These Are the Breaks

About the Book

Standard histories describe hip-hop’s emergence from poverty, urban decay, and the Cross Bronx Expressway’s devastating impact on the South Bronx. Eugene Stein moves beyond the abstractions to provide a neighborhood-by-neighborhood examination of how people’s reactions to socioeconomic shocks shaped a revolutionary form of music.

Stein combines granular detail, oral histories, and analyses from economic geography and Black geographies to reveal the urban environment’s effect on the lives and artistic activities of young people. Himself a Bronx native, Stein grew up in the unpredictable New York City of the 1970s and witnessed a cascade of economic distress, structural racism, city-wide fiscal catastrophe, and the borough’s housing crisis. As he shows, these and other factors primed pioneering rappers, DJs, and other artists to aim at success and outclass rivals by developing new styles. Housing policies and population movements, meanwhile, both tore apart social networks and provided the need and impetus for new and nurturing cultural communities.

Expansive and innovative, These Are the Breaks chronicles how a generation of Black and Latino youth transformed hardship into identity, competition, community, and art.

* Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the Judith McCulloh Endowment for American Music.