There is more than a taste of life’s highs and lows crowding around the microphone. That means you get the corny but contagious boasts of the Sugarhill Gang (“Rapper’s Delight”) and far down the road, the grainy, documentary insight of the Roots (“Act Two: ”) and West’s internal struggle with temptation (“Jesus Walks”). While the objective of the book was not to be encyclopedic (this isn’t a music form pressed behind glass, it’s in motion), it was to be representative: The book’s goal is to exhibit a diversity of content, poetry and language. Seeing the lyrics on a page, once the errors are untangled, is a way to formally set down the lyric’s intent. Part of this, even the critics agree, is simply the nature of stories passed down and the trick of the ear, like a game of telephone. Bradley acknowledged the transcription errors and said he plans to correct them in future printings. All of this was played out quite publicly earlier this fall both in the blogosphere and in a series of pieces in Slate by Paul Devlin, who enumerated some of the more egregious errors he’d encountered (backed up with audio). ![]() They are the poets and rap is the poetry of hip-hop culture.” For a book that seeks to elevate the importance of rap lyrics by placing them between two covers, hip-hop heads - old and young - with ears keen to the chapter and verse of the rhymes are already calling foul, citing various errors in transcription. MCs, hip-hop’s master of ceremonies, are its literary artists. “Hip-hop,” writes Gates, "… is an umbrella term to describe the multifaceted culture of which rap is but a part. More than 800 pages, the book not only carefully distinguishes between the long-tangled definitions of hip-hop and rap but also attempts to situate three decades of witness-bearing - with all of its bravado and blemishes - into historical and literary context. and afterwords by Chuck D and Common, is the first formal anthology of rap lyrics spanning 1978 to the present. “The Anthology of Rap,” edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois and with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. As Public Enemy’s Richter-scale tripping Chuck D once put it: “Rap is CNN for black people.” Some had wandered into something else, something that seemed to speak to their everyday, a resonant soundtrack of sorts. These were the voices telling stories of the streets, the stories of what was happening to those people who sat in the pews - or who once did. While “Preaching With Sacred Fire” follows the pulpit narrative from slavery to the ascendency of President Obama, there was another set of voices gaining momentum too. It’s about the little one with the little nappy hair whose mama is on drugs and whose daddy is in jail.” It’s about little girls and boys in our churches. It’s about generations who are coming after us. As Weems tells her flock in her 2004 sermon “Not … Yet”: “Right now, this race is not about me and you. ![]() Jakes and Renita Weems weave a narrative of struggle, resistance and resilience. Franklin Peter Gomes Jesse Jackson Louis Farrakhan T.D. ![]() It is a sonorous continuum of voices, prophetic and poetic: John Chavis, the country’s first ordained African American Presbyterian preacher Douglass Martin Luther King Jr. Here are more than 100 sermons, from both Christian and Muslim traditions, that speak to the pressing issues - slavery, segregation, the war on drugs - of their day. What “Preaching With Sacred Fire” underscores is that though seldom was wider light cast upon it, this oral tradition has flourished for centuries from the pulpit: Men and women who have educated, uplifted and unified their flocks. ![]() Grabbing the mike, so to speak, and reclaiming their own narrative and the vast platform from which to tell it didn’t happen until the mid-20th century. Histories, family narratives, parables were passed through generations but were quietly held. For decades, large-scale stories told from an African American point of view were few and far between.
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