Looks like our Universitatis Yalensis just earned some serious street cred.
On November 9th, Yale University Press drops The Anthology of Rap, edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois, with a Forward by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Afterwords by Chuck D and Common. I’m not sure if you know this, but Yale University Press is known primarily in tea and biscuit circles for publishing exhibition catalogues and erudite titles that nobody without a Ph.D. can read. So a book on hip hop is really new and exciting!
The massive tome, which clocks in at just under 1,000 pages, presents rap as poetry, and as a major literary and cultural force. You’ll find lyrics to nearly every rap song you can think of, from the earliest form of the genre to favorites like Queen Latifah, Kanye West, Busta Rhymes, M.I.A. and Ice-T. So just in case you never really knew the words to “The Mack Daddy on the Left,” now you can be confident and sing along with the whole family!
Seriously, though. This book is so legit, edited by an English professor/Hip Hop studies scholar who studied the genre at Harvard. Plus, The Anthology of Rap comes 16 years after the publication of Tricia Rose’s highly influential Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, which basically started hip hop studies, and after countless scholarly conferences, books and research archives devoted to hip hop.
Wonder if that “Pants on the Ground” dude from American Idol made the cut?