Jamaica Kincaid and Hip Hop Culture?

Harvard Gazette

Hip Hop Harvard

Kincaid listens...

Excerpt:
I remember thinking: Why do boys dress like this?” observed panelist-critic Jamaica Kincaid, a novelist who watched the early blooming of rap while writing for the Village Voice and The New Yorker in the 1970s. But then droopy pants and backward ball caps penetrated white culture in the suburbs, she said, puzzling parents with the fact that “the children they love are influenced by people they despise.”
Kincaid grew to “adore” the authenticity of girl rappers like Lil’ Kim, a fixture in the 1990s, and at the same time she noted the present “authentic inauthenticity” of a performer like Lady Gaga. “Now white children like black children,” she said, “and are pretending to be black children.”