If there’s any hope of tearing highfalutin rap music exclusionaries away from their clouded spheres of organic espresso steam and yoga sweat, it’s probably in the form of The Anthology of Rap, a new 920-page tome edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois.
Like many other comprehensive and well-written music books, the anthology exposes the lyrical life, the humanness, and mainstream assumptions and stereotypes of its genre. Broken down into chronological sections – The Old School (1978-84), The Golden Age (1985-92), Rap Goes Mainstream (1993-99), and New Millennium Rap (2000-10) – the book highlights artists and lyrics of key songs that the editors feel most accurately represent the history of American hip hop. While it is unapologetically lyric-heavy, laying out the entire lyrical content of around 100 different songs through the ages (all of which can be found online for free), the narrative parts of each section complement and round out the book nicely.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2010.