Gather Losing My Cool: How A Fathers Love And 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture Authored By Thomas Chatterton Williams Issued As Copy

compelling memoir recounting the author's coming of age and coming to terms with his racial and personal identity.
The author's father, who overcome tremendous odds as a Black man growing up in the Jim Crow South, instills in his son a respect for learning and bookseven if he can't admit this with his friends.
This fatherson relationship is the emotional heart of the story, Williams offers a sharp indictment of hip hop culture and how it can deform when it is understood as an arbiter of authenticity rather than a mere aesthetic pose.
An unpopular opinion:

This book is an honest take from one man's perspective, Among other things, it goes a long way in crushing the myth that all black men and women like the same things, which, of course, is ridiculous.
Our place in the world is what we make it, no matter what obstacles are deliberately thrown in our way.
That said, we need to be careful about things that aren't particular helpful, Hip Hop music is great, Hip Hop culture, . . not so much. Books beat hip hop all day long, Can we love both Absolutely, but make no mistake, while both have entertainment value, one adds more value in your life than the other.
Mildly heartwarming as a father/son comingofage story, but lacking sufficient perspective or nuance in its portrayal of hiphop culture.
Far too many reductive, sweeping judgments of hiphop's influence based on tenuous interpretations of scant anecdotal evidence.
I'd highly recommend the The Beautiful Struggle by TaNehisi Coates, for a much sharper take on similar subject matter.
I'm aboutyears older than the author, so my relationship to hiphop is a bit different.
I grew up with funk and disco in the white suburbs of Pittsburgh, When hiphop came along, I lapped it up, It was so black. The mainstream white and black hated it, People didn't understand it. Hiphop became a source of pride for me,

Of course, the music was a lot more diverse in the 's, We had silly rap, goodtime rap, black nationalist rap, misogynist rap, and what would become "gangsta" rap.
It was before the multinational record labels got a hold of it and turned the lion's share of mainstream hiphop as though that could've existed in 'into the gangsta variety.


I often wondered what it must've been like growing up with that constant nihilistic, selfloathing, misogynist message being pounded into impressionable, young ears.


Losing My Cool gave me insight into that experience, I don't know how representative Williams's experiences are of that generation's experience with hiphop, but it is still illuminatingas well as depressing.
I definitely appreciate his perspective and recommend that other people check it out, An engaging but very frustrating read, I found it very upsetting how onesided the author is about a subculture that contains so many different elements both positive amp negative.
He has a very narrow view of hiphop, While it is an interesting read, I really HATE the premise amp message, The author's racial politics taint every account he gives, I'm not sure he can claim to be a voice for most black men, since his experience of seeking to mimick and be accepted as black are tied to his biracial heritage.
This is reinforced by his continous stereotyping, He equates black culture and black people to hiphop, which is really over simplistic amp racist.


As a teaching tool about development, I feel it still has some value because it does speak to many issues faced by most young men growing up, regardless of race.
However, I don't see how it could help teachers or administrators think about how to improve institutional support amp policy for men of color.
It thrives heavily on deficit theories for why black men struggle, amp it downplays institutional racism.
I think it's a dangerous book to use as a lens into the black college student experience, especially for whites who may have very low racial identity development.
Wonderful memoir I really love the way this guy writes, and what he writes about, A remarkably courageous book. Predictably, I loved this book and identified quite a bit with the author, although my own experience with trying to conform to the standards of hiphop culture is limited to my shortlived Lil' Bow Wow phase in elementary school, which I soon abandoned in favor getting lost in the pages of YA mystery novels.
But enough about me. What I enjoyed most about this book, beyond the affirmation I felt when reading it, was the author's ability to dig beneath the surface, indeed to dismantle the shallow but widelyaccepted mythologies that uphold a culture whose destructive nature we all too willingly blind ourselves to.
He has a way of piercing through the smokescreen and illuminating truths that would be obvious if the proverbial waters were not so muddy: one such example is his observation that his white classmates typically listened to hiphop with a sense of irony, enjoying the artistry but nevertheless accepting that the lyrics are not to be taken literally.
Meanwhile, too many of the black kids he befriended in high school, perhaps due to social pressure and a lack of alternative role models, took those same messages seriously, adopting the lifestyles promoted by the most popular rappers and, as a result, blinding themselves to their own individuality.
I suspect he gives voice to many other black and POC people who grew up during the same hiphop era and struggled with the same doubts.
Even if you disagree with his conclusions, his experience is an authentic one that is worth reading.
One of the dumber books you'll ever read, The author, who wrote a somewhat widely read oped in I think the Washington Post back in the late 's, was riding that wave of antihiphop sentiment kicked off by the likes of Bill Cosby and Essence magazine, not to mention the fact that rap music, on the whole, really did shit the bed back in the mid 's.
Arguably, it peaked as far back as the mid 's,

And so this is the story of how the author, presumably at risk of getting shot in the back for stealing pound cake, turned his back on hiphop and got his life together.
In high school, he was dating a hoodrat who doesn't seem like a legit hoodrat but rather a suburban black chick with a typical black chick attitude, he once almost got into a fight after school, and he dressed like an en extra in a Puff Daddy video.
In college, an actual authentic black person, who's of course just there at Georgetown playing basketball or some shit, puts a shoe on the author in the locker room for a misunderstanding involving the athlete's girlfriend, prompting the author to ditch his 'sera hiphop clothes and develop more of a white affect.


Literally, that's all this book is about, but of course he tries to attach some sort of moral significance to his various wardrobe choices, and to blame hiphopwhich, to hear him tell it, isn't about anything other than beating up girls, not learning how to read and dressing like a clownfor all of the ills affecting the black community, I guess none of which existed pre.
Otherwise this Losing My Cool's subtitle would: The Evolution of One Dumbass's Wardrobe, I didn't want to love this book but I did, I love memoirs about people who realize that something is wrong with them and with how they've learned to live, and who read a bunch of books in a search for how to live differently.
I relate to bookish people who know they're broken in some way and who look to books for salvation.
My life has been totally transformed by that quest,

I would include in this "genre" books like: Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain, Hillbilly Elegy by J.
D. Vance, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chau, Lit by Mary Karr, An Education by Tara Westover, The Autobiography of Malcom X, From Fire By Water by Sohrab Ahmari and many many more.


Still, I found myself fighting this book on every page, I think there's an unspoken double standard in identity politics where white men like J, D. Vance or Jared Yates Sexton who has written at length about the toxic white masculinity he was raised to emulate in Indiana are allowed to say, "Hey, my culture taught me some lessons that didn't always serve me well, and I've decided to unlearn many of them after learning more about myself and reading a bunch of books.
" Black men are not always allowed to say the same thing, but the deal with people's stories is that they get to tell them and Williams tells his well, even when it's uncomfortable.


I also found the story of his brother being assaulted by police officers for no reason and having his teeth knocked out an important and horrifying example of the police brutality and racism that BLM has brought to light.

This is an amazing book, I think that the decision to make this authobiographical instead of an essay on the problems of emulating hip hop culture

was a good one.
It's hard to argue with someone's personal experience, People will anyway, I'm sure,

Williams maps his journey from childhood to adulthood, dealing particularly with his reactions and modes of thinking in a way that is comes from both the emotional and the intellectual.


I never got the impression that he was straining in order to make a point or that he had to wrestle his facts to fit into his ideas and overall theme.
The whole book seemed effortless, a simple, straightforward and unflinching look at growing up within a culture that has strict norms and ideas about how people should be.
It's about going beyond that set of expectations, I'm sure this book would generate a lot of controversy if it were first published today, but it appeared in, when the tail end of Generation X was getting subsumed into the metairony that early Millennials would perfect and go on to be mocked forrightly, in my mind.


I don't have a dog in this fight, so I felt embarrassed at times rooting for Williams's hypothesis.
It's hard not to root for Williams himself, though and I think this is a point that is largely lost in today's silly, performative, puritanical, and holierthanthou world of race relations.
It's all about the people, individual persons who make up collectives that those persons didn't create but under whose generational burdens they labor.
This book is about Williams's life, but it's also about Stacey's and Charles's and Ant's,

Williams may be wrong about his friends, but he loves them, He may be wrong about his ideas and his prescription for overcoming a certain generation's upbringing, but he has done a lot of deep thinking about the subject and has compared the things he has learned with the previously unquestioned assumptions with which he grew up, and he has decided to change his mind.


If only more people had the ability to change their minds, honestly to examine the assumptions they've always made, to interrogate their specific choices.
Most importantly, if only the ones now clamoring for the immediate righting of all the historical wrongs that ever existed had the grace to understand that human change is possible.
It doesn't come from Twitter mobthink or online spreadsheets of accumulated transgressions of dubious origin or a kinder, gentler version of China's Cultural Revolution.
No, change comes through courage, curiosity, honesty, and tenacity, Williams has all four in spades, and I feel fortunate to have been allowed into the deepest, most intimate moments of his teenage and college years.


I always think Williams is much younger than I am, so it was a pleasantmaybe that's the wrong wordsurprise to read about his experiences on the morning of September,.
I remember almost everything about that day as well, and I don't mean just the news coverage or how I felt.
He's only four years younger, and I was in graduate school at that time, and the similarity between our two experiences is hopeful, if deeply sad.


The one typo I found in the book may be my favorite of all time.
He misspelled Inglewood, California, "Englewood, " That's because he's a Jersey boy, and he assumed, with his East Coast bias, that the city in California had the same name as the city in New Jersey.
He probably also pronounces Oregon ORuhgone, like a cretin, He's even earnest in the way he makes mistakes,

You should read this book before you read SelfPortrait in Black and White.
I wish I had. .