This chapter centres Paul Gilroy’s warning at the dawn of hip-hop studies against a scholarly trend wherein “the phenomenology of musical forms is dismissed in favour of analysing lyrics, the video images that supplement them and the technology of Hip hop production.” This chapter is thus a methodological overview examining how leading journalists and scholars have approached the tricky job of writing about hip-hop’s musical sound. Drawing examples from the history of writing about rap music, it offers tips on how to develop our sound writing toolkits and challenges us to improve our understanding of the relationship between the sonic and the social. Because “music” remains such a conservative frame in the university, this chapter approaches the topic with a broadly decolonial, practical, and sound-centred approach. Such an approach opens us up to the important sonically minded contributions of arts practitioners, journalists, and scholars outside of music departments, while focusing in on the recent methods of scholars in the increasingly interdisciplinary fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, popular music studies, and sound studies. The chapter is a resource to help hip-hop scholars enrich their thinking (and feeling) about sound and make their research and writing more musical.