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Audiobook5 hours
Signifying Rappers
Written by Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace
Narrated by Robert Petkoff
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
()
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About this audiobook
Finally back in print--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.
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.
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Reviews for Signifying Rappers
Rating: 3.179487220512821 out of 5 stars
3/5
39 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a very wordy book written by a couple of late 20-year-olds who possess great knowledge of the English language and of hip-hop. This is written in the late 1980s, and as such, it's a great testament of both culture and music of the day, in the USA.
The authors collaborated on the whole, but each chapter is written individually.
All in all: surgical precision when it comes to the authors' use of grammar and words, but at times the intellectual level of the book is its biggest downfall. "Stoopid fresh" isn't exactly it, when I got the feeling that this book was partly written as an intellectual exercise to impress peers, rather than to explain hip-hop and rap (which I don't hold as synonymous, despite the authors wishing to do so).
However, it does contain a lot of great insight into hip-hop, displaying it as "CNN for black people", to paraphrase Chuck D., also as the Shakespearian poetry of the now - and, indeed, during the 1980s. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/51990 erstmals veröffentlicht und somit schon 25 Jahre alt. Aufgrund der geänderten Verhältnisse heutzutage schlecht gealtert, zu dem muss man schon fit im amerikanischen Old School Rap sein, um sich zuhause zu fühlen. Fühlt sich ein bißchen nach Sell-Out des ohne Zweifel grandiosen David Foster Wallace an.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5David Foster Wallace was a brilliant writer -- but his and Costello's Signifying Rappers is filled with inaccuracies and embarrassing omissions -- take for instance the long discussion of a "mysterious" song they heard on the radio that they call "The Honey Child" and talk about as though it were rare and impossible to ever track down -- but which anyone who knew the music would instantly recognize as Ice-T's "The Hunted Child." As a scholar of Hip-hop for more than 20 years, I steer people away from this unreliable book and to more solid ground, such as David Toop or Tricia Rose. Still fun as a period piece, though!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One of the most interesting things about this nonfiction book is that it was written during the early years of rap music as the industry was just beginning to expand into a formidable genre. It's almost like reading the biography of an an established and successful individual to learn about the person's early years. Granted, this is the insight of one individual, but that person is David Foster Wallace who has written some excellent commentary on other aspects of American culture. The essays in this book are similar to others he's written and certainly worth reading, especially if you're a fan of DFW's work, which I am.Whether or not you listen to rap music, a number of DFW's point hold true across the arts — and these points make the book worth reading. For example, my favorite quote from the book: "Ironies abound,of course, as ironies must when cash and art do lunch."Recommended for fans of DFW or individuals who enjoy art commentaries, in general.