Where You're at: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip Hop Planet [Paperback]

Initial indications were great, references, conversations and material that was right on the money. But for me, as the odyssey goes on the material becomes more dislocated from any objective assessment of the subject.

With each chapter it becomes evident that we are passengers on the authors journey, that this is no comentary on Hip Hop, it's evolution or it's current state. What it is however, is a platform for the author to relate Hip Hop directly to socio ecconomic and political climates within each location. It feels a little like being preached to. I've no problem with that, except that it makes for unfulfilling and somethimes slightly tedious reading. This is very much one man's view. Less about Hip Hop and more of a travellers journal.

So really, my criticism is that this isn't the book I wanted to read. The fact that it came close to being that book only added to my disappointment.

I also struggled with the mismatched ratio of material and locations. You can't write about Hip Hop worldwide without at least visiting California and the New York section is half as big as the South African section. There is little to represent the home scene (UK)either. Of course there are reasons for this, I just don't know what they are.

Overall, it is well written and has truly insightful details that also reveal the authors passion for the subject. What is evident, is that the vastly exploded world of Hip Hop is one you can no longer hold in your hands (not so the "old school"). There's just too much of it. I feel like the author has probably not really found the core of Hip Hop because he's happily settled in the periphery of loving how it used to be. Getting to the messy rough cutting edge is probably best left to the next gen.

They instinctively know where it's at.

Everything's bling. Everyone's pimping. Only last week at my local supermarket, I had to curb my desire to tell the young staff chatting at the checkout that the latest compilation CD by a well-known hip-hop DJ was probably not the best introduction to hip-hop they could receive. Fearing a path that would end with me writing to the Daily Mail on a regular basis to complain about the minutiae of life, I bit my tongue.

What Neate does so well in this book is to introduce you to people in New York, Tokyo, Cape Town and Johannesburg who harness elements of hip-hop that aren't dripping in the common clichés. Neate aims to uncover that hip-hop is a force for good, and he wants hip-hop to be a unifying element that can teach and enrich people in the way that he feels it has done with him.

I got the feeling that what Neate really wanted was to meet people who feel the same way about hip-hop that he does. Once he stopped yearning for this to happen, he was able to see that this global phenomenon affects people differently in their own locality, but in a positive and uplifting way. And so, his firm belief that hip-hop remains a vibrant medium for positive change in the modern world is confirmed.

This is a book written with passion and compassion. Neate's love of hip-hop (and indeed, reading) comes through clearly in his writing, and he's a thoughtful and interesting host. There's a lot more to hip-hop than what you see on TV. It is still very much a genre rooted in reality, participated in by real people. And these people are a thousand times more interesting than most of the artists who make an overblown living from it.

'Where You're At' is certainly something the dedicated hip hop head will enjoy, but I suspect it's written with non-devotees in mind. For example, the fact that Mos Def concerts are mostly attended, both in the UK and the US, by right-on white trendies ("the rucksack posse", as they tend to be damned in New York) is old news to anybody who follows the scene, but here it functions as a crucial revelation in Neate's (and, by implication, our) voyage of discovery. Elsewhere, he celebrates the discovery of a copy of the JVC Force's 'Strong Island' as though it's the Lost Ark, apparently unaware reissues of that single have been available in significant quantities since the late Nineties anywhere from Long Island to Edinburgh.

The erratically-applied footnotes wind me up and would perhaps have been better given space to breathe at the back of the book. I also feel that there are times when its global reach, linked to its relatively small size, means it risks dipping into trite, reductive pop-anthropology. So large chunks of the chapter on Tokyo, for example, will have you rolling your eyes if you're familiar with modern Japan - by the end of it, you may feel you've simply endured ideas that have been explored with greater subtlety and precision elsewhere, and it's questionable whether you're much the wiser about Japanese hip hop as a result, either.

The definitive book on hip hop culture, its origins and its creative brilliance is still David Toop's ' Rap Attack' (now in its third edition), but this is an interesting, tangential take on one aspect of what happened to rap in the Nineties.