The Anthology of Rap

Item

Title: The Anthology of Rap
This edition: "The Anthology of Rap" . Ed. Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois. Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Afterwords by Common and by Chuck D. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010. 868 pp.
About the anthology: ● "The Village Voice, The New England Book Festival, the San Francisco Book Festival, and the Book of the Year Awards all honored The Anthology of Rap as one of the best books of 2010" ("Wikipedia," sv "The Anthology of Rap").
Publisher's description: Blurbs about the book:
● Nikki Giovanni: "From the Sing Song cadence of the slave preachers to the emotional bravery of Tupac Shakur to the clarity of Queen Latifah…for all the hearts and heads and voices who have still to be heard: We Now Have an Encyclopedia. Good for us. Much needed. Much needed."
● Cornel West: "'The Anthology of Rap' is an instant classic. It brings together the lyric poetry of some of the greatest artists of our time. Hip Hop is here to stay and rap lives forever—on the stage and now on the page!"
● Sonia Sanchez: "These Rappers' lyrics love. Cut. Curse. Fight. Teach. Play. Pray. Testify. They bring us the pace of sound. The swiftness of sound. The discordant way of looking at the world of sound. The Blackness of sound. The new bebopic beat of sound. These are word sorcerers who love language and hablar sin bastón (speak without a crutch)."
● Touré: "This monumental encyclopedia of rhymes is great for hip-hop newbies or longtime fans, lyric lovers and poetry devotees. It's an invaluable reference on hip-hop history spanning from Afrika Bambaataa to Kanye West."
● Billy Collins: "Some readers of poetry still wonder where the rhymes went. One answer is they left the ends of the lines and went inside the poem. But rhyme also strongly re-emerges in rap. Whatever the stakes or the messages contained in this monumental volume, the like-sounds that used to be the engine of English poetry drive and power these energetic lyrics."
Reviews and notices of anthology: • Young, Kevin. "Unwrapping the Message." "Bookforum" (Sept/Oct/Nov 2010); BookForum; • Anderson, Sam. "Straight Outta Comp 101." "New York Magazine" 28 Oct. 2010.; New York Magazine; • Barr, Zachary. "The Anthology of Rap." "Colorado Public Radio" 2 Nov. 2010. (Interview with co-editor Adam Bradley.) 20 min. 50 sec.; CPR (Colorado Public Radio); • Labash, Matt. "Hip-Hop Goes to Harvard." "The Wall Street Journal" 5 Nov. 2010.
"Puffing the merits of 2 Live Crew's provocative 1989 single "Me So Horny" as being a parody, which is "one of the most venerated forms of art," and asserting that sampling "is just another word for intertextuality," Mr. Gates [in his foreword] calls "The Anthology of Rap" "an essential contribution to our living literary tradition." This hardly comes as a surprise. Now that the academy venerates all manner of pop-culture study— everything from "Muppet Magic: Jim Henson's Art" (U.C. Santa Cruz) to "Learning From YouTube" (Pitzer College)—the question isn't, "Why an Ivy-League certified anthology of rap lyrics?" But rather, "What took them so long?""; The Wall Street Journal; ● Kelley, Frannie. "Listening to Rap for the First Time, with a Book Critic." "The Record" (NPR Music) 4 Nov. 2010. [Interview with Sam Anderson, in the wake of his review of "The Anthology of Rap"]
"I'm really glad I read this anthology but the moment I started listening to the songs you sent, I realized it is basically insane to make any kind of judgment about rap without hearing it — or at least post-1992 rap."; NPR (The Record); ● Raz, Guy. "'The Anthology of Rap': Lyrics as Poetry." "All Things Considered" NPR 6 Nov. 2010. (Interview with co-editor Adam Bradley.)
"RAZ: There are some rappers that are in the anthology, and some who are notably absent, like Vanilla Ice who had the first number one rap song with "Ice, Ice Baby"; M.C. Hammer, "U Can't Touch This," that's not in here. A lot of gangsta rap is not in here, particularly some of the more sort of profane gangsta rap. Did you leave that out intentionally? Did you - I mean, because it seems like the rappers that are in this book are really the best lyricists.
Mr. BRADLEY: This is a complex but important question, Guy. I mean, one of the things that I'll say is that if you want profanity, there's plenty within the anthology. One of the things we didn't want to do was to sugarcoat hip hop.
Now, when it comes to artists like Vanilla Ice and M.C. Hammer, I would add Young MC, Sir Mix-A-Lot, all these artists who were...
RAZ: Bestsellers, right.
Mr. BRADLEY: Yeah, really huge artists in the early to mid-'90s, I think what we ultimately decided is that something like "U Can't Touch This," M.C. Hammer's great hit, is best served by listening to it in full. [ . . . ] What our purposes was in this volume, however, was to focus as much as possible on the lyrical art.
RAZ: What do you want people to get out of this book because, I mean, you know, it's sort of an academic look at hip hop. And, you know, as you know, that can easily be ridiculed. I mean, even our conversation, right, you know, talking about hip hop lyrics on NPR, I mean, I promise you there's no way to have this conversation without someone poking a little fun.
But, I mean, what do you - so what are you sort of hoping people come away with from this book?
Mr. BRADLEY: Hip hop culture has always been about the battle. So I think the idea of there being ridicule or pushback or whatever it may be to our conversation or to the fact that Yale University Press is publishing a book on hip hop is all part of hip hop culture, in a way.
What do I want people to take out of the book? I think I want people to take away a sense of rap in full. I think rap at its best is a keyhole into American culture over the last 30 plus years. It's a way in to think about all of the things that matter to us about this past four decades. And it's also something you can dance to. So how good is that?"; NPR (All Things Considered); ● Ireland, Corydon. "Hip-hop Harvard." "The Harvard Gazette" 23 Nov 2010.
"“This started as a dream for us,” said Bradley of the nearly 900-page anthology. “It brought us together as friends, as different as we might be.” (Bradley, who is black, grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. DuBois, who is white, grew up in northern Alabama.) The book is an autobiography of sorts for both of them, said Bradley, the result of studying “Beowulf” and other canonical literature by day, and listening to rap at night. It’s also a product of community, he said, of the artists whose credits and permissions cover nearly 40 pages, and of the friends and advisers who helped to shape the book’s original 500 offerings into 1,000 more — and then back down to a core of 300. “We stated thinking it would be the greatest mix tape of all, bound between two covers,” said Bradley, but in the end “you’re cutting things so vital to the tradition.” The answer is to think of the anthology as more inspiring than inclusive, a way for fans and scholars alike to awaken to the poetry of rap."; The Harvard Gazette; ● Murphy, Tim. "Anthology of Rap: The Unofficial Index." "Mother Jones" 29 Nov. 2010.; Mother Jones; ● "Alumnus publishes groundbreaking rap anthology." Lewis & Clark (press release) 1 Dec. 2010.; Lewis & Clark; • Light, Alan. "Music Chronicle." "New York Times" 3 Dec. 2010.
"With the mammoth “Anthology of Rap,” Bradley and DuBois — professors of English at the University of Colorado and the University of Toronto, respectively — build a solid case for the achievements of hip-hop lyrics as poetry. The collection traces hip-hop’s rhymes from the rudimentary cadences of the old school to the high-wire verbal gymnastics of the Notorious B.I.G., Eminem and beyond. The “Anthology” serves several functions: it’s a repository of significant lyrics (and some significant errors — but even those demonstrate just how complex this stuff can be); a history of the music by eras; and an encyclopedia of performers, with a brief, well-written biography for each. As with all printed song lyrics, it’s crucial to remember that these words were intended not to be read but to be heard (though as Bradley and DuBois point out, these particular rhymes “have little in the way of melody or harmony to compensate for a poor lyrical line”). Still, this landmark work chronicles an earth-shattering movement with deep roots."; New York Times; ● "Anthology Traces Rap's Lyrical Journey, Its Poetic Roots." "PBS Newshour" 10 Dec. 2010.; PBS News; ● Lucas, Dave. "'Broetry' and 'The Anthology of Rap' Square Up to Masculine Verse." "Cleveland.com" 14 Dec. 2011.
""The Anthology of Rap" is both necessary and insufficient. It sits uncomfortably on the shelf while the stereo plays, but it also stands as a new draft of verbal history. "What you hold in your hands is more than a book," Common writes, echoing Whitman, who said of his own "Leaves of Grass": "This is no book; / Who touches this, touches a man.""; Cleveland.com; • George, Lynell. "Los Angeles Times" 26 Dec. 2010.; Los Angeles Times; • Chiasson, Dan. "'Rude Ludicrous Lucrative' Rap." "New York Review of Books" 13 Jan. 2011.; New York Review of Books; • Pettite, Andrew. "The Anthology of Rap." "The Telegraph" 14 Jan. 2011.
"By trying to elevate rap to the status of poetry, The Anthology of Rap ed by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois highlights the form’s limitations."; The Telegraph (UK); ● Kirsch, Adam. "How Ya Like Me Now." "Poetry" (Feb. 2011).
Mentions the episode in Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty," in which the poet Claire Malcolm recruits the rapper Carl, seeking to "refine" his craft and thinking of him as "a John Clare for the twenty-first century"--an embrace that Carl resists. "Smith captures the comedy of cross purposes: to the poet, turning a rapper into a poet is a cultural promotion; to the rapper, it looks more like a forfeiture of authenticity. And it is hard to imagine why any rapper would want to make such an exchange. If Carl hits it big as an mc, he can look forward to becoming rich and famous, with an audience of millions of passionate fans. If he succeeds as a poet, he can look forward to—tenure."
"No wonder that, in the real world, poets have been more interested in what they can learn from rap than vice versa. Ironically, poets who are considered aesthetic conservatives have been most enthusiastic about hip-hop. The premise of “new formalism,” to use a term almost as old as the Sugarhill Gang, is that rhyme, meter, and narrative are the defining elements of poetry, and that their absence from most contemporary poetry explains the genre’s unpopularity and cultural irrelevance. The huge popularity of rap, which is committed to all those traditional techniques, seems to clinch the case. Dana Gioia, in his 2003 essay “Disappearing Ink,” called rap “the new oral poetry,” and hoped that it could spark a “renovation from the margins” of literary poetry. “While the revival of form and narrative among young literary poets could be dismissed by critical tastemakers as benighted antiquarianism and intellectual pretension,” Gioia writes, “its universal adoption as the prosody-of-choice by disenfranchised urban blacks. . .is] impossible to dismiss in such simplistic ideological terms.”"
"The Anthology of Rap" "is meant to encourage skeptical readers to give rap the kind of attention they are used to giving poetry. Bradley and DuBois are well aware that this means doing a kind of violence to rap, by severing lyrics from performance, the mc from the dj. Ordinarily, you don’t read Ice-T, you listen to him, and his voice and affect, as well as the producer’s contribution of hooks and beats, are crucial to the overall effect. In fact, the editors write, most of the lyrics they include in the anthology had never been written down. They had to be transcribed, entailing a whole series of choices about lineation, punctuation, and orthography." But the anthology is not meant to be a collection of song lyrics; rather, it is a literary selection. As the editors note, "This is not, after all, a collection of lyrics from rap’s greatest hits, but rather a collection of rap’s best poetry."
"Inevitably, when rap is defined as a form of written poetry, virtuosic rhyming becomes more important than other qualities—vocal timbre, dramatic performance, emotional intensity—which translate less well to the page. Nor does mere popularity earn a rapper a place in the book—if anything the opposite, as the rather sniffy notes about Run-DMC show (“not the most lyrically accomplished group in rap history”)."
"From the beginning, one of the central issues in rap is authenticity, which relates directly to authorship: to what extent is the character who speaks in the verse identical with the person who wrote it? 'The Anthology of Rap' shows how the premium on authenticity forces rappers into a strange double bind. On the one hand, hardly a single mc in the book goes by his or her real name: the florid, often cartoonish pseudonyms mark the difference between the writer and his larger-than-life persona. Yet neither can the rapper afford to put too much daylight between himself and his persona. As Bradley and DuBois note, and Chuck D confirms, there is a strong taboo in rap against performing someone else’s lyrics. Raps are structurally almost as predictable as Tin Pan Alley songs, but they can’t become “standards.”"
Re the "insistence on authenticity": "if rap’s power comes from its expression of feelings listeners share and want to hear formally expressed—then the problem of subject matter becomes acute, because many of the pieces in the Anthology are obscenely, violently misogynistic." Kirsch quotes some examples of this, then comments: "There are various demurrals to be made: that this is gangsta rap, the most hardcore subgenre, and not representative of all rap; that such misogyny is compensatory playacting, meant to appeal to adolescent boys who are rebelling against their mothers and afraid of women’s sexuality (as Queen Latifah points out: “a minute ago you was a nerd and nobody ever heard of ya/Now you a wannabe”); that Ice-T is playing a role, like a villain in a movie, with a fictional character’s license to be wild and extreme. . . . Yet it remains true that the misogyny, ranging from objectification to outright hatred, in 'The Anthology of Rap' is not incidental. It is pervasive, and perhaps constitutive; and despite what Gates hopes, it is probably a factor in rap’s appeal, not an obstacle to it. This raises all kinds of social and political questions, but it also raises literary ones, which can be formulated, once again, as questions of authorship. A poet, by writing under his own name, signals that he is writing with and about his whole self. When he writes about his evil inclinations, then, it is with as much self-awareness as he can muster, taking account both of the desire to do wrong and the consciousness that it is wrong. This dialectic is what makes the poems of John Berryman and Frederick Seidel so moving and finally so ethical, despite the sexual hostility that they express, reprove, and atone for.
"In rap, on the evidence of the 'Anthology,' this kind of literary (not social or political) responsibility is hard to achieve, and for the very same reason that rap is so linguistically vital: its rigid conventionality. The convention that a rapper is a larger-than-life figure, closer to a movie star or a comic book hero than a “man speaking to men,” urges the writer to ever more hyperbolic forms of self-assertion. And because the writer is identified so closely with his character, it is difficult to cultivate any irony about that self-assertion. . . . The gangsta culture in rap bears some similarities to the warrior culture we can see in the 'Iliad': both value physical courage, encourage bragging, indulge masculine self-pity, and make it easy to dehumanize women. But because the Iliad is a narrative, it can both glorify a figure like Achilles and criticize him, by placing him in contrast with other kinds of masculine virtue and authority. Reading 'The Anthology of Rap', however, is like hearing Achilles rant and brag nonstop. . . . Reading rap as poetry, the way the 'Anthology' invites us to do, makes this monotony especially stark, since reading is a more critical mode of engagement than listening. If rap is mainly a genre for and by adolescents, it is largely because its notion of artistic self-assertion is an adolescent one—a fight for status in a closed hierarchy. A little of this kind of spiritedness may be healthy for art—contemporary poetry could use a dose of it—but the 'Anthology of Rap' demonstrates that it’s not until this striving is sublimated and turned inward, becoming a struggle for truth and beauty, that an art grows up."; Poetry Foundation; ● David Barnes, "Times Literary Supplement" (8 April 2011): 27.
"In Zadie Smith's novel 'On Beauty,' the fictional New England university of Wellington has a 'Black Music Library' and the trendy poet Claire Malcolm takes her students to rap and spoken word nights to show them that 'poetry is a broad church.' The scenario is based on reality; Harvard, where Smith spent a year as a visiting fellow, now has a 'HipHop Archive,' where grandees such as Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr pay regular visits. Rap has entered the academy, but the academy still struggles to find the appropriate language to talk about it."
The volume "includes illuminating essays by Gates and the rapper Chuck D from the highly influential group Public Enemy, but there are many omissions; no Cypress Hill, no Gravediggaz, and next to no British artists represented. . . . 'The Anthology of Rap' is neither exhaustive nor definitive, but it is an important contribution to this highly contested lyrical culture" (27).; Times Literary Supplement; ● Staley, Willy. "Why We Shouldn't Treat Rap as Poetry." "The Awl" (20 April 2011).
Argues that this anthology's "premise — that rap lyrics, separated from their performative context, can be read as literature or poetry, or both — is faulty. Very faulty."
One aspect of this is the phenomenon of rap lyrics being written by someone other than the performer on a recording--an issue that the editors of "The Anthology of Rap" acknowledge themselves: "Ghostwriting, the practice of one artists supplying lyrics for another to perform, has been around since rap’s beginnings. However, given the audience’s expectation that rappers’ words should be their own, it has almost always been transacted behind the scenes. Rap lyrics are so closely associated with the identity of the artist that the idea of a distinction between writer and performer seems counterintuitive. Nonetheless, rap is in its essence, a collaborative art form, from the tapestry of its densely layered samples to its borrowed lyrical riffs and reverences. For the purposes of this anthology, we have elected to include all lyrics under the names of the their performers. We do this for both practical and aesthetic reasons. Practically, we recognize the impossibility of discerning with absolute certainty which artists wrote their own lyrics and which did not. Aesthetically, we believe that the act of performance constitutes a kind of composition; though the Beastie Boys, for instance, did not compose all the verses on “Paul Revere,” their distinctive voices and deliveries shape the song and remain in our memory, even when the lyrics are brought back on the page."
Staley comments: "But authorship is clearly more important than DuBois and Bradley like to pretend, and it has only gotten harder to pin down since the days of “Rapper’s Delight.” Even though rap is an art form that has benefited greatly from the practice of sampling and borrowing on the production side, its lyrical claims to authenticity make authorship an important, maybe even central issue to the genre, one that cannot be explained away in 200 words. . . . rappers write verses for one another. Sometimes this is done peaceably. You might see N. Jones listed in the liner notes to songs Nas didn’t appear on. Other times, business is not conducted in a straightforward fashion, leading to inevitable he-said-he-said situations. Philadelphia rapper Gillie the Kid seems to want to take credit for Lil Wayne’s whole catalog. Incarcerated rapper Max B claimed to have written Jim Jones’s “We Fly High,” and furthermore said that he thought it sucked. The rapper [Mad] Skillz has been known to air out those for whom he has offered his services. Rappers writing for other rappers can get messy, especially when ghostwritten lyrics typically go upstream, so to speak — less-famous rappers ghostwriting for their more famous, but less talented, or otherwise creatively exhausted, counterparts."
So, too: "Not only can stripping rap of its performative context make authorship a complex issue, it’s a bit reductive, and it makes it difficult to tell who is good at rap and who is bad at rap."
"Rap is entirely inseparable from its lyrical content, and its lyrics are inseparable from their insecure claims to authenticity, and inevitable descent into exaggeration and self-aggrandizing. The constant use of the first person and the notion that rap is “street reportage” makes ghostwriting a problem for RAP [rap-as-poetry], because the Yale Anthology cares more about the content and primary document aspects of rap than the editors care to admit. Isolating the lyrics from both the music, the performance, and the author makes them utterly uninteresting as art, and DuBois and Bradley know that. But it does provide a means for them to treat rap as poetry, and that’s what they want to do. . . . Treating rap as poetry explains away too much of the sloppy realities about how and why it happens. We should just go back to treating rap as rap. It’s far more enjoyable to embrace the mess."; The Awl
Commentary on anthology: An important critical discussion was initiated by Paul Devlin at Slate about the accuracy of the transcriptions of rap lyrics in this anthology. I've gathered some of the pieces involved in this discussion here (rather than under reviews of the anthology), to allow for a more coherent gathering of items:; ● Devlin, Paul. "Fact-Check the Rhyme." "Slate" 4 Nov. 2010.
"'The Anthology of Rap' is rife with transcription errors. Why is it so hard to get rap lyrics right?"
"As of this week, rap finally has an anthology, published by Yale University Press. The Anthology of Rap sets out to capture the evolution of rap lyrics through what its editors consider representative examples, collecting the work of a wide variety of MCs who recorded from 1979 through 2009, from Grandmaster Caz to Joell Ortiz. More so than most anthologies, the book is also an essay collection, featuring substantive general and chapter introductions by the editors and essays from Henry Louis Gates Jr., Chuck D, and Common. The eye-opening essay by Gates (who is the editor-in-chief of The Root, a Slate sister site) provides deep historical context for rap; it alone makes the book worth owning.
Edited by two young yet accomplished professors of English, Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois, and featuring an advisory board of prominent professors and journalists (though tellingly, no rappers), The Anthology of Rap is a good start, but it will inspire mixed emotions. Most anthologies feature the name of their publisher: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry. This book is simply The Anthology of Rap, not The Yale Anthology of Rap. The title seems to present a claim to definitiveness, and that is wrong for any anthology, but especially for one that makes no mention of innovators like DJ Quik, Redman, Keith Murray, Grand Puba, Sadat X, Rah Digga, or M.O.P., while finding room for also-rans Foxxy Brown, M.I.A., and Twista. The editors claim to be supersensitive to the role of women in hip-hop, but as the excluded Remy Ma might say, whateva.
Of course, anthologies will always provoke arguments over who was included and who was left out in the cold. An anthology of rap runs the risk of raising hackles over a different problem: transcription. Transcription of rap lyrics is excruciatingly difficult, due to speed of delivery, slang, purposeful mispronunciation, and the problem of the beat sometimes momentarily drowning out or obscuring the lyrics. (And unlike rock or pop albums, rap album booklets very rarely include lyrics.) This is why so many Web sites devoted to the endeavor have (and have always had) horrendous mistakes and one reason why DuBois and Bradley's book was badly needed. Alas, too often it makes mistakes of its own.
This is not a game of gotcha. But this book, with its university-press imprimatur, will be quoted from by future students and scholars, and while much of it is accurate, too much of it is not. The editors write in the introduction that "flawless transcriptions are nearly impossible to achieve; undoubtedly small errors remain in even the most scrupulous efforts, ours included. However, readers can rest assured that the lyrics included here have been meticulously vetted, sometimes by the artists themselves." The acknowledgements section lists the artists who "vetted" their lyrics, but strangely there seem to be errors even in some of these instances.
And not all of the mistakes are small. Some stem not just from mishearing but from an apparent lack of understanding of the cultural context. For example, when KRS-ONE is quoted on a 1995 track as saying, "I reside like artifacts/ On the wrong side of the tracks, electrified," artifacts should be Artifacts, as it is a reference to the group of the same name who authored the 1994 song "Wrong Side of the Tracks." (Unlike many anthologies, this volume has no footnotes. Footnotes would have been useful to explain echoes, cross-references, in-jokes, esoterica, and so on.)"
Devlin goes on to enumerate nine places where he's noted transcription errors.

"To give credit where it is due, The Anthology corrected some of my own mishearings, particularly in the case of Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)."I thought she was saying, "It's silly when girls sell their souls because of sin," even though she's just said "sin" a few lines prior to that. I believe the editors have it correct: "It's silly when girls sell their soul because it's in," as in "in fashion." I'm grateful for the lines they got right. I just hope the next anthology of rap will be more careful and will be right more often."; Slate; ● Smooth, Jay. "14 More Mistakes I Found in the Anthology of Rap." "Nil Doctrine" 8 Nov. 2010.
"The value and import of treating rap as poetry have always been hotly debated by fans, and I’m generally in the “hip-hop is already hip-hop, who cares if it’s poetry” camp. But I have to admit this book is lots of fun to read while listening along with the music, and I’m not sure “rife with errors” is a fair estimation. These transcriptions get a lot of tricky things right, and are a few steps above what is currently available online. THAT BEING SAID……yes, I think I see some other mistakes. Here are 14 of them"
"So what have we learned here? Well it seems pretty clear that A) I have no life, and B) Yale’s Anthology of Rap has a few more errors than it ought to. It would also greatly benefit from fleshing itself out with footnotes. But again, I do think it’d be an enjoyable read for any fan and I don’t mean to knock it wholesale."; Nil Doctrine (blog); ● Devlin, Paul. "It Was Written." "Slate" 10 Nov. 2010.
Devlin continues his discussion of transcription errors in "The Rap Anthology" and notes the correspondence of many of the errors noted by himself and by the blogger Jay Smooth (at the now defunct blog "Nil Doctrine") with transcriptions found on the crowd-sourced site the "Online Hip Hop Lyrics Archive" (OHHLA) (and occasionally also the site "Rap Genius"). Of 18 transcription errors noted by Devlin and Smooth, 15 also appear in OHHLA. "While not proof positive, these numbers strongly suggested that OHHLA was a source for the anthology transcriptions."
The editors evidently recruited undergraduate students to work on the transcriptions, who (according to Julian Padgett, one of these student assistants) "were encouraged to find online lyrics and correct their errors as we formatted the line breaks to coincide with the measures of the track's beat. Sometimes there wasn't any option but to start from scratch though. Jean Grae's lyrics, for example, usually didn't have any online lyrics to use as a starting point."
Devlin remarks that such reliance on online lyric sites as "a starting point" conflicts with the account offered by the volume editors about the transcription practice used to produce the anthology's rendering of lyrics. The editors' remarks about OHHLA in the anthology's introduction implies that they would not make any substantive use of it: "The most significant effort to record rap lyrics to date is not in a book but online, in the numerous user-generated lyric databases launched in recent years. The OHHLA is the most comprehensive. One can find nearly every rap song imaginable with a few keystrokes. However, these transcriptions are often so flawed that they are of limited use for anything more than a casual perusal."
In response to Devlin's query about their transcription practice, one of the editors, Adam Bradley, described it as follows:
"(1) Listen to each song multiple times, typing out an original transcription with the song itself as the primary "text."
(2) Pass that preliminary transcription on for checking by another set (or sets) of ears.
(3) Check that transcription against a range of other transcriptions, including online resources such as OHHLA and AZ Lyrics as well as print resources such as liner notes and lyrics published in books.
(4) Contact the rights holder and whenever possible the artist him- or herself to review our transcriptions. Nearly thirty artists did just that.
(5) Submit our transcriptions to the publisher for copy-editing.
(6) Subject every copy-edited song to another process of listening and correction.
(7) Review the page proofs by reading through each lyric again, revisiting problematic passages."
Devlin comments: "That's a painstaking, labor-intensive approach to transcription. Using the original song as the primary text—and not a potentially corrupted transcription—seems prudent. When you work from an existing transcription, it can be too easy for your ears to start hearing what your eyes are seeing on the page. Due to rap's heavy reliance on ever-changing, regionally inflected slang, it also seems smart to consult as many sources as possible, as the editors say they did.
The process Bradley describes is as thorough and careful as you'd expect of an academic volume. And its thoroughness also tracks with the editors' seriousness of purpose as expressed in their introduction to the anthology. They write that their book "treats rap as a body of lyrics that responds to transcription, explication, and analysis as poetry. The lyrics included offer a kind of laboratory of language for those interested in the principles of poetics." Later on, they add that they "have endeavored to include those indispensable lyrics that define the body of rap at the present time, lyrics whose formal virtuosity, thematic interest, or both merit preservation and sustained study." Given these mission statements—this book treats rap as poetry and endeavors to preserve exemplary lyrics for study—you'd expect great attention to have been paid to the transcription. Getting the lyrics right in a book like this isn't a bonus feature; it's the book's raison d'être.
What remains puzzling, however, is how so many errors made it into the anthology, and why so many of those errors repeat mistakes present in the OHHLA transcriptions."
"Did the editors rely more heavily on online transcriptions than Bradley's response suggests? Or did they simply manage to make the same mistakes as the OHHLA transcribers because the lyrics are easily misheard? Regardless of the answer, there are too many mistakes in 'The Anthology of Rap'—something in their process, whatever it was, wasn't working. As I noted in my original piece, the editors are to be applauded for their efforts to encourage and facilitate the serious study of rap lyrics. But rap deserves a more accurate volume.
To their credit, the editors do seem committed to improving the anthology in subsequent printings and editions. In a comment on my Slate article, Adam Bradley indicated that he knew the book contained errors, and that he hoped readers would find them and help the editors improve the anthology. He wrote:
"Yes, the book has transcription errors. I've found some. So has my co-editor. I hope our readers will, too. Our goal from the beginning has been to make each printing (it's about to enter its second) more accurate than the last. In fact, we have a comment section on our website designed largely for the purpose of people submitting corrections for future print runs . . ."
It's admirable that the editors admit their book is imperfect and have pledged to improve it. (Though if you visit the "contact" page Bradley links to, it doesn't in any way indicate that its purpose is to submit errors to the editors.) Let's help them make the next book bulletproof. . . . Perhaps with our help, the folks who fork out $35 for the second edition will get a better product—and scholars of rap will have a better resource to use in their studies."; Slate; ● Crouch, Ian. "Literary Smackdown: Rap Battle." "The New Yorker" 12 Nov. 2010.
"So, point to Devlin on this one, on a T.K.O. We’re taught to be gracious in victory, but Devlin can’t help but end with a little strut:
'Perhaps with our help, the folks who fork out $35 for the second edition will get a better product—and scholars of rap will have a better resource to use in their studies.'"; The New Yorker; ● Ganz, Jacob. "Why the Errors in 'The Anthology of Rap' Matter." "The Record" NPR 15 Nov. 2010.
"The errors Jay Smooth and Devlin and others have found suggest that maybe this document should have been polished a little more, but a question nagged at us: are The Anthology's shortcomings merely annoying — a chance for rap nerds to flex their deep knowledge — or do they point out something about the way we read rap, and how our collective knowledge might be eroding?
"I don't know if I would use the word 'erode,'" said Jay Smooth when we got in touch with him. "I don't think it means the world has forgotten the essence of these works. In that general sense these are quibbles for purists." . . . [But] a flawed set of lyrics "doesn't represent the full meaning and quality of an artist's work, and it denies readers a chance to understand the work in its full context, which would be a much richer experience, would give a much deeper understanding of the art and where it came from." . . . And [Smooth] thinks these errors in 'The Anthology of Rap' could have been avoided.
They suggest how "the succeeding generation will not have the same understanding as the artist's contemporaries," Smooth says. "But those contemporaries are in their thirties and forties. It's not like we're studying tapes that Lomax dude made in 1933 or something. So it should be possible to capture these nuances properly, and this sort of project ought to better accomplish that while we still can.""
In an email exchange with Paul Devlin, Adam Bradley insists that "The primary source was always the recorded song" and he notes that "'The Anthology of Rap' is 867 pages long. It contains close to 300 songs. It includes more than 25,000 lines of lyrics. We believe it's the most polished and most thoughtfully edited collection available."; NPR (The Record); ● Rothman, Josh. "Yale's 'Anthology of Rap': 'Rife with Transcription Errors.'" "Boston Globe" 16 Nov. 2010.
"It's not as though the editors were lazy. They took their lyrics through a complex vetting process, sometimes even contacting the artists for clarification. (Rap lyrics are rarely printed and included with CDs and records.) They did rely in part on undergraduates to make sense of lyrics written a decade or more before they were born - and they did, on many occasions, rely upon an online resource, the The Original Hip Hop Lyrics Archive, which is full of errors. What this shows, though, is that even very devoted fans can't always get the lyrics right.
The truth is that misheard lyrics go with pop music the same way embellishments go with a good story: they're a sign that a work of art has been good enough to travel outside of the world that created it. The errors in the Anthology show just how far rap music has travelled, and just how local it was in the first place. "Transcription" is far too simple a term for what goes into producing something like the Anthology of Rap - it's more like excavation. In the meantime, many of these errors will be fixed in the second edition [sic; second printing]."; Boston Globe; ● Devlin, Paul. "Stakes Is High." "Slate" 19 Nov. 2010.
"Members of the Anthology of Rap’s advisory board speak out about the book’s errors. Plus: Grandmaster Caz lists the mistakes in his lyrics."; Slate; ● Liberman, Mark. "Rap Scholarship, Rap Meter, and The Anthology of Mondegreens." "Language Log" 4 Dec. 2010.
Aside from the issue of accuracy in the transcription of the lyrics of the rap songs, Liberman also calls for some kind of notation of "the relationship of the lyrics to the metrical background": "it seems to me that anyone who care about rap or hiphop as poetry ought to be interested in its meter. The fact that European and American art poetry has largely been largely unmetered for the past century shouldn't prejudice the analysis of the genuinely sung lyrics of the same period, where the musical background and its relationship to the words is isomorphic to traditional notions of metrical structure in accentual-syllabic verse during the previous five centuries or so."; Language Log; ● Hamilton, Ben. "Things Done Changed: Hip Hop and Literature." "The Millions" 30 Nov. 2010.
Not focused on the issue of the accuracy of transcriptions--though it does mention the discussion prompted by Devlin. Focused, instead, on what the author views as the distorting effort to consider "rap lyrics as poetry."; The Millions; ● De Luca, Simona. "Canon/Canons: Mutations and Alternative Speeches: Rap Music." "Storia, identità e canoni letterari." Ed. Ioana Both, Ayse Saraçgil, and Angela Tarantino. Firenze UP, 2013. 67-76.
"Even if hip hop culture and its subgenres, such as rap music, have not emerged from the inner city, they have recently attracted the attention of the academic world by which
they have been studied and monitored. One of the many achievements has been the creation of an anthology, entitled 'The Anthology of Rap' (2010), by Adam Bradly and Andrew Dubois, two young scholars and researchers, both of them PhDs at Harvard. The book came out in 2009 and had the purpose of enquiring into the genesis and history of rap music and culture. It is divided into several sections whose goal is to describe comprehensively its development from the very first days, from the so-called ‘Old School’, to the Golden Age, until the present-day reality analyzed in the chapters entitled: Rap Goes Mainstream and New Millennium Rap. The two co-authors were invited to participate in radio programs, such as 'The Strand', broadcasted by the BBC, and describe their fruitful research programmes in lectures and conferences like
the one held at Harvard (Hip-Hop’s Global Reach), whose transcription can be found on the web page of the «Harvard Gazette» Fundamental help, source of information and premise to the book was the Hip Hop Archive, previously created by the same university, which came out in 2003 in collaboration with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research" (71).
See also: ● "Adam Bradley co-curates Grammy exhibit celebrating 50 years of hip hop." UCLA press release. 4 Oct. 2023.; UCLA
Item Number: A0420

Item sets: Anthologies

Media: Front cover; Front and back cover; title page and frontispiece.