Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop by Adam Bradley

From the Publisher

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.

The New York Times - Baz Dreisinger

…essentially English 101 meets Hip-Hop Studies 101…Bradley, who teaches literature at Claremont McKenna College in California, distinguishes himself from the growing glut of hip-hop scholars by writing a book about rap, as opposed to hip-hop: not a study of the culture or a history of the movement, but a formalist critique of lyrics—almost an anachronistic effort in the era of cultural studies.

Joshua Finnell - Library Journal

With hip-hop's tremendous growth over the last decade, the amount of literature covering the genre has increased considerably. Yet, few books have been devoted exclusively to the poetic elements of hip-hop. Having studied under such luminaries as Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Bradley (literature, Claremont McKenna Coll.) is emerging as a pioneering scholar in the study of hip-hop. Here, he shows that rap can be analyzed as literary verse while recognizing its essential identity as music. Dissecting hip-hop's dual rhythmic voice-rhymes over beats-Bradley uncovers rap's poetic tradition as well as its progressive contributions to the medium of poetry. He explains terms such as assonance and consonance through the lyrics of Keats and Eminem. Rap is a relatively new genre of music, but lyrical analysis reveals the use of intricate structures steeped in poetic tradition. This refreshing read challenges common assumptions that hip-hop is simple or mundane. Recommended for all public and academic libraries; this will particularly appeal to hip-hop artists and aficionados, poets, and literature students and scholars of the hip-hop generation or younger.

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• Table of Contents

Table of Contents