Rap dad

About this book

"Part memoir and part cultural critique, Rap Dad is a timely reflection on fatherhood in America, explored through the lens of race and hip-hop culture. Just as his music career was taking off, Juan Vidal received life-changing news: he'd soon be a father. Throughout his life, neglectful men were the rule--his own dad struggled with drug addiction and infidelity--a cycle that, inevitably, wrought Vidal with insecurity. At age twenty-six, with but a bare grip on life, what lessons could he possibly offer a kid? Determined to alter the course for his child, Vidal did what he'd always done when confronted with life's challenges. He turned to the counterculture. In Rap Dad, the musician-turned-journalist takes a thoughtful and incredibly inventive approach to exploring identity and examining how we view fatherhood in a modern context. To root out the source of his fears around parenting, Vidal revisits the flash points of his juvenescence, a feat that transports him, a first-generation American born to Colombian parents, back to the drug-fueled streets of 1980s-90s Miami. It's during those pivotal years that he's drawn to skateboarding, graffiti, and the music of rebellion: hip-hop. As he looks to the past for answers, he infuses his personal story with rap lyrics and interviews with some of pop culture's most compelling voices--of which plenty have proven to be some of society's best, albeit non-traditional, dads. Along the way, Vidal confronts the unfair stereotypes that taint urban men--especially Black and Latino men--in today's society. An illuminating journey of discovery, Rap Dad is a striking portrait of modern fatherhood that is as much political as it is entertaining, personal as it is representative, and challenging as it is revealing"--