This is the first book to explain how rap is put together musically.

At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry prov

Rap and hip hop, the music and culture rooted in African American urban life, bloomed in the late 1970s on the streets and in the playgrounds of New York City.

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 sou

This Companion covers the hip-hop elements, methods of studying hip-hop, and case studies from Nerdcore to Turkish-German and Japanese hip-hop.