Journalists Natalie Hopkinson and Natalie Moore explore various expressions of black male masculinity in the hip-hop generation through the figure of “Tyrone” from Erykah Badu’s 1997 hit song. For the authors, “Tyrone” represents Black men as they are seen in the media, through stereotypes, as well as from the perspective of Black women. In eleven chapters of the book by this name, Moore and Hopkinson discuss subjects like Etan Thomas, an NBA basketball player and political a poet, Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick known as the “Hip-Hop Mayor,” the complicated relationship between women and hip-hop culture, and gay Black men on the so-called “down low.”

Recorded Saturday, February 24, 2007 at Chicago Public Library-Englewood Branch.