Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (PB) (2019)

In Dead Precedents, Roy Christopher traces the story of how hip-hop invented the twenty-first century.

Emerging alongside cyberpunk in the 1980s, the hallmarks of hip-hop - allusion, self-reference, the use of new technologies, sampling, the cutting and splicing of language and sound - would come to define the culture of the new millennium.

Taking in the groundbreaking work of DJs and MCs, alongside writers like Burroughs, Dick and Gibson, as well as post-punk and DIY culture, Dead Precedents is a counter-culture history of the twentieth century, showcasing hip-hop's role in the creation of the world we now live in.

Dead Precedents uses the means and methods of cyberpunk and hauntology to thoughtfully remap hip-hop's spread from around the way to around the world. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop culture are the blueprint to 21st century culture, and that an understanding of the appropriation of language and technology is an understanding of the now. Memories once firmly rooted in places in the past now float free of historical context. We all share memories courtesy of the mass media, and its rampant reproduction of artifacts.