jeff Chang, author, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
“This book is the bomb-diggety!” — Greg Tate, author, Flyboy in the Buttermilk
“Boogie Down Predictions offers new ways of listening to, looking at, and thinking about hip-hop culture. It teaches us that hip-hop bends time, blending past, present, and future in sound and sense. Roy Christopher has given us more than a book; it’s a cypher and everyone involved brought bars.” — Adam Bradley, author, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop
“How does hip-hop fold, spindle, or mutilate time? In what ways does it treat technology as, merely, a foil? Are its notions of the future tensed…or are they tenseless? For Boogie Down Predictions, Roy Christopher’s trenchant anthology, he’s assembled a cluster of curious interlocutors. Here, in their hands, the culture has been intently examined, as though studying for microfractures in a fusion reactor. The result may not only be one of the most unique collections on hip-hop yet produced, but, even more, and of maximum value, a novel set of questions.” — Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist & Media Assassin
“The study of hip-hop requires more than a procession of protagonists, events, and innovations. Boogie Down Predictions stops the clock—each essay within it a frozen moment, an opportunity to look sub-atomically at the forces that drive this culture.” — Dan Charnas, author, Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla
“This is an extraordinary project and is fortunate to have Roy Christopher’s intellectual leadership.” — Alondra Nelson, co-editor, Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life
“This is so dope!” — Tananarive Due, author, The Reformatory
From the Introduction
by Ytasha L. Womack:
“This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop’s intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny—a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you’re the superhero. Enjoy the journey.”
Excerpts:
The MIT Press Reader: “Scratch Cyborgs: The Hip-Hop DJ as Technology” by André Sirois a.k.a. DJ Foodstamp.
GreedMag #4: “Preface” by Roy Christopher.
Interviews:
New Books Network: Interview with Alex Kuchma
Table of Contents:
Preface – Roy Christopher
Introduction – Ytasha L. Womack
I. TIME
1. Take Me Back: Ghostface’s Ghosts – Steven Shaviro
2. Two Dope Boyz (In a Visual World) – Tiffany E. Barber
3. Close to the Edge: “This Is America” and the Extended Take in Hip-Hop Music Video – Jeff M. Heinzl
4. Glitched: Spacetime, Repetition, and the Cut – Nettrice R. Gaskins
5. “The Theology of Timing” Black Consciousness and the Origin of Hip-hop Culture – Omar Akbar
6. Breakbeat Poems – Kevin Coval
7. The Free Space/Time Style of Black Wholes – Juice Aleem
8. Chopping Neoliberalism, Screwing the Record Labels: DJ Screw, Atavistic Hipsters and Temporal Politics – Aram Sinnreich & Samantha Dols
II. TECHNOLOGY
9. Scratch Cyborgs: The Hip-Hop DJ as Technology – André Sirois
10. Public Enemy and How Copyright Changed Hip-Hop – Kembrew McLeod
11. Done by the Trickle Trickle: Jbeez With the Ley Liners – Dave Tompkins
12. Preprogramming the Present: The Musical Time Machines of Gabriel Teodros – Erik Steinskog
13. The Cult of RAMM:∑LL:Z∑∑: A Hagiography into Chaos – Joël Vacheron
14. Hip-Hop’s Modes of Production are Futuristic – Chuck Galli
15. #ThisIsAmerica: Rappers, Racism, and Twitter – Tia C. M. Tyree
III. THE FUTURE
16. Further Considerations on Afrofuturism – Kodwo Eshun
17. Afrofuturism and the Intersectionality of Civil Rights, the Space Race, Hip-Hop, and Black Femininity – K. Ceres Wright
18. Afrofuturism in clipping.’s Splendor & Misery – Jonathan Hay
19. Black Star Lines: Ontopolitics of Exodus, Afrofuturist Hip-Hop, and the RZA-rrection of Bobby Digital – tobias c. van Veen
20. Constructing a Theory and Practice of Black Quantum Futurism – Rasheedah Phillips
Reviews:
The Journal of Popular Music Studies, March 2025:
Echoing its sci-fi inspirations, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism is a comprehensive worldbuilding project. This collection of essays, curated by Roy Christopher, weaves a vibrant assemblage from many emergent threads of hip-hop discourse during the first quarter of this century. Christopher does not linearly advance a single ideology. Boogie Down Predictions does not defend East Coast, West Coast, or Dirty South stylings. It does not offer a unified vision of Black posthumanism. Instead, my strongest impression was of the cosmic reach and visceral excess that hip-hop culture feeds into the contemporary American imagination. Just in Ytasha Womack’s six-page introduction, I casually counted the names of forty-four different artists, a density that many of the twenty subsequent entries maintain. To stay afloat on this sea of shoutouts, keep a search window close at hand. Rewatch Childish Gambino’s much-discussed video for “This is America” and find ritual footage to fathom the Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ. Sit with DJ Screw’s codeine-enhanced time stretching. Witness sonic-literary fusions of Gabriel Teodros and Nnedi Okorafor. But inevitably you won’t catch every citation, just as you won’t track down each sample on Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet. Overload makes the book compelling. The hip-hop world these authors envision is multifaceted, with internal conflicts, literary, visual, and sonic components, and scholarly engagement from such varied disciplines as film studies, communication, musicology, law, literature, poetry, Black studies, and computer science, to name a few… [Read More]
The Wire (click for larger view):
