"If the editors of MAD were hip-hop heads, they might produce a book as funny, irreverent, and indispensable as this one."
Publisher's note
Hip hop is huge, and it's time someone wrote it all down. And got it all right. With more than 25 aggregate years of interviews, and virtually every hip hop single, remix, and album ever recorded at their disposal, the highly respected EGO TRIP staff are the ones to do it. Their BOOK OF RAP LIST runs the gamut of hip hop information, breaking it down into chapters on Art, Lyrics, Production, Fashion, Names, Performances, etc. This is an exhaustive, indispensable and completely irreverent bible of true hip hip knowledge.
Annotation
One of the smartest hip-hop publications of the 1990s, Ego Trip magazine was the product of the thoughtful and irreverent collective of Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Jefferson Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, and Brent Rollins. When the magazine folded in 1998, the group turned to book publishing; EGO TRIP'S BOOK OF RAP LISTS was the first result. It's an informative, frequently hilarious window onto hip-hop's exclusive world, one with its own rules, mythology, saints, and sinners. It encompasses pretty much everything fans of the genre need to know, from the roots of hip-hop, with lists of Afrika Bambaataa's inventory of essential breakbeat records (which functioned as a kind of Rosetta Stone for 1980s European hip-hop devotees) and "the Most Disappointing Debut Rap LPs," to notable hip-hop lyrics, both intelligible ("16 Memorable Mysogynistic Rap Music Moments"), and not so much ("8 Songs With Notoriously Unintelligible Lyrics"). Often controversial, wide-ranging in scope, and above all, a ton of fun, the BOOK OF RAP LISTS should be essential reading for old school hip-hop fans and novices alike.
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