When I was in the fourth grade my family left our Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago for the suburbs. While I have very mixed feelings about that decision made by my parents, I know they wanted a safer life for their daughters. When we got to the ‘burbs, I did what I always do: I set out to make friends. When I did that and brought them home to meet my older, cooler sister who was actually too shy to go out and make friends on her own, they ended up liking my sister better than they liked me so OH, WELL, THAT WAS A STUPID PLAN. All it did was make me retreat to my books. We had a red wagon and I put my baby sister into it and pulled her up a hill (no, really, this isn’t one of those I-walked-two-miles-to-school-both-ways-uphill stories) about 6 blocks to the library. I’m sure it was a way to keep us busy and active out of the house, but I liked it all the same.

The library was actually a house that was converted into a library. The played movies on a projector and screen during the summer months and they had all the Nancy Drew books I could want to read. There was a section of the library that had music albums you could check out and I wore the hell out of Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie and the musical Annie. I can clearly remember singing the words to those songs as I traveled back and forth to the library in the summer months. This was a daily trip since I could read a book a day and I made good use of the library that summer.

Not long ago I received a copy of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ book Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture. I figured from the press release information that I would like this book, but I didn’t realize how much until I was a mere chapter into it. Williams has, in my opinion, a unique existence and experience in that his father was not only present and active in his life, he even got out of his son’s way to allow him to make all the mistakes he wanted. When you read this book you can put yourself in his shoes. His tone and way of writing, his wording, and his extensive vocabulary already make him attractive to read, but listening to him tell how much he struggled with embracing hip-hop fully into his being is what captured me the most. Especially once he went in search of his own knowledge and did The College Thing where you start to think for yourself and break away from all that you know. I remember doing The College Thing and reading the book Lies My Teacher Told Me and feeling like I had a whole lot more education to acquire.

The book cover.

One point that he makes which sticks with me is how Blacks are inundated with hip-hop music. How they emulate and truly try to become that which they listen to repeatedly but how non-Blacks have permission to listen to it with a sense of irony. A sense of “I can listen to this and dress like them now, but sooner or later I have to give this up and get back to my own White world. This can’t go on forever.” It’s almost as if there is a social agenda to pursue anti-intellectualism within Black culture and that is driven through music. When I think about music and the hip-hop that I like, it’s not what the mainstream listens to via radio. In fact, the hip-hop that I know and love is not the anti-women, money-grabbing, ho-slapping, gang-banging type of hip-hop. It is the socially-conscious, make-a-difference, do-something-with-your-life, wake-up-and-smell-the-conspiracy type of hip-hop. And if I even mentioned artists here it would fall on deaf ears. “Who is that she’s talking about?” and “I’m not familiar with those artists.” I sincerely hope, however, that that doesn’t sound pretentious. My experience is that when I tell most people who I’m listening to musically they look confused as if I made it all up.

The author.

Growing up, my friends were Nancy Drew and Annie and Really Rosie. But they were also EPMD and Public Enemy and Tupac (and I’m not slamming these particular artists – in fact, some of their lyrics were lost on me until much later in life). My feet were in two worlds. I sang those same lyrics, blindly I might add, that Williams sang before that consciousness took ahold of him in the form of 15,000 books. So I can empathize fully with him on that front. Like Williams, I feel saved from the ignorance of poverty and the thinking that keeps people there. And I hope so much that others can break free from it if only they were lucky enough to have a father like he did. His dad kept pursuing knowledge along with his son and unfailingly waits it out with patience and enough books to keep him reading and full of accomplishment. He writes fondly of his father and captures who he is as a man and a parent. Williams truly makes his father come to life narratively speaking. On a personal level, he makes me want to know him as a mentor.

I can’t think of a single person who wouldn’t enjoy reading Losing My Cool, but if you were ever sucked into the belief that you could find success and happiness by following the tenets systematically detailed in mainstream hip-hop, then this book is for you.

You can read other book reviews of this at the TLC Book Tours website where other bloggers have written their own critiques of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ book.