Lester Spence, assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, joins Dan for a look at the intersection of politics and the hip-hop culture. Spence is the author of Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics.

Listen to the interview here.

"Lester K. Spence brings an essential degree of clarity and precision to our understandings of popular culture and political expression. This book is engaging and nuanced, and it will enrich in an original fashion our understanding of hip-hop as well as black politics." —Richard Iton, author of In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era

"Stare in the Darkness offers brilliant insight into the political realities of contemporary black life. More importantly though, Stare in the Darkness is remixed, chopped and screwed in ways that hip-hop heads will certainly love and more than a few social scientists will find great value in."—Mark Anthony Neal, coeditor of That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader