Capital Rules Everything around Me

Last fall, Yale University Press published The Anthology of Rap, a 920-page volume documenting the lyrical evolution of rap recordings from 1978 to the present. The ambitious project was helmed by Adam Bradley—author of the heralded Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop—and Andrew DuBois, with assistance from an impressive advisory board of other scholars, as well as journalists, artists, and critics, and a team of student researchers. Boasting a foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and afterwords by the hip-hop artists Chuck D and Common, the Anthology was yet another reminder of the surge of academic interest in this once-outlaw art form. Over the past fifteen years, hip-hop has become a dynamic growth industry within the academy. There are hip-hop conferences, research centers, and archives at major universities, as well as books, journals, and courses hailing from various disciplinary orientations that consider hip-hop’s contributions to music, literature, fashion, art, and business. A generation whose minds were rewired by the aesthetics and philosophies of hip-hop has come of age and are today leading scholars. There is even a degree-granting program in hip-hop studies.¹ In this context, the Anthology represented an important step toward cataloging some of the primary texts associated with hip-hop’s crystallization as a cultural movement. As Chuck D observed in the afterword: “Every great literature deserves a great anthology. Rap finally has its own” (789).

As with any attempt to build a canon, the Anthology’s editorial choices were scrutinized. The offenses were mostly minor: Was this body of songs, clustered around well-known record labels and successful artists, representative of hip-hop’s various artistic turns and (often compelling) paths not chosen? To what extent does reading rap lyrics as poetry dull the force and import of rap music? Why does it need to be poetry at all—why can’t it just be rap? Did the Anthology’s periodization counter its claims of disinterested preservation? Had the editors privileged a certain technical proficiency, traditionally associated with the East Coast, over other regional styles? And where was Tim Dog’s oeuvre? But one material concern did persist: Why would anyone feel compelled to buy such a book when most rap lyrics are available for free online?

Chuck D offered an insightful answer to this question: “Anyone can put together a bunch of lyrics, but an anthology does something more: it provides the tools to make meaning of those lyrics in relation to one another, to think about rap both in terms of particular rhymes, but also in terms of an art form, a people, and a movement” (789). Hip-hop, following Chuck’s logic, needed its history preserved. The editors elaborated on this by situating rap “within the context of African American oral culture and the Western poetic heritage.” This book aimed to improve on the various online lyrics sites and advance a broader argument about hip-hop’s place among the American arts. As a coherent, statement-making, single-volume project, the Anthology set out to establish “a wide and inclusive cultural history of rap on the grounds of its fundamental literary and artistic nature” (xxix).

These lofty aims were overshadowed once a series of articles were published on the online magazine Slate tenaciously—some might say obsessively—cataloging the Anthology’s many transcription errors.² Online sleuths began matching some of the book’s more conspicuous mistakes against those found on major lyrics Web sites, alleging various instances of cut-and-paste theft. Student assistants who had been tasked with producing the volume’s lyrics stepped forward to assume blame, and...