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Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World.

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Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World. Edited by Alain Philippe Durand. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002. [xviii, 150 p. ISBN 0-8108-4431-1. $49.50 (hbk.); ISBN 0-8108-4430-1. $24.50 (pbk.).] Illustrations, index.

On his scooter, Roger Chamberland was crossing Quebec's bridge, as he did every evening on his way back home from the university. Suddenly, he had a flat. He fell and died in a coma a few days later. Chamberland's contribution to this collection of essays on Francophone rap music was his last one, but not his least. By helping to bring Quebec's rap music a little more to the fore, he was able to attain one of his academic goals, a goal shared by all contributors to Black, Blanc, Beur: to relate "the emergence and growing notoriety of rap music and hip-hop culture in France and the rest of the Francophone world" (p. xiii), as the book's editor, Alain-Philippe Durand, simply puts it. "But why did a book as important as this take so long," asks Adam Krims in his foreword to the book (p. vii)? "Never mind," he answers; the book approaches rap in a refreshing way: "Far from the shopworn notion of hiphop as quintessential urban guerrilla practice, the [ten] essays collected here allow for subtle mappings of the intertwined structures of urban form, cultural production, class, and ethnicity" (p. viii). Another contributor, Andre J. M. Prevos (1948-2002), author of the first essay, died just before the publication of the book, and...

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