Saving Hip Hop From the Celebukids. Discover the Meaning of Rap Lyrics. The Rap Map — Mapping the Gangsta Terrain of the Planet. 2dopeboyz. The Anthology of Rap is rife with transcription errors. Why is it so hard to get rap lyrics right ? As of this week, rap finally has an anthology, published by Yale University Press. The Anthology of Rap sets out to capture the evolution of rap lyrics through what its editors consider representative examples, collecting the work of a wide variety of MCs who recorded from 1979 through 2009, from Grandmaster Caz to Joell Ortiz. More so than most anthologies, the book is also an essay collection, featuring substantive general and chapter introductions by the editors and essays from Henry Louis Gates Jr., Chuck D, and Common.
The eye-opening essay by Gates (who is the editor-in-chief of The Root, a Slate sister site) provides deep historical context for rap; it alone makes the book worth owning. Edited by two young yet accomplished professors of English, Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois, and featuring an advisory board of prominent professors and journalists (though tellingly, no rappers), The Anthology of Rap is a good start, but it will inspire mixed emotions. Why are there so many errors in The Anthology of Rap? The editors respond. - By Paul Devlin. Last Thursday, I wrote an article for Slate about The Anthology of Rap, officially published this week by the Yale University Press.
In that piece, I pointed out the errors I'd found in reading the book's transcriptions of rap lyrics. (I also noted how tricky and difficult such transcription can be.) Inspired by my investigation, the blogger Jay Smooth launched one of his own and found more mistakes in the anthology, which he published on his site on Monday. Commenters on both Slate and on Jay Smooth's site, Nil Doctrine, noted that many of the mistakes found in The Anthology of Rap also appear on the Online Hip Hop Lyrics Archive, a collection of lyric transcriptions posted by hip-hop fans that has been around for more than a decade.
For example, I pointed out in my original article that The Anthology of Rap incorrectly quotes Ghostface Killah, in his track "Daytona 500," as saying "voice be metal like Von Harper. " That's a painstaking, labor-intensive approach to transcription.