Think De La Soul is that great new tapas place you’ve been hearing about? “The Anthology of Rap’’ will catch you up on hip-hop standards of the last 32 years, from Afrika Bambaataa to Young Jeezy. Organized into four distinctive eras (“The Old School: 1978-1984’’; “The Golden Age: 1985-1992’’; “Rap Goes Mainstream: 1993-1999’’; and “New Millennium Rap: 2000-2010’’), the anthology educates readers about a rich and lyrical canon.
Take the late Big L’s lesson in slang from his most well-known song, “Ebonics (Criminal Slang)’’: “Max means to relax / guns and pistols is gats / condoms is hats / critters is cracks / the food you eat is your grub, a victim’s a mark / a sweatbox is a small club / your tick is your heart.” Like Big L, these rappers exhibit an intuitive mastery of poetics. They boast, battle, and spin yarns with impressive command of the English language.
Whether writing through the lens of Black Nationalism or gang life, these young lyricists challenge dominant cultural narratives with unapologetic gravitas. Check out Jay-Z in “99 Problems’’: “Rap critics that say he’s Money, Cash, Hoes / I’m from the ’hood, stupid, what kind of facts are those? / If you grew up with holes / in your zapatos / You’d celebrate the minute you was havin’ dough.’’ Crack house to White House, urban to suburban, bedroom to boardroom, this is not the ephemeral verse wafting from your local master’s writing program. True, there’s no shortage of N words and more brand names than an Orange County shopping mall, but what should be more troubling than the language is the reality it reflects.
In the foreword, Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls rap “linguistically intricate and astonishingly profane,’’ but he situates it in the historical and cultural context of “black language games’’ of generations past. From Gates’s perspective, rap is the spirited “signifying’’ of barber shops and pool halls put to a beat.
