Prep
- 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)
In Class
- Attendance
- Q&A: What can the study of literature teach us about hip-hop lyricism?
- Reading Notes for Next Time
- Adam Bradley, ‘The Artists Dismantling the Barriers Between Rap and Poetry’, The New York Times Style Magazine (4 March 2021)
- Audio: Adam Bradley, ‘American Poets on the Hip-Hop Songs That Most Inspire Them’, New York Times (4 March 2021). 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)
- Homework: What’s your favourite hip-hop verse of all time? Identify one technique from ‘Rapping Deconstructed’ (e.g., crossing the bar line, motifs, daisy-chaining, etc.) or Bradley (2021; e.g., assonance, consonance, epistrophe) used in this verse. (Note: Using one of the verses discussed in the videoessay is cheating, obviously.)
