David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture.
Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop."
The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom. Signifying Rappers issued a fan's challenge to the giants of rock writing, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, and Lester Bangs: Could the new street beats of 1989 set us free, as rock had always promised?
Back in print at last, Signifying Rappers is a rare record of a city and a summer by two great thinkers, writers, and friends. With a new foreword by Mark Costello on his experience writing with David Foster Wallace, this rerelease cannot be missed.
Finally back in print--David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Upon the discovery that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop¿ longtime friends David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello set about writing a collaborative essay on the subject. That essay became Signifying Rappers, one of the first books to explore rap across contexts--race, politics, language, and popular culture. With infectious excitement, insight, and relentless self-consciousness, Wallace and Costello discuss the golden age of rap in the 1980s.
