Can't Stop, Won't Stop, Chapter 10

End of Innocence: The Fall of the Old School
by: Alycia Burkitt

The book presents a much different conclusion to Old School than I was expecting. I thought that the book would be talking more about the commercialization of Old School rather than the devastation that drugs had on the community. It did talk about how record labels, Hollywood, and the art community scripted many of the artists so that their art conformed to pop culture fads. One of the examples the book gives is the movie, Beat Street, originally written my Steven Hager based off his book Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. When the movie came out it had been rewritten for pre-teen and teenage suburban fad followers. Hager said “not a single word of anything I said made it into that unfortunate film.

The author then begins to talk of the increase in violence and drug use in the community. Brutal beatings of “colored citizens by white officers” were no longer being tolerated and activists were fighting back.

This chapter then discusses the angst and abandonment felt by the original crews. They began turning to drugs as way of coping, earning money, and keeping themselves in the game. Drugs were everywhere, drug trafficking boomed and U.S. agencies did nothing to stop it. Drugs, dealing, and scoring became the main focus of movies and especially music. The quote at the end of the chapter sums it up the best; “This was a new breed of renegades. The hip hop generation had reached childhood’s end and was coming into an era of rebellion.”