Thinking about hip-hop and the state of the nation, it’s tempting to put those Brother D bars on the page, drop the mic (or close the laptop), and leave it at that. A schoolteacher in the Bronx by day, Daryl Aamaa Nubyahn became an MC at night. And, looking back, it’s clear that he was one of the first to truly grasp the tensions and paradoxes that continue to haunt the culture almost half a century later. With fascist salutes already being thrown by senior figures in the second Trump administration – a nightmare that will doubtless have grown fresh tendrils by the time you read this – his warnings feel more pressing than ever. (“The Ku Klux Klan is on the loose,” he raps, “Training their kids in machine gun use.”) But what really strikes me, listening to D’s song today, is how his horrific vision is intertwined with joy: almost despite himself, he conjures a gathering of sympathetic bodies moving together as the dawn breaks.

Pleasure and fear continually intertwine across hip-hop’s first five decades, tracing the music’s uneasy relationship to American culture. “I remember how it felt when the Twin Towers fell,” Nicki Minaj once rapped. “I was in the Trump Towers looking for some shower gel.”¹ It’s a darkly funny couplet, letting a hint of disquiet creep into her otherwise luxurious verse. Where earlier MCs had embraced the property tycoon and dictator-to-be as an unlikely mascot, leading to regrettable moments from Raekwon, Jay-Z, and Young Jeezy, Minaj’s nod to his brand is more ambivalent.² (How did it feel? She doesn’t say.) During Trump’s first term, the Trinidadian MC went on to vocally attack his policy of systematic family separations at the US–Mexico border. “I came to this country as an illegal immigrant,” she wrote, sharing an image of the Ursula detention facility in Texas. “I can’t imagine the horror of being in a strange place & having my parents stripped away from me at the age of 5. This is so scary to me. Please stop this.”³

Make no mistake: Minaj isn’t an activist and ‘New York Minute’ isn’t protest music. But her rhyme is a reminder of the way that dread is often sublimated in hip-hop, and blurred with desire. You can feel Offset wavering in the same uneasy space on one of Migos’s early mixtapes, as he recalls being “raised in the trenches” before boasting that now he’s “got the white man money, call me Donald Trump.”⁴ His bar manages to land precisely between critique and approval. It’s a hell of a balancing act, but not an unfamiliar one. Under the dreamlike alchemy of American capitalism, after all, the enslaver’s whips and chains can always be reimagined as cars and necklaces.

One of my strangest rap-adjacent experiences occurred not too long ago, while sitting in the cinema with my young son, watching Sonic the Hedgehog. As you may know, Sega has had a taste for rap aesthetics ever since Hideki Naganuma ripped off the Bomb Squad and sampled Malcolm X for a game soundtrack.⁵ Even so, as we hit the end credits I was a little surprised to hear Wiz Khalifa’s voice come blasting from the speakers. It was ‘Speed Me Up,’ a new cut that had been composed specially for this film. “Free my struggles, detach me from this island / Bleed my knuckles, attack me for my finance,” the Pittsburgh MC rapped, seemingly merging his own woes with the hedgehog’s intergalactic troubles.

The credits rolled on, and I started gathering sweet wrappers. Before long, Khalifa was joined by Lil Yachty, who seemed to be leaning even harder into the persona (“best friend named Tails! Balance on rails!”). And then the mic was tossed to Ty Dolla $ign. My ears started to prick up at this – just how much money had Paramount thrown at this song? Like Boat, Dolla also seemed to be rapping as the hedgehog, daydreaming of 16-bit somersaults, before he abruptly glitched into the real world: “Spin Dash to the safe, do the dash like Tay-K.” It was a truly bizarre line, sending two worlds swirling into collision. (Tay-K, of course, is the young Texan rapper behind 2017’s ‘The Race,’ a charmingly lo-fi SoundCloud track that went platinum while the teenager was on the run, having smashed an ankle tag and fled house arrest in the hope of dodging a capital charge.)

Voiced in the persona of a 1990s Japanese video game character, Dolla’s nod to Tay-K can be seen as a snapshot of the increasingly deranged role that hip-hop often plays in contemporary pop culture. The questions immediately began to proliferate, even as Khalifa’s pre-hook was still booming through the multiplex (“I’m dealing with this pain, / I just can’t let you throw it away”). Are we to take Dolla’s bar as subversive? Is it possible to hear sincerity here? Does it honor Tay-K’s plight to superimpose him onto a spin-dashing hedgehog? Or is the whole exercise nothing but a bleak hollowing out of the kinds of solidarity that Brother D called for, way back in 1980? The track somehow flickers back and forth: you can sense that same old blur between loathing and desire, critique and complicity, all over it.

Leaving the cinema, I began to wonder what hip-hop might look like from my son’s perspective. Was it nothing more than a dash of borrowed cool – or, worse, appropriated suffering – to be enjoyed as the ice cream melts into the rug following a CG spectacle? The recent festivities surrounding the genre’s fiftieth birthday tended to point back to NYC block parties in the summer of 1973, but it was clear long ago that the culture had vacated such local spaces. Writing about hip-hop (along with other forms of experimental music) for the Wire magazine across the past decade and a half, I’d spoken to rappers and producers from all over the map – spanning the US, Canada, the UK, Togo, and elsewhere. Often, I was struck by the sense that this music was turning into something like a global lingua franca: it was slowly becoming placeless – a sonic commodity that could flow freely through earbuds everywhere.

This turn is accelerated on Megan Thee Stallion’s self-titled third album, from the summer of 2024. The LP was unveiled with a spooky Beckettian video. A camera zooms in on the artist’s lips (her face is blacked out) as she recites a line attributed to the Buddha – “Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past: over and over again.”⁶ There’s a jump cut to eyes with reptilian slit pupils, a flash of scary teeth, and the short clip ends. On the album itself, this commitment to fleeing the past (both Megan’s own and the culture’s) comes with a flex of her formidable reach. “Just landed in Kyoto, I’m worldwide these bitches local,” she raps at one point, before elongating a Japanese word across a whole bar: “Arigatoooo.”⁷ The LP’s third single, ‘Mamushi’ (named for a deadly species of pit viper found in Japan’s swamplands), finds the Houston MC extending her polyglot flow even further:

Bowls of ramen, Soviet video games, and French crocodile-leather bags all sink into an expensive soup here as a boilerplate Stallion brag (it translates as “I’m cute and have a nice body”) melts smoothly into Japanese. The hook is astonishingly minimalistic, its second half built entirely from a thudding monosyllable: “I get money, I’m a star, star, star / Star, star, star, star.” Draining all life from the boast, it feels suspiciously like a mantra for late capitalism, something to hum as you sit and rock yourself to sleep at the end of a graveyard shift in some borderless Amazon warehouse.

Hip-hop has come a long way from the block party, for sure (in the same way, perhaps, that football has come a long way from Shrovetide village kickabouts to global TV spectacles hosted by Gulf petrostates). As early as 2015, Spotify was declaring that the genre was now the most popular music on the planet, and by the end of that decade a Canadian rapper was being crowned as the most streamed artist alive.⁸ My own biases – both aesthetically and politically – tend sharply away from this, pining for glimpses of the kinds of local, underground music that Marcyliena Morgan has documented so vividly.⁹ Those Bronx parties may have ended long ago, but there are still sublime rappers hailing from regional microscenes, from Southern Michigan’s surreal epicist Decuma to Atlanta’s trippy dayglo GloryGirl2950. (Simply put, it makes me smile when a cassette or CD lands on my desk and I can see the artist’s handwriting on the postage slip: incredibly, Pink Siifu still seems to have the time to mail his own tapes.) I am, though, conscious that there is absolutely no room for purism here – as a white listener based in the UK, my relationship to this culture is always remote and conditional upon the very networks of circulation that artists like Megan Thee Stallion expose, and celebrate.

On reflection, what continues to set hip-hop apart from every other kind of music I know and love is that, no matter how much it grows and drifts across the globe, it still feels like one interconnected story – for all its paradoxes, contradictions, and plot twists. Where a follower of underground guitar music is unlikely to pay much attention to, say, a Bon Jovi reunion, you’d be hard pushed to find a rap fan who doesn’t keep at least one eye on the larger scene. When I interviewed the radical Philadelphia artist Moor Mother around the time of her debut album Fetish Bones (2016), I was delighted to hear her rapping Drake bars from memory as she laughed about the tunes she would spin in the car with her partner, Rasheedah Phillips (the other half of Black Quantum Futurism). In a sense, part of the pleasure of hip-hop is the hopeless scramble to keep up with its omnivorous sprawl. Because, somehow, it all counts. As the Florida MC Doechii – the self-styled Swamp Princess – put it on the second single from her recent mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal:

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Now, putting together an earthly book that encompasses everything is, of course, impossible. The goal of Hip-Hop and American Culture is more realistic. As the culture rolls into its sixth decade, these nineteen essays attempt to reckon with some of its most gripping issues and aspects. They are unique, personal takes, but certain familiar coordinates and landmarks recur across the whole. There are, for instance, repeated glimpses of the urban ruin and acts of creative resistance that took place in the 1970s, as documented by Jeff Chang in his pivotal study, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (2005). Similarly, the idea of the rise and fall of a so-called Golden Age (from 1987 to 1994 or so) haunts a number of contributors, as does a sense that the scene has inexorably grown, branching out from the Bronx into something much larger. That lingering tension between resistance and complicity with which I began can be detected throughout too. And, I’m pleased to say, the glorious din of the Bomb Squad can often be heard in the background, along with the smoother sounds of funk and jazz.

Many of these chapters seek to extend the discussion of hip-hop beyond the familiar Mount Rushmore faces that we all know. This might mean examining neglected aspects of the culture, listening closely to underground rappers, considering forgotten hits, or tuning into more recent sounds. It must be said: rap scholarship is barely as old as I am, but it has already shown a tendency to get stuck in the past – even as the music has exploded geographically and transformed sonically. I hope that you can sense something of this shifting cultural landscape in these essays and hear it in the playlist that accompanies them. There are also shared commitments here. While these chapters were mostly completed prior to the second Trump election in November 2024, they were all written in the wake of the Houston rapper George “Big” Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin back in the spring of 2020. The shadow of state violence has only grown longer since then, and, as such, it passes across the pages of this book. The work being done by each contributor, it seems to me, aims to resist this and to nudge the moral universe back toward something like justice.

Partly in light of this, I’ve chosen to redact the n-word across the text, regardless of whether it is spelled with an -a or -er. (Less controversially, I’ve also standardized the hyphenation of “hip-hop” throughout and used “MC” and “DJ” in favor of “emcee” and “deejay.”) This is a delicate decision, and I’m grateful for the thoughtful and generous discussions that contributors have had with me regarding it. I appreciate that asterisks are a provisional and inadequate compromise, but this is surely because there is no satisfying solution. The issue remains bound up with the commodification of Black identity, reflecting – as R. A. T. Judy has pointed out – the “historical systematic employment” of hate speech during the long process of extracting exchange value from human beings. As Judy wonders, a question remains as to whether “hard-core gangster rap’s employment of the category n***a” represents a sincere “attempt to think an African American identity at the end of political economy, when work no longer defines human being.”¹¹ This debate will run on long after we’re done here. In any case, for me, the simple answer has been that if I wouldn’t say a word aloud, I shouldn’t print it either.

As you can see, the chapters in Hip-Hop and American Culture have been arranged into four substantial parts. Part I, “Sonic Roots,” is not about Sega. Its five chapters consider a handful of the dizzying cluster of musical elements that have gone on to comprise hip-hop’s instrumental layers. The section doesn’t pretend to include a comprehensive list of ingredients, as hip-hop has spent half a century drawing on just about everything. (If you’re curious about rap’s link back to early blues, for instance, I’d point you in the direction of Elijah Wald’s 2012 book, The Dozens.) Nor is it presented chronologically. One reason for this is that hip-hop refutes any linear model of musical development. By deploying samplers, producers carve time into radically new shapes, their beats folding American history back onto itself.

Part I opens with Chapter 1, “The Funk Impulse” by Sequoia Maner, a detailed study of a genre that has been seen as underpinning the core sound of early rap. Starting with the work of James Brown (the most sampled artist in hip-hop), Maner traces a groovy line through New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta before heading off into outer space. In Chapter 2, “Nation Time(s): Jazz and Hip-Hop’s Changing Same,” David Grundy considers the complex relationship between these two crucial strands of Black music, following a series of overlapping sonics and ideologies across the past half century. Finding room for triumph amidst terror, he closes with a discussion of the rebellious, politically engaged rap of the BLM era.

In Chapter 3, “Return of the Griot?” Eric Charry weighs up the attractive claim that US hip-hop’s deepest roots lie in West African sung poetry. Placing this chapter at the top would, of course, have given a tacit nod to that familiar genealogy (affirming Chuck D’s description of his craft as “griot-like”).¹² Its placement here reflects Charry’s insistence that such ideas are actually quite young, and that any connection to griot culture is fragile and metaphorical. A similar swerve takes place in Chapter 4, “Afrofuturism, the Caribbean, and the Loop of History.” Paul Youngquist’s spiraling account of cosmic rap is drawn backward, listening to Jamaican sound system culture and hearing prophetic blasts of future justice. Part I closes with Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton’s Chapter 5, “From Circuits to Aesthetics: The Samplers and Beat Making Styles of Hip-Hop’s Golden Era.” Digging down into nuts and bolts, this chapter shows how some of rap’s most iconic instrumentals were actually put together. Interviewing key producers (including one of the architects of Illmatic) and engaging in detailed technical analysis, Rivers and Fulton demonstrate that devices like the E-mu SP-1200 and the AKAI MPC should sit as central to our understanding of hip-hop as Stratocasters and Les Pauls do for rock audiences.

Alongside the beats, naturally, we have the rhymes. Part II, “On the Mic: Wax Poetics,” zooms in on the ways that rap artists have spent the past half century rewiring poetic form. As a literature person (at least when I’m not moonlighting as a music critic), this is crucial to my own understanding of hip-hop. In the words of poet John Murillo (in a couplet that David Caplan brought to my attention), there are plenty of young writers out there who dig “Kane, not Keats, / Rakim, not Rilke.”¹³ Nodding to this, the poetry editor of the Paris Review has admitted that most of the poems that are truly lodged in his head are “rap songs”: “Big Daddy Kane’s ‘Smooth Operator,’ Rakim’s ‘Mahogany,’ or Nas’s ‘N.Y. State of Mind’ – these are poems I know by heart, from beginning to end, and will probably never forget.”¹⁴

In my own Chapter 6, “Like an Interstellar Wind: Flow and Meter,” I listen for the pulse of hip-hop. After identifying a core set of technical tricks and effects, first developed in the 1980s, I sketch some parallels between early rap and more recent Atlanta trap, before closing with a discussion of the ethics of close listening against a backdrop of hostile surveillance. In Chapter 7, “The History of Hip-Hop Rhyme in Three Samples,” David Caplan unpacks rap’s virtuosic use of rhyme, a device that has become increasingly marginalized in contemporary print poetry. Pointing to a complex sonic evolution across the past half century, he moves from the end-stopped, monosyllabic bars of early eighties rap to the explosive polysyllabic rhymes (what he calls “impossible rhymes”) that can be found in more recent cuts.

Turning from the page to the stage, Patrick Turner’s Chapter 8, “Spinning Staves in Bars: Hip-Hop Comes to Spoken-Word,” examines the shifting relationship between these two parallel forms of postwar US poetry, taking them as twinned social and aesthetic movements. Thinking of artists like Saul Williams, the chapter posits spoken-word poetry as a fertile site for rappers who feel alienated from the sharp capitalist edge of the rap mainstream. Part II closes with Adrian Matejka’s elegy for Daniel Dumile, Chapter 9, “‘Read the Fine Print’: DOOM and Persona Poetry.” It’s a real trip to see Matejka, the current editor of Chicago’s Poetry magazine – birthplace of “Prufrock” and “We Real Cool” – pay such close attention to DOOM’s bars. (He makes a strong case for their inclusion in any meaningful future canon of American verse.) Drawing parallels to ancient masked theatre and to recent print poetry, the chapter is also shot through with real sensitivity to the tragic life of Dumile himself.

In Part III, “Dollars and Bodies: Hip-Hop America,” the focus is pulled back to the larger question of rap in the contemporary US. As the title hints, there are two lurking themes here – capitalism and the humans within it. The section hovers around the sly pun in the title of Joe Coscarelli’s recent study, Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story (2022). I take Coscarelli’s phrase as a whisper that our fascination with regional centers might be seen to overlap with (or perhaps even obscure) the real nucleus of this music: capital. This is the invisible force that draws and repels, providing the source of so much of the pleasure and pain that seeps through contemporary hip-hop. As Young Thug once put it, reflecting ominously on his gold necklaces: “I might die from all these chains, choking me in my sleep.”¹⁵

Part III opens with Chapter 10, “‘Made a mil’ off that mumblin’ shit’: The Freestyling Cyborgs of Post-internet Hip-Hop,” joining Michael Waugh in the purple haze of contemporary trap as he listens to a mass of Auto-Tuned bars and chattering 808s. Linking mumble rap back to Lil Wayne’s astonishing mixtape run (circa 2005–2008), Waugh reads this music as a stoned reimagining of the human body itself, abandoning masculinist rap tradition in favor of what he calls “post-internet cyborgism.” In Chapter 11, “‘How Much a Dollar Cost’: Hip-Hop, Race, Capitalism,” Mark Steven grapples with one of rap’s central tensions, namely its ambivalent position between the twin poles of Black capitalism and Black Marxism. Taking issue with the lack of commitment he finds in Kendrick’s work, Steven outlines a fiery alternative playlist. While continuing to mull over the question of American capitalism, Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie Hay are more pragmatic. Chapter 12, “Community and Capital: Detroit Hip-Hop Collectives and the Business of Culture Creation,” carefully weighs up the work done by two local groups in Michigan’s underground scene. The chapter draws on the pair’s fieldwork with Detroit’s first women-centered rap collective, the Foundation, comparing this group to the more hustling mindset of We Are Culture Creators, while raising important questions about the ethics of the culture industry.

Charles L. Hughes returns our focus to the body with Chapter 13, “The ‘Krip-Hop’ Remix: Disability and Hip-Hop,” as he assesses the vital roles that artists with disabilities have played in this culture. Building on his recent study of Why Bushwick Bill Matters (2021), Hughes moves beyond the work of the iconic Geto Boy here, introducing a host of unfamiliar (to me) activists and collectives, while casting a light on the work of newly emerging microgenres, such as dip hop. Part III ends with Justin D. Burton and Brea M. Heidelberg spinning the radio dial, hunting for the defiant tunes of rappers like Saweetie, Latto, and Cardi B. Their Chapter 14, “‘Make Him Give Me Einstein’: Pop Trap and Black Women’s Pleasure,” examines a stack of recent hit singles in relation to Sylvia Wynter’s theory of “demonic ground,” clearing space for Black female desire in the wake of four centuries of white supremacist patriarchal destruction.

Part IV, “Off the Mic: Hip-Hop Media,” takes a much broader view of the kinds of creativity taking place under this banner. As Daniel Levin Becker points out in his chapter (via Questlove), there has been a tendency to slap the term “hip-hop” on almost anything in recent American commercial life, using the tag to lend edge, cool, and authenticity to a range of soulless economic activity. And yet the idea of nonmusical hip-hop has deeper roots. As the old adage goes, the culture grew from a number of core elements – or pillars, as they’re sometimes called – and only a handful of these were sonic. Take breaking culture: it is, naturally, invisible on wax (aside from the occasional 7” promo, such as 1984’s jaunty ‘Hey You! The Rock Steady Crew’), but the leading crews were vividly documented elsewhere in hip-hop media.¹⁶ Moving away from the records, Part IV explores the ways hip-hop has made itself felt on the page, on the screen (large and small), and on graffitied walls.

In Chapter 15, “What Is the Hip-Hop Novel?” Levin Becker heads for the bookstore and returns with a small mountain of texts, including novels by rappers, novels about rappers, and, as he puts it, “novels called ‘hip-hop’ chiefly because they are fashioned by and marketed to Black people.” Critically weighing up categories such as “lit hop” and “street lit,” the chapter also reckons with the uneasy parodies of rap found in books by such canonical figures as Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo. Shifting the focus to graphic novels and comic books, Vincent Haddad’s Chapter 16, “Hip-Hop Comics: Ronald Wimberly’s Intertextual Adaptations of Rap’s Minor Characters,” offers a detailed account of the work of a major figure in the DC/Vertigo ranks. Haddad shows how, as well as contributing to established titles – such as Swamp Man and Lucifer – Wimberly has gone on to develop his own original projects, deftly incorporating hip-hop techniques and flourishes to reimagine the form.

In Chapter 17, “The Wrath of the Math: Identity, Aesthetics and Representation in Early Hip-Hop Films,” Amy Abugo Ongiri shows how a selection of 1980s cinematic works can be seen as a moving archive, capturing the pioneering work of NYC’s breakdancing crews and graffiti writers. After tracing the economic impulses behind the hip-hop musical – a form that circulated these new aesthetics among a global viewership – they close with a turn to a much more violent and pessimistic scene: the New Jack Cinema of the early nineties. Eric Harvey’s Chapter 18, “‘Black America’s TV Station’: The Rise and Fall of Reality Rap,” examines the relationship between hip-hop and the small screen during the same era, making the case that so-called gangsta rap should be heard as a direct response to a televisual turn toward twenty-four-hour cable news and true crime broadcasts. Reading shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted alongside pivotal albums from Dre and Cube, the chapter culminates with the genre’s abrupt collapse in the wake of the deaths of two of its leading artists. The book closes with Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón’s Chapter 19, “Notes on Hip-Hop, Graffiti Subculture, and Performing Anti-imperial Feminism in the United States.” Outlining the lexicon and credo of contemporary tagging artists, Pabón-Colón shows how a tired, androcentric account of graffiti is being overturned by writers who identify as women, or “graffiti grrlz.” The chapter bows out with a utopian vision as a team of forty-four artists gather at the Paint Louis festival in Missouri, seeking to throw open a portal to a truly decolonized feminist world.