A review by ralowe
Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present by David Foster Wallace, Mark Costello

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.