Review: Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism, edited by Roy Christopher

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:SLL:ZSS.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.Writing on African diasporic music has often emulated the aesthetics of the music it describes.Fred Moten's prose on Anthony Braxton is so concentrated with meaning that reading becomes free improvisation.Jeff Noon remixes text in the style of the dub B-side remixes he recounts.Kodwo Eshun's manifesto More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction wields sci-fi neologisms so mellifluously that words become a music technology, a hybrid between sampler, saxophone, singer, and spaceship.Boogie Down Predictions is situated firmly in this tradition, not least of all because it features Eshun's writing.Additionally, the editor presents the book as a mixtape.Each entry is timestamped like a CD track, and contributors' titles reference hip-hop mixing techniques or styles, such as Netrice Gaskins's "Glitched: Spacetime, Repetition & the Cut," Kevin Coval's "Breakbeat Poems," and Aram Sinnreich and Samantha Dols's "Chopping Neoliberalism, Screwing the Industry."Saturated with the musical substrate of hip-hop language, the reader plunges into the body of the text.