When this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were announced (the actual ceremony is on March 12), I had the sneaking suspicion that Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five would be the first practitioners of hip-hop to make the cut. A quick check of the inductees since the hall’s inception indicates as much, and while I’m not stunned, I’m also somewhat perplexed.

Sure, it’s the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but this is America, the melting pot, a metaphor that can be applied to our native music. Everything, in theory, mixes, and the results are often exciting and, as in the case of hip-hop, world-shaking. Before it even turned 25, hip-hop music and culture boasted a global audience, from Brazil to Japan. And already seven years into the 21st century, hip-hop still has a hold on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart.

Strangely, as popular as hip-hop is, it still doesn’t generate that many hit trade nonfiction books (the magic formula seems to be put “Tupac” or “Notorious B.I.G.” in your title). For the most part, I still see the stuff of African American studies syllabi, a la T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (April, NYU Press). Commercial houses, meanwhile, will try their luck this spring with the anthology Beats, Rhymes, and Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip-Hop (May, Harlem Moon) and Roni Sarig’s Third Coast: Outkast, Timbaland, and How Hip Hop Became a Southern Thing (May, Da Capo).

Then, again, I shouldn’t forget street lit. We tackled the genre in a collection development article last summer (“Streetwise Urban Fiction”), and it’s no stretch to say it’s probably the most powerful propagator of the “thug rapper” lifestyle outside of MTV. This platinum-selling pulp will be the subject of our best sellers list in July, and our own Barbara Hoffert moderated a panel on street lit at lasts year’s Day of Dialogue in Washington, DC. For a recap complete with authors and titles mentioned, click here.

After reading about “Blacks & Books,” a new monthly insert to appear in the Baltimore Times, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Philadelphia Tribune, which will feature reviews of books by Black authors and of interest to Black readers, I felt compelled to highlight our recent features.  As Sarah Nelson of Publishers Weekly says of their coverage, it is mostly features and special sections.  One of our fiction editors, Wilda Williams, often expresses frustration at the scarcity of street-lit reviewers she has.  (So, if you’re interested, see how to apply at http://www.libraryjournal.com/document/22042.html!)

Take a look at the Collection Development article, “Streetwise Urban Fiction,” that ran in the July issue–an article that was in the issue I took home after my interview, and one that made me really excited to join the LJ staff.  Also see editor Ann Burns’s Black History Month preview, “African American Visions,” in the Nov. 1 issue.

I remember being surprised to see Tavis Smiley’s The Covenant with Black America on best sellers lists, because I knew of the editor from his show on NPR and elsewhere but hadn’t heard he had a book coming out until it hit the list.  (Wikipedia says, “it’s the first non-fiction book by a Black-owned publisher to be listed as the number-one non-fiction paperback in America by the New York Times Best-Seller List.”)  The New York Times also recently exclaimed about Obama’s “surprise best seller.”  Perhaps more reviews will keep us from being so surprised when books by Black authors or of interest to Black audiences sell well.