i wasn't terribly impressed. it's easy to rip through, really pacy and paints a credible and pretty accurate picture of the city but my main contention is that, like much of cohn's work, it's as much, if not more, about him as/than the subject at hand. i'd have liked to have heard more from KLC of Beats By The Pound, who I love as a producer, and who has some interesting stories to tell (was lucky enough to spend a bit of time chatting with him and mannie fresh thru work back in july) and i don't know why ice mike wasn't mentioned, either.
i know cohn's emphasis of his own role in the story doesn't stop it being a good book, but the sections on race/cross-cultural relations/being a white man in a black world made me cringe. it all struck me as very 60s cultstuds and missed the point that hip-hop is a crucial factor in breaking down barriers of race, especially in the southern states, and that we're now getting into the second generation of people brought up with hip-hop and that within these groups people of all races can now claim it to be their music, too, making the idea of "us" and "them" pretty much anathema.
led me to the conclusion that his whiteness wasn't the problem, rather his age.
cohn's view of race/place and the constant explicit and implicit "(white) guilty" pleas all rang a little hollow, too, especially when he then wonders aloud why bounce producers look at him like he's stupid when he asks them to use samples of things like the nortec collective. despite professing to love bounce, there was a real feeling that he was trying to "improve" it in a paternalistic, reithian "must educate these people" kinda way.
there was also an idea of trying to shoehorn bounce into his own idea of the city's musical hertitage via this process of adding elements to the productions etc. this struck me as pretty narrowminded and unneccessary as it absolutely does fit anyway, just more implicitly. especially on album's like soulja slim's the streets made me, the stories told, the vocal cadences etc are not entirely dissimilar from blues, the call and response aspects straight outta gospel... why reach when you can say that so categorically?
the thing that was really sad about the general story of waiting for bounce to break was that after atlanta blowing up, people have been looking to the south for new sounds lately, leading to houston finally earning its place on the map and elsewhere gaining attention. so if it weren't for the hurricane, the likelihood is that new orleans' time would have come naturally, anyway, without cohn pushing it. plenty of places have had self-sustaining scenes that function on a very regional basis that don't try to bust out nationally/internationally and actually don't want to anyway, but eventually do by default (cf houston, atlanta and now even baltimore). it seems to be a pretty organic process and it's a shame that events have conspired to deny new orleans this chance.
apart from the bit where cohn is talking about being in the crowd at the parade and falling under the spell of magnolia shorty's "monkey on a dick", i also don't think the music was described especially well. if you want to find out what the stuff sounds like, the cocaine blunts blog did a compilation called bounce for relief a while ago, which you should be able to get on a few filesharing services (if you do, please make a donation to hurricane relief because that was the original idea behind it) or hit me off list and i can sort you out with a comp of stuff featured in the book and a little more besides.
that may all sound pretty harsh, but i didn't hate it, i just had a few problems (and cohn has written a couple of my favourite books ever, so it's certainly not based on any antipathy toward him). among many other things, cohn is very, very good at writing people/events/music (cf things like his pj proby obsession) into history and he's achieved this for bounce. if it weren't cohn, there's no way this book would have been published to such fanfare and you'd certainly never have seen people like choppa and dj jubilee being discussed in the guardian weekend magazine or granta. also, it is very well written and is a good place to glean information/names/tracks to listen to if you're a complete novice, so don't anyone shy away from it on my account.