So I burst in the room mad excited and say to my girlfriend, "Pick any popular Hip Hop verse or song you know and start rapping the first couple of lines." She takes a second. Then she goes, "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one." I take out the book and flip through a couple of pages. Once she catches on to what I'm trying to do, she immediately recants. "Oh that's a newer rap, it probably won't be in--" I turn to page 436 and go, "I got the rap patrol on the gat patrol/ Foes that wanna make sure my casket's close.."
That's The Anthology of Rap for you. Edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew Dubois, both professors of English, this collection is all encompassing resource for Hip Hop's most canonical lyrics. Everybody's in there from Lauryn Hill to Biggie to KRS One to Jay Electronica. Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote the foreword and Chuck D, the afterword. Look out for the book to be released on November 9 through Yale University Press. Cheers to Hip Hop becoming more firmly entrenched in academia.
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