Higher Rap-ucation

Sam Anderson reviews Yale University Press’s new collection of rap lyrics, The Anthology of Rap, for New York Magazine. That’s right: the most comprehensive anthology of rap lyrics is published by Yale.

Anyway, the editors' major claim seems to be that rap can be read as lyric poetry, and can therefore afford the same aesthetic pleasures (and academic scrutinies) of lyric poetry. Anderson writes:

The toughest, coolest, most dangerous-seeming MCs are, at heart, basically just enormous language dorks. They love puns and rhymes and slang and extended metaphors; they accuse enemies of plagiarism and brag endlessly about their own hard-core habits of revision. A book like this, then, is the ultimate homage.

There's also a slideshow called "A History of Rap as Literature."