Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women - Hardcover

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French at Vanderbilt University, where she also directs the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies and serves as Director of the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies. Author of four books, she was described by cultural critic and scholar Michael Eric Dyson as a rising “superstar” among black intellectuals and “one of the country’s most brilliant and prolific racial theorists” in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2002. She has also co-edited three volumes, including The Black Feminist Reader.

“Sharpley-Whiting’s book does not suffer from the sort of cowardice one too often hears from black academics who genuflect to hip hop in order to stay current with the tastes of the students who provide them with whatever power they have on college campuses. Sharpley-Whiting calls them as she sees them and wisely quotes the offensive material when necessary. Her book is high level in its research and its thought, and those looking for adult ideas about the subject should look it up.”
-Stanley Crouch,New York Daily News

"Sharpley-Whiting’s uncommon perspective is one that deserves to be examined more often."

“Sharpley-Whiting gets at the heart of the paradox . . . and puts the discussion on the turntable.”
-Washington Post

“Offers damning evidence about hip hop’s underlying racial and social prejudices, examining the politics of gender and providing a feminist’s perspective and insights into black music’s underlying message.”
-The Midwest Book Review

“Offers an insightful look into the strip clubs, groupie culture, and other aspects of hip hop that have given a voice to the disenfranchised while raising troubling questions about what those voices are saying and doing.”
-Vanderbilt Magazine

“Sharpley-Whiting unmasks thought provoking socio-political commentaries concerning sexual obsession in rap music and its effects on the black female sense of self.”
-Allhiphop.com