Gunshots in My Cook-Up: Bits and Bites from a Hip-Hop Caribbean Life
- Book Review,
by Selwyn Seyfu Seyfu Hinds
From Publishers Weekly
As a former editor-in-chief of hip-hop magazine the Source and a fan since he was a nine-year-old living in Guyana, Hinds knows hip-hop as well as any journalist around. This account is part memoir, part behind the music: we get days in the life of Puffy, Lauryn Hill at the Grammys and guerrilla touring with the Wu-Tangs. We get Hinds's writerly woodshedding at Princeton and the Village Voice, the rise of the Source, sweaty clubs in Brooklyn and the escalation of the East Coast-West Coast feud until two of rap's superstars, Tupac and Biggie Smalls, are lost. An excellent storyteller, Hinds can write with equal intensity about his little brother's aspiration to be an MC, hiring an intern to go through "the Wack Box" or hurtling down the highway with Raekwon and Ghostface. Even though he knows it's business, Hinds's book works because he still believes in the power of this new, brash and still-not-fully charted art: this is a fan's memoir first, and a journalist's chronicle second.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
A former editor of the Source magazine, Hinds has written a terrific work. As a ten-year-old in his native Guyana, Hinds first heard hip-hop via the Sugarhill Gang, who scored the first massive hip-hop hit in 1979 with "Rapper's Delight." He felt an instant attraction that grew into a great love when at 15 Hinds moved to New York City. Weaving details of his own relationships and travails with portraits of numerous hip-hop luminaries, Hinds shows how intricately his life and music are intertwined. Often, his relationships with industry movers and shakers (e.g., Russell Simmons) proved more personal than professional, and his two younger brothers have both tried their hand at hip-hop. When Hinds writes of the troubles that have surrounded the culture, readers will feel his pain and anger; and when he sings the praises of artists like Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean, they will be uplifted. For anyone interested in the culture of hip-hop-and the numbers keep growing-Hinds's effort should prove educational and enlightening. A fine complement to Nelson George's social and cultural history, Hip Hop America; recommended for all public libraries.Craig Shufelt, Lane P.L., Fairfield, OHCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
As former editor-in-chief of the respected hip-hop journal The Source and former top aide to rap mogul Russell Simmons, Hinds is well placed to provide a definitive look at the state of hip-hop, and he does in an autobiography full of reportage and stock-taking on where the music is today and where he and his cohort have ended up. "As a member of the hip-hop generation," he says, "ambivalence is my birthright," which he exercises frequently and profitably in chapters indicatively titled "Young Black Teenagers," "My Uzi Weighs a Ton" (about Chuck D's massive influence), "The Source of It All" (about the hip-hop side of the rock press), and so forth. In the last chapter (before a protracted sheaf of acknowledgments), which is addressed to his daughter in utero, Hinds gets downright sentimental by contemporary standards; for instance, he rues "that Daddy and Mommy [i.e., Hinds and consort] belong to an oft-maligned generation" that is seen as a bunch of "slackers . . . gorged on entitlement and dot.com excess." Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Kirkus Reviews Refreshing and insightful....An alert take on hip-hop's trajectory.
Book Description
Selwyn Seyfu Hinds -- award-winning former editor-in-chief of The Source -- presents an extraordinary memoir/history of hip-hop as seen through the eyes of one fan-turned-luminary. The moment nine-year-old Hinds heard "Rapper's Delight" in Guyana, he embarked upon an amazing, if sometimes contentious, relationship with hip-hop -- one that would continue through his migration to Brooklyn as a teenager and on through adult life. Here, he takes readers to a murky nightclub in the violent streets of late-eighties Brooklyn; to an Ivy League campus caught up in political rap during the early nineties; to a curbside in Los Angeles where Notorious B.I.G. has just been shot; to the achingly poor streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as a sea of black humanity surges to touch a hip-hop native son.... Interspersing recollections of life in the hip-hop trenches with profiles of figures like Lauryn Hill, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, Dr. Dre, Wyclef Jean, and more, Hinds traces the heights and depths of his hip-hop love affair. Like the Guyanese rice dish "cook-up," Gunshots in My Cook-Up ingeniously pulls wide-ranging elements into an irresistibly cohesive dish.
About the Author
Selwyn Seyfu Hinds has written for Vanity Fair, Spin, The Village Voice, Vibe, and other publications. A graduate of Princeton University, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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