Murray Forman is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and the forthcoming One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Duke University Press, 2012). He is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship. Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005), all published by Routledge. Neal hosts the weekly webcast, Left of Black in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal maintains a blog at NewBlackMan (http://newblackman.blogspot.com). You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.
"""Hip-hop, like all living artistic expression, constantly regenerates, turning innovation into convention, 'datcourse' into discourse, vernacularisms into commodity or the precious art object. As this second edition of the groundbreaking That's the Joint! shows, hip-hop scholarship has done the same: moving, grooving, breaking, and sampling the best ideas from an interdisciplinary community theater of writers whose insights chart a vibrant sector of the American musical landscape."" --Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania ""A standard bearer text in Hip Hop Studies. Sweeping in scope and rigorous in analyses."" --T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American Diaspora Studies and French, Vanderbilt University"