Signifying Rappers
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture.
Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop."
The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom. Signifying Rappers issued a fan's challenge to the giants of rock writing, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, and Lester Bangs: Could the new street beats of 1989 set us free, as rock had always promised?
Back in print at last, Signifying Rappers is a rare record of a city and a summer by two great thinkers, writers, and friends. With a new foreword by Mark Costello on his experience writing with David Foster Wallace, this rerelease cannot be missed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Based primarily on the authors' experiences hanging out with the owners of a small rap music production company, the first part of this long essay on understanding rap describes the setting in which this subversive music has arisen--the urban ghetto, in this case, the North Dorchester section of Boston. We get a vivid picture of rap's real-life context in an area of poverty, drugs and various types of radical activity, an environment closed to upscale whites by the barriers of fear and oppression. The music similarly remains for whites, assert the authors, ``like little more than looking at something venomous in a tightly closed jar.'' Much of the book is devoted to a critical explication and validation of rap, including literary and historical analysis, placing it, for instance, in the context of African oral tradition. But away from the stark truths of reportage, the authors--Costello is an assistant district attorney in Manhattan; Wallace wrote the novel The Broom of the System --often get mired in theoretical hyperbole and digression. They claim to be the first whites to appreciate its political radicalness and artistic value, calling rap ``quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today.''
