What the Music Said is a book about communities under siege, but also communities engaged in various forms of resistance, institution-building and everyday pleasures. Beginning with the Be-Bop era, Mark Anthony Neal reads the story of "black communities" through the black tradition in popular music. Exploring the broad range of black cultural experience and expression, Neal locates a history that challenges the view that hip-hop was the first black cultural movement to "speak truth to power."

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