It's strange, given the profusion of hip-hop scholarship, that rap lyrics have received so little sustained analysis.
But though hip-hop is studied at universities -- as a social movement, a musical form, a manifestation of postmodernity -- the public conversation about it remains a zero-sum game of overzealous attacks and passionate defenses.
As a key part of America's youth culture and a central battlefield in our culture wars, hip-hop often seems to have forfeited the right to be discussed as art. Most academic and popular writers subjugate its aesthetics to its politics.
Until very recently, such writers could be counted on to begin around the time of hip-hop's birth and attempt to tackle the entire culture -- which, in addition to rap music, includes break dancing, graffiti and a number of other elements -- all at once.
Luckily, a new paradigm of scholarship is emerging, and Adam Bradley's "Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop" is a solid contribution.
Like Joe Schloss' "Making Beats," William Jelani Cobb's "To the Break of Dawn" and the Jeff Chang-edited "Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop," "Book of Rhymes" scrutinizes hip-hop's artistry with rigor and imagination.
Bradley has his eye on canon-building and his back turned to the debate over whether hip-hop threatens moral fiber. He explains just what kind of verse the most popular poets in the history of the world are producing.
Yet even as he seeks to establish hip-hop's literary sophistication -- see Stanley Crouch's statement that rap is "Dick and Jane with dirty words" if you doubt it remains contested -- Bradley is seldom defensive or overly celebratory.
"The caricature of the artistically and intellectually impoverished street thug," he writes, "fails to account for the linguistic virtuosity and cultural literacy required to rap effectively to a beat."
This is a striking statement, and it re-centers the conversation toward poetic analysis.
An assistant professor of English literature at Claremont McKenna College, Bradley is an unabashed formalist. He takes obvious pleasure in such obscure poetic terms as apocopated rhyme, ballad form and metonymy -- as well as in rappers' mastery of them.
Many scholars would characterize the use of these devices as a subversion of the canon. Bradley is more interested in the notion of rap as a Western poetic form and, as such, heir to all that's come before.
