Bomb the Suburbs

Wimsatt, William. Bomb the Suburbs: Graffiti, Race, Freight-Hopping and the Search for Hip-Hop’s Moral Center. Soft Skull Press, 2008.

The word of hip-hop and rap is growing immensely drawing large interest from a wide section of interested parties. The hip-hop music genre is known to go with a cool mix of graffiti and attractive pictures to pass the message to the mass. It is for this reason that the author, William Upski Wimsatt, inquires to know as to whether the graffiti writers, who are well organized in the city, are planning to bomb the suburbs. The artistic presentation of this book also takes into the deep reorganization of the glaring racial, political and the different cultures that exist in the society. The book is not limited to the hip hop and rap genre; it is cleverly written to encompass on a wide range of existing topics that include among other factors the suburb growth and its challenges in the contemporary society.

The author, Wimsatt smartly incorporates the graphical elements to draw reader’s attention to the existing messages in the book. The inclusion of the cartoon characters, instances of interviews and the parodies in the book also helps to clearly generate the required element of the suburb mindset and the exact challenges that they face. The book encourages the readers to expound on their social boundaries and try to create a new set of relations with different types of people for the benefits of societal responsibilities. The hip-hop music genre is not exclusively left to a certain group of people as has been discovered in this article. The hip-hop genre, by itself, is espoused to bring on fold a wide range of personalities who by extension can relate to the societal issues. The book is brutally honest, pinpointing to some of the realities of life that exist beyond the comforts of the suburbs setting.