rapper’s delight

Which is of course just to say that this isn’t the OED’s – that bible of educated expectation’s – ‘music’, this weird shit. Its values and foci are different, its precedents un-Anglo. Like the drum machine and scratch, sample and backbeat, the rapper’s ‘song’ is essentially an upper layer in the dense weave of rhythm that, in rap, usurps melody and harmony’s essential functions of identification, call, counterpoint, movement, and progression, the play of woven notes…until ‘rhythm’ comprises the essential definitions of rap itself: dance beats that afford unlimited bodily possibility, married rhythmically to complexly stressed lyrics that assert, both in message and meter, that things now can never be other than what IS.

– David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers

posted: 14 December 29
under: Uncategorized