This chapter listens closely to songs released by Saweetie (‘My Type’ and ‘Tap In’), Latto (‘Muwop’), Erica Banks (‘Buss It’), and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion (‘W.A.P.’) in 2019 and 2020. Each of these tracks employs sonic elements of trap music while sampling classic hip-hop and club anthems. Beyond just flipping samples, these rappers flip hip-hop sexuality itself on its head, transforming cuts that position Black women as objects into songs that center Black women’s desire and agency. We listen to these tracks not only in relation to one another (and to the sources of their samples) but also in the context of Sylvia Wynter’s influential analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Riffing on Katherine McKittrick’s engagement with Wynter, we theorize the work of these rappers as “demonic sound,” as they make themselves present in music that had previously absented them.

What Stradivarius and Steinway are to classical music, and Fender and Gibson are to rock and roll, the E-mu SP 1200 and AKAI MPC samplers are to hip-hop. As beat makers in the mid 1980s experimented with newly available digital samplers, E-mu Systems and AKAI introduced their all-in-one sampler. During the so-called Golden Era, the SP 1200 and MPC developed a reciprocal relationship with hip-hop music that saw the specifications of the machines in conversation with the aesthetics of the music. Through analyses of ‘South Bronx,’ ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell,’ and ‘Unbelievable,’ the chapter addresses how these two machines became primary instruments of beat making. In addition, these examples reveal how each machine developed mythic legacies within hip-hop culture that have long survived their commonplace usage, and how these machines shape an aesthetic consideration of the “sound” of hip-hop beats to the present day.

This chapter examines hip-hop’s rhyme history. With attention to examples from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Big Daddy Kane, and Busta Rhymes, it identifies three main modes of rhyme: “normal,” “extraordinary,” and “impossible.” Popular during hip-hop’s early development, normal rhymes clearly and predictably mark line endings. Sometimes dismissed as unsophisticated, they invite the listener to experience the depicted experience as communal. Extraordinary rhymes concentrate normal rhymes’ infrequent technical flourishes into a defining characteristic. They play intonation against line breaks and feature denser, more complicated multisyllabic rhymes such as mosaic and forced rhymes. They aim for a conspicuous virtuosity. Impossible rhymes are often performed at a formidable speed, without any clear sense of where lines start or end. Riddling passages also cannot be conclusively understood. While normal and extraordinary rhymes encourage their listeners to remember and perform them, impossible rhymes aim for irreproducibility.

Moving from Illmatic to Young Stoner Life, this chapter listens closely to rap flow – the complex metrical pulse that runs through its verses. Drawing on lyrical examples from rappers like MC Lyte and Missy Elliott, it lays out a series of core technical effects (such as pauses, overflows, and triplets) before turning to the question of how MCs have grappled with the challenge of recording their flows on the page. Discussing the obstacles that face any attempt to apply traditional print poetic scansion to hip-hop, the chapter moves on to the innovative ways that rappers like Rakim and Young Thug have approached their notepads – making use of 16x4 grids, unorthodox punctuation, and abstract shapes. It closes with a discussion of so-called mumble rap and the ethics of close listening, pointing to the controversial use of rap lyrics in the recent YSL court case.

Rap has long enjoyed a generative relationship with spoken-word poetry, one that can be traced back to the politicized orientations and aesthetic preferences that distinguished the Black Arts poetry and early spoken word of the late 1960s/early 1970s. However, this chapter argues that differences between rap and spoken-word poetry are as salient as similarities. Rap’s relationship to the spoken word only starts to acquire political and strategic importance at the point at which gangsta rap – with its hyper-profanity and alleged nihilism – comes to prominence. Amid the antiblack racism and structural dislocation of Reagan’s America, rap in the spoken word can be seen as emblematic of hip-hop’s intra-cultural politics of uplift versus negativity. Yet, despite such claims, this does not suffice to settle the matter of the elevated and profane within rap. For in rap, carnality, irreverence, and high-mindedness are the alternating currents and tensions that make hip-hop penumbral, the goad to its intra-politics.

Looking to politically committed artists, this chapter asks how hip-hop has been shaped in both its form and its substance by a revolutionary critique of racial capitalism. After setting out the antinomies of Black capitalism and Black Marxism via listening to a song by Kendrick Lamar, the chapter demonstrates how hip-hop codifies its own forms of racialized and proletarian radicalism. To so do, and moving in roughly chronological order, it listens to a handful of songs by Public Enemy, The Coup, and Noname, reading their lyrical content and describing their musical form as a response to the interlock of race and class under capitalism.

This chapter explores the influence of Jamaican music and culture on the origin and development of hip-hop in the US. With roots reaching back to Jamaican sound systems and Nyabinghi drumming, hip-hop inspires a new flowering of Afrofuturism as Black resistance to colonial authority. The example of Jamaica’s Maroons, Afro-Caribbean freedom fighters, clarifies its strategy of cultural resistance: to seize and secure space for a Black future of living free. As hip-hop’s early innovators – DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Rammellzee, among others – adapt the Jamaican sound system to new colonial territories, they use music, dance, raps, and tags as weapons to create spaces of freedom in the oppressive world of the Bronx in the mid 1970s. This legacy of Afrofuturism informs the ensuing history of hip-hop, half a century of Black musical creativity that extends from Brother D and the Sugar Hill Gang through X Clan, Public Enemy, and NWA to Dr. Octogon, Deltron 3030, Janelle Monáe, Ras G, and beyond.

The word griot has been linked with hip-hop since its early days in the 1980s, but it is a fragile connection. Initially used by French travelers to West Africa who thought they were using a local term, it refers to hereditary praise singers, instrumentalists, and oral historians. Although there is some overlap between what modern-day rappers and griots do, there are also some significant differences, especially in their social status and roles in society. If rap has distant origins in Africa, dispersed via the transatlantic slave trade, and come back transformed, then how can we think about the highly specialized skills and roles of griots in Africa, their inspirations in the diaspora, and their intersections with rappers? Tracing the institution of griots in western Africa and charting how the term took root and expanded in the US will help us appreciate their congruencies and incompatibilities with hip-hop.

This chapter examines the transformative work of Danielle Dumile, the masked rapper who went by the stage name DOOM (among other aliases), and who was known for his complex lyricism and innovative personae. Adrian Matejka considers the MC’s use of persona through the dual lenses of hip-hop and poetry, highlighting the ways in which DOOM’s lyrics borrow from and enhance these twinned literary traditions. Drawing parallels between DOOM’s innovative lyricism and the tradition of persona poetry, Matejka considers how contemporary poets – particularly Black American poets – adopt various masks to explore history, culture, and identity. This longer tradition is related back to DOOM, whose layered personae subverted mainstream rap in the early 2000s. Matejka frames the rapper’s work as an enduring testament to persona’s power in mythmaking and cultural commentary.

This chapter examines funk music as a central artery of rap music and hip-hop culture. It charts a funk current that crests and flows throughout hip-hop’s fifty-year span such that, what Maner calls the funk impulse – the percussive, kinesthetic energy that undergirds and drives Black sound and Black life – is rendered audible. After charting the patterns of sampling that developed in the early stages of hip-hop, the chapter moves on to the evolution of the funk impulse in the contemporary era, from renderings on album covers to live stage performances. James Brown, Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad, George Clinton, and Parliament-Funkadelic, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and OutKast are all discussed in detail.