When Disaster Strikes: On the Apocalyptic Tone of 1990s Hip Hop - by James Edward Ford III
"Reginald Dwayne Betts...offers a first-person account of the punitive turn of the 1980s and 1990s, in which criminal penalties established by the Reagan Administration, alongside his economic and other political policies, attempted to punish away the nation´s most pressing problems...I argue that an alternative temporality characterizes apocalypticism in 1990s hip-hop. In contrast to mainstream discourses that can be staved off by listening to the warning of prophets, 1990s hip-hop testifies to an apocalypse that is already here and still arriving."