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  • Introduction:“Reading” Hip-Hop Discourse in the Twenty-First Century
  • Candice M. Jenkins (bio)

In the opening pages of Jay Z’s 2010 autobiography, Decoded, the rapper (a.k.a. Shawn Carter) describes his first encounter with hip hop as a nine-year-old who happens upon a cipher and finds himself “dazzled” by the neighborhood kid at the center of the circle, “throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance” (4). One is struck, reading the passage, by how fundamental a role language plays in this moment; while Slate, the figure Carter describes for us, “never los[es] the beat” created by the kids around him clapping, what seems to astound is what he is saying and how skillfully he says it, the words he strings together while in perpetual motion, “not dancing, just rotating in the center of the circle, looking for his next target” (5). Thirty minutes of spontaneous rhyming—think of the average four-minute length of a popular song, and the stunning accomplishment of this becomes clearer—rhyme after rhyme “about nothing,” about “the kids who were standing around listening to him,” or “how clean he was, how nice he was with the ball, how all our girls loved him,” eventually turning to “rhyming about the rhymes themselves” (4-5). “It was like watching some kind of combat,” Carter writes, “but he was alone in the center. All he had were his eyes, taking in everything, and the words inside him” (5).

This anecdote, and particularly this final line, with its nostalgic distillation of hip-hop culture down to a solitary rapper’s powerful, personal, almost mystical (“like he was in a trance”) powers of perception and facility with language, captures some of what sparked the initial idea for this special issue of African American Review on “Hip Hop and the Literary.” Carter centers rap’s literariness, its reliance upon and respect for language, a rhetorical move that privileges the rapper as a kind of author and the rap lyric as the ur-text of hip-hop culture writ large. This move seems to compel literary-critical analysis. Indeed, it calls for a rigorous attention to rap’s language and to the genre itself as a particular kind of verbal artifact, one driven as much by aestheticized oral communication as by musical expression. As I wrote in the call for papers, “if we acknowledge hip hop as always already a verbally constructed space, both a spoken performance and an (un)written representation of the lyricist’s vision, then the application of literary analysis to hip hop and its fictions seems both appropriate and necessary.” However, with several notable exceptions, surprisingly little of the rich and vibrant field of academic work known as “hip-hop studies” has come to us from the realm of literary scholarship. Instead, much of what has already been produced on hip hop has labored to situate the music in its sociological milieu and historical moment; to understand hip hop, broadly, as a political movement, or to consider the music primarily in terms of how it succeeds or fails at particular political aims, including those related to gender politics; to describe, catalogue, and (sometimes) justify its subject matter, rather than interpret and illuminate its form or the deeper valences of its content.

In part, perhaps, this dearth of literary and aesthetic analyses of rap music—hardly a complete silence, as I will explore further in the next section—has to do with the way that some scholars, including some of us who grew up on and with hip hop, have ceased, really, to listen to its meanings, to understand it as interpretable. In the thirty-plus years since its inception, hip hop has shifted from, in Greg Dimitriadis’s words, “live performance to mediated narrative,” and become far more openly [End Page 1] intertwined with pop music. Q-Tip’s suggestion that rap should not be understood as pop, on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Check the Rhime” (1991)—already in its moment a conscious finger in the dike of hip hop’s rapid “progress” toward globally consumable product and spectacle—seems almost nonsensical in today’s hypercapitalist context...

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