• H. Samy Alim, ‘“Bring It to the Cypher”: Hip-Hop Nation Language’, in Forman and Neal (2012)
• Audio: Chief Rocker Busy Bee Starski vs. Kool Moe Dee of The Treacherous Three (Harlem World, 1981)
• Video: The Art of Diss: The History of Battle Rap (2023)

We spent much of the class huddled up in group work. So we still need to discuss the assigned texts from last Wednesday.

In Class

1. 1. Attendance
   2. Q&A: What can the study of linguistics teach us about the language of hip-hop?
   3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

• Adam Bradley, ‘Rhyme’, Ch. 2 in Book of Rhymes (2009)
• Audio: Adam Bradley, ‘American Poets on the Hip-Hop Songs That Most Inspire Them’, New York Times (4 March 2021). To complement T’s recent feature on how the barrier between rap and poetry is becoming increasingly porous thanks to a new generation of practitioners in both art forms, we asked a number of poets mentioned in the piece about the hip-hop songs they return to again and again. (These excerpts from interviews with various poets shouldn’t be read apart from the embedded Spotify playlist, ‘A Playlist from the Poets’.)
• Video: ‘Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time’, Vox (19 May 2016)