Signifying Rappers

by David Foster Wallace
Signifying Rappers
Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2013-07-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0316401110
GET BOOK

David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop." The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom. Signifying Rappers issued a fan's challenge to the giants of rock writing, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, and Lester Bangs: Could the new street beats of 1989 set us free, as rock had always promised? Back in print at last, Signifying Rappers is a rare record of a city and a summer by two great thinkers, writers, and friends. With a new foreword by Mark Costello on his experience writing with David Foster Wallace, this rerelease cannot be missed.

Signifying Nothing

by Clifford Thompson
Signifying Nothing
Author: Clifford Thompson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781440132698
GET BOOK

The novel is set in Washington, D.C., in 1979 and focuses on the Hobbs family. Lester Hobbs, nineteen years old, is mentally retarded and mute ― until the day he suddenly begins to rap at the top of his lungs about life with his parents and older siblings. That development has a profound effect on the rest of the family, whose members struggle to figure out what it means, for Lester and themselves. Lester's wise-cracking brother, Greg, the middle child, who has long alternated between being protective of Lester and being jealous of the attention Lester receives, tries with a spectacular lack of success to profit from his brother's new ability. Lester and Greg's sister, Sherrie ― bright, pretty, responsible, and aloof ― tries to learn the medical explanation for Lester's condition, which leads her to an affair with George Greer, a brilliant, married, womanizing neurologist. Meanwhile, Lester's mother, Maddie, tries to adjust emotionally to the change in her son, and Pat, the father, works to figure out the right course of action once the cause of Lester's rapping is revealed.

Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley
Book of Rhymes
Author: Adam Bradley
Publisher: Civitas Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2017-06-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0465094414
GET BOOK

If asked to list the greatest innovators of modern American poetry, few of us would think to include Jay-Z or Eminem in their number. And yet hip hop is the source of some of the most exciting developments in verse today. The media uproar in response to its controversial lyrical content has obscured hip hop's revolution of poetic craft and experience: Only in rap music can the beat of a song render poetic meter audible, allowing an MC's wordplay to move a club-full of eager listeners. Examining rap history's most memorable lyricists and their inimitable techniques, literary scholar Adam Bradley argues that we must understand rap as poetry or miss the vanguard of poetry today. Book of Rhymes explores America's least understood poets, unpacking their surprisingly complex craft, and according rap poetry the respect it deserves.

Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists

by Sacha Jenkins
Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists
Author: Sacha Jenkins
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2014-03-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1466866977
GET BOOK

Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists is more popular than racism! Hip hop is huge, and it's time someone wrote it all down. And got it all right. With over 25 aggregate years of interviews, and virtually every hip hop single, remix and album ever recorded at their disposal, the highly respected Ego Trip staff are the ones to do it. The Book of Rap Lists runs the gamut of hip hop information. This is an exhaustive, indispensable and completely irreverent bible of true hip hip knowledge.

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

by Houston A. Baker
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
Author: Houston A. Baker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022615629X
GET BOOK

"Mr. Baker perceives the harlem Renaissance as a crucial moment in a movement, predating the 1920's, when Afro-Americans embraced the task of self-determination and in so doing gave forth a distinctive form of expression that still echoes in a broad spectrum of 20th-century Afro-American arts. . . . Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance may well become Afro-America's 'studying manual.'"—Tonya Bolden, New York Times Book Review

Notorious C.O.P.

by Derrick Parker
Notorious C.O.P.
Author: Derrick Parker
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2007-04-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1429907789
GET BOOK

Throughout his career, Derrick Parker worked on some of the biggest criminal cases in rap history, from the shooting at Club New York, where Derrick personally escorted Jennifer Lopez to police headquarters, to the first shooting of Tupac Shakur. Always straddling the fence between "po-po" and NYPD outsider, Derrick threatened police tradition to try to get the cases solved. He was the first detective to interview an informant offering a detailed account of Biggie Smalls's murder. He protected one of the only surviving eyewitnesses to the Jam Master Jay murder and knows the identity of the killers as well as the motivation behind the shooting. Notorious C.O.P. reveals hip-hop crimes that never made the paper—like the robbing of Foxy Brown and the first Hot 97 shooting—and answers some lingering questions about murders that have remained unsolved. The book that both the NYPD and the hip-hop community don't want you to read, Notorious C.O.P. is the first insider look at the real links between crime and hip-hop and the inefficiencies that have left some of the most widely publicized murders in entertainment history unsolved.

The Signifying Monkey

by Henry Louis Gates (Jr.)
The Signifying Monkey
Author: Henry Louis Gates (Jr.)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0195136470
GET BOOK

A groundbaking work of enduring influence. The Signifying Monkey illuminates the relationship between the African and African American vernacular traditions and literature. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. This superb twenty-fifth-anniversary edition features a new preface and introduction by Gates that reflect on the book's genesis and its continuing relevance for today's culture, as well as a new afterword written by the noted critic W.J.T. Mitchell. --Book Jacket.

Bling Bling

by Minya Oh
Bling Bling
Author: Minya Oh
Publisher: Wenner
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2005-08-10
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN:
GET BOOK

When it comes to the world of hip-hop, nothing shines brighter than glorious bling. A fascinating look in words and pictures at the stars of hip-hop and their fabulous jewelry. elcome to the rarified world of hip-hop royalty, where mega-stars from Jay-Z to J. Lo flash brilliant rocks to signify status and express personal style. In Bling Bling, writer and radio show host Minya Oh takes readers deep inside this star-studded world, exploring the wild appetite for flashy adornment that typifies the contemporary rap scene. See how the other half sparkles in this fascinating photo-filled book devoted to the history and culture of rappers and their jewelry from the last 25 years. Run DMC, Slick Rick, Ludacris, and Puff Daddy are just some of the rap legends who show and tell, as the author travels from East Coast to West to discover the world's most fabulous accoutrements and the stories behind them.