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Reviews
Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present by David Foster Wallace, Mark Costello
ralowe's review
2.0
what really can be said? '90s neurotic white boy irony doesn't age well. here we see the type of detail-oriented obsession with difference that makes it miraculously disappear in a bravura exercise of mastery. this book has less to do with rap than it has to do with the white obsession of it, which probably on the global scale under capitalism finally amounts to the same thing. i don't know if they get it or not. 'it' i'm going to define by examples of diametric opposites: 1) they spend most of the book trying to prove that blackness is not as black as it thinks it is, or rap is not quite what it really presents. a lot of writing goes into their preoccupation with this unbridgeable cultural gulf that must be bridged, re-making themselves to pass t.e. lawrence-style into the vast nubian unknown, like hemingway chasing white elephants or something. it's tedious, i'll explain the two stars at the end of this. 2) their irritation with sampling is so dated, and unfortunately it becomes the no-duh analogy to how blacks live their lives or something. yeah uncle sam sampled a continent and released it as america so shut up. mark's i dream of genie passage is tepidly amusing, tedious in a creative writing way. so i gave this two stars because on the last pages of the book there is a transliterated score of "paid in full." it was pretty.
dllh's review
3.0
Kind of meh. It was neat to see the early sort of journalistic writing, but I'm not sure it's really a successful book beyond that. Mostly suitable for DFW completists or the Costello-curious, I think.
strangledfruit's review
2.0
[2.5 stars] Even with its self-awareness it frequently comes across as try-hard, nebbish, and overly anthropological. Not surprisingly the best stuff is DFW talking about cultural chaos in sampling which could easily stand on its own.
pharmdad2007's review
4.0
**2020 reread**
Unique investigative style and far reaching metaphors abound, as you would expect from David Foster Wallace. Hip hop explained weirdly.
I love DFW, so even when he writes on a topic I have like zero interest in, it is enjoyable. This collection of essays about the early rap scene in America is an example of a brilliantly explored topic that doesn't really speak to me. But I did enjoy the section comparing the cultural "sampling" of Martin Luther King Jr and the musical sampling that provides a tonal backbone for much of rap.
Unique investigative style and far reaching metaphors abound, as you would expect from David Foster Wallace. Hip hop explained weirdly.
I love DFW, so even when he writes on a topic I have like zero interest in, it is enjoyable. This collection of essays about the early rap scene in America is an example of a brilliantly explored topic that doesn't really speak to me. But I did enjoy the section comparing the cultural "sampling" of Martin Luther King Jr and the musical sampling that provides a tonal backbone for much of rap.
caralikesbooks's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
will_cotton4's review
4.0
First 80 pages or so were difficult to get through, but the last half of the book has some really helpful and interesting insights on early rap music. I will say I found sort of a condescending attitude toward rap and rappers for much of the book that was only occasionally inverted. Read with caution.
cmadrenas's review
3.0
Mediocre as a rap book…mostly unoriginal and occasionally vaguely offensive (stuff about rappers as yuppies and about stereotypes just being “synecdoche” instead of, um, NOT THAT AT ALL.) Awesome as a History-of-DFW book, though. Guy is constantly making the hokiest grammar/linguistics jokes in the most inappropriate places. Every bit the messed up son of Avril Incandenza I MEAN his textbook-writing mother. I love him.