A love letter to the verbal artistry of hip-hop, What\'s Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysisWhat\'s Good is, among a great many other things, a byproduct of joyful obsession and immersion into both Language and sound, an intersection that offers a rich and expansive land upon which to play.
What a thrill to swing so gracefully from Lil Wayne to Mary Ruefle to the lyrical evolution of \'tilapia\'; pure ple. --Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest: A Novel What\'s Good is a feat of critical precision and personal obsession: Daniel Levin Becker\'s deep appreciation for rap is rangy and illuminating, and his delight in Language is infectious. --Adam Bradley, author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop Could this be the rap equivalent of Lewis Hyde\'s The Gift or Marina Warner\'s Once Upon A Time? Anyhow, it\'s an electrifying book, full of wild epiphanies and provocations, an exhibition of a critical mind in full and open contact with their subject at the highest level, with a winning streak of confessional intimacy as well.
A remarkable achievement.
Its brief and brilliant chapters are like the best kinds of freestyles: spontaneous and structured, startling and profound.
The book offers a new set of eyes and ears through which to see and to hear the Language of rap.
A book for committed hip-hop heads, curious neophytes, armchair linguists, and everyone in between.
For those of us who love rap, What\'s Good is a gift.
Ranging from Sugarhill Gang to UGK to Young M.
A, Rakim to Rick Ross to Rae Sremmurd, Jay-Z to Drake to Snoop Dogg, What\'s Good reads with the momentum of a deftly curated mixtape, drawing you into the conversation and teaching you to read it as it goes.
Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker considers how rap\'s use of Language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies. an often hilarious, surprisingly moving and always joyful paean to rap\'s relationship to words.--Jayson Greene, The New York TimesWhat\'s Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis, a set of freewheeling liner notes, and a love letter to the most vital American art form of the last half century. . . --Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance .
A love letter to the verbal artistry of hip-hop, What\'s Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysisWhat\'s Good is, among a great many other things, a byproduct of joyful obsession and immersion into both Language and sound, an intersection that offers a rich and expansive land upon which to play
