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Joe Coscarelli
Positive The New York Times Book Review Both the music and the best writing about it embody the same credo: You either go hard or go home. Joe Coscarelli, a seasoned music journalist at The New York Times, has opted for the former. And the world of music criticism is better for it ... an impressive, albeit at times unwieldy, cultural history. Coscarelli meticulously tracks Atlanta rap music’s meteoric rise to commercial dominance through an ambitious mix of in-depth profiles, interviews and Billboard chart insights. His good reporting is exceeded by a commitment to the kind of social analysis that defies linear narratives. Coscarelli lingers in the complex intersections between music, artists, the streets’ illicit economies, the prison system, racism, poverty and class dynamics in Atlanta, a city that’s branded from the block to the boardroom by an ethos of Black Excellence ... Coscarelli approaches the text with a director’s sensibility. Driven more by character than plot, Rap Capital tells the story of the music primarily through the origin stories of a compelling cast of headliners, music execs, and supporting players ... Coscarelli has a knack for story. Save the few frustrating times he mires his pacing in the minutiae of charts and studios, these carefully crafted close-ups are delivered in page-turning prose. What emerges is a rap game that eschews the purist and largely regional divide between 20th-century East and West Coast rap music and disrupts the romantic mythos of rapper as poet, the diligent street griot with a rhyme book ... Coscarelli understands how to render individual characters in ways that make the reader invested in their quest for success and in their heartbreaks. He is particularly adept at capturing the kind of nuanced detail that layers and complicates his subjects without compromising the strength of his critiques of the culture around them ... Making relatively brief reference to hip-hop’s emergence in the ’70s, Coscarelli writes about Atlanta rap as if it is the messiah child that sprang from no one’s loins ... This is an unfortunate choice, and not because of some purist ethic that demands he kiss the proverbial ring. So much of the contemporary narrative about early hip-hop is rooted in a deferential nostalgia that stresses the importance of race, gender and class to the birth of this musical generation, but misses the ways in which these contexts have shifted in the digital age, transforming everything from access to creative process. Rap Capital corrects this oversight, providing an illuminating snapshot of how the game has changed; but it could have used greater context about hip-hop’s 20th-century history as a cultural and commercial force in order to bring its present landscape into greater relief ... More disappointing is the rather superficial glance given to the women in this corner of the industry, especially given the attentiveness Coscarelli devotes to both race and class, and the significant body of work that’s existed on gender and hip-hop since the ’90s ... Inclusion is not gender analysis ... It’s Coscarelli’s job to continue to ask why, as he has throughout this otherwise fresh, contemporary work.
Kyla Schuller
Rave The New York Times Book Review Schuller...lays bare how white feminism, rooted in binary, dated understandings of womanhood...\'is a political position, not an identity,\' and has no interest in disrupting the status quo, or in a reallocation of power ... The most adept historian is one who can transform carefully mined nuggets of archival material into compelling, if not piquant, prose. Schuller is a gifted storyteller, her counterhistory equal parts writerly craft and scholarly diligence ... Schuller’s writing is strongest when locating the precise historical moments in which these feminist figures intersected ... Schuller takes care to render these women not as heroes and villains, but as studies in complexity, contradiction and nuance. Sometimes, though, the balance between the two subjects can feel off ... However, when Schuller does strike the right balance, as she does between the anti-trans feminist Janice Raymond and the trans theorist Sandy Stone, the result is mesmerizing. The Trouble With White Women is a welcome addition to the feminist canon. Undertaking the kind of critical labor necessary for engendering a truly liberatory feminism, Kyla Schuller is doing the work.