Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide

Geoff Hamilton, a former columnist for the Queen’s Journal, is a
Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

This collection brings together 50 or so essays by prominent critics on
more than 80 rap music albums. Material was selected with an eye to
examining those albums deemed to be the “most vital to understanding
the power, scope, and legacy of hip-hop on its own merits.” Each
essay—ranging from Afrika Bambaataa to Eminem to Jay-Z to LL Cool J to
Wu-Tang Clan—attempts to define the importance of a particular artist
and his work to the genre. Many of the writers are contributors to such
magazines as Vibe, Source, Spin, and Village Voice. Those interested in
filling in gaps in their knowledge of rap music, or finding provocation
for debate, will no doubt judge this book valuable and entertaining. Any
selection of “most important” music will be controversial, but this
one is impressively comprehensive in its scope.

What weakens it considerably, however, is the typically sophomoric
nature of the writing. Written by devotees, many of them with
graduate-school credentials, the essays often tend toward
cliché-saturated gushing and self-conscious mythmaking rather than
mature analysis. Hua Hsu, for instance, wraps up his essay on Nas’s
Illmatic by remarking: “As a kid, Nas didn’t fear God; he just
thought he was better, and he wanted people to know that tomorrow.
Unfortunately, that next day came, and the boy who was ahead of his time
grew into a man forever captive to it.”

At times the prose is absurd and totally unhelpful, as in this
observation by Joseph Patel about the group Organized Konfusion:
“[They] used metaphor and escapism as an exercise of self-deliberation
on their debut, but on [their follow-up album] those mechanicals are
even more finely tuned, and the result is an album of darker
emission.” In addition, an emphasis on (usually very flimsy)
sociopolitical analysis is routine in the essays and often crowds out
insights into the artists’ aesthetic achievements. The best
essays—that is, the most incisive, sensitive, and balanced—are those
by Melissa Maerz (The Coup) and Elizabeth Mendez Berry (Eminem, Jay-Z).