A love letter to the verbal artistry of hip-hop, What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis.
Praise for What's Good:
"Music aficionados and hip-hop lovers will savor every bit."—Publishers Weekly
"His book performs a unique and exciting rhetorical move, presenting itself as a sort of freestyle in its own right: short, punchy chapters that each focus on a single lyric."—ALTA
"There is so much I admire about Daniel Levin Becker's What's Good: how knowledgeable it is, how synoptic, how precise, persuasive, and risky; I love its savvy politics, its passion, its aching, tragic heart."—David Shields, author of Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season
"All in all, What's Good is an enlightening, self-aware, and deeply satisfying look at the wondrous ways rap music uses language. It is absolutely essential reading on hip-hop—and one of the smartest books about music I've read."—Ian Port, author of The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock 'n' Roll
"What's Good: Notes on Rap and Language is a celebration of the artistry and craft of rap lyrics written in a way that only Daniel Levin Becker could, with his sharp eye for linguistic experimentation and his appreciation for the ways rappers have been able to turn English inside out. His fascination is contagious as he revels in the incredible vitality of this ever-morphing lexicon, from its rhymes to its slang to its creation of new modes of meaning. It's the book us lovers of music and language had no idea we needed."—Emma Ramadan, Riffraff Books, Providence, RI
"Characterized with a clear love for hip-hop, Daniel Levin Becker's What's Good is a joyful and deep dive into the many wonders of hip-hop as an art form."—Bennard Fajardo, Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington DC
