Perhaps it should serve as a red flag that the back cover of When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost, critic Joan Morgan's book of essays about her life as a "hip-hop feminist," is filled with quotes from such eminent literary figures as MTV personality Ananda Lewis and social theorist Sean "Puffy" Combs. The idea of a coherent, well-articulated manifesto for hip-hop feminism is intriguing and exciting, but Morgan's book has little new to say about feminism and next to nothing to say about hip hop. Clearly influenced more by the you-go-girl sassiness of Oprah Winfrey than the in-your-face political dissent of Public Enemy, Chickenheads is a frustratingly self-referencing, self-indulgent mixture of affirmative platitudes and vague generalizations, all of which say a great deal about Morgan and her opinion of herself and next to nothing about hip-hop culture and its relationship with the often fierce misogyny of rap music. While she acknowledges that gender is a far more ambiguous issue than old-school feminists will acknowledge, some of her other statements—that mainstream feminism is unnecessarily butch and unladylike, and that the Million Man March wasn't a macho, sexist affair, but an affirmation of the "male sphere"—call into question whether Morgan is a feminist at all, hip-hop or otherwise. Much of her self-indulgence would be forgivable if she had trenchant, important things to say about rap music and its tricky gender politics, but Morgan's analysis of hip hop's difficult evolution runs the gamut from threadbare to abstract to meaningless. There's probably a great book to be written about hip hop from a feminist perspective, but Chickenheads sure isn't it.