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Another pretty simple answer, from outside the window: even the best of rap has no 'vision' of anything beyond present discontent less because it's a black music than because it's a distinctively young one. Ours is a generation (late- or post-Boom) divorced from Time: we're taught to look to the …

Yr. staff posits that the rapper's is a Scene that has accepted—yea, reveres—the up-to-date values and symbols of a Supply Side prosperity, while rejecting, with a scorn not hard to fathom, what seem to remain the 'rules' for how the Marginal are supposed to improve their lot therein: viz., by st…

... Is it real freedom, though: a world where Chuck D. can serenade his Uzi in art exactly because in the S. Bronx 'Uzi's' such a perfect metonym for irresistible force? For all the exciting formal innovations and transformations of rap, what's finally, for us, its most affecting quality is that …

[...] He had served only one day when he was told that an anonymous 'well-dressed Negro' had paid the $178 fine. King protested; he wanted to stay jailed. The Albany police chief refused, explaining that since King's fine had now been paid, it would be illegal to keep him behind bars. The 'well-dre…

[...] it's quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today. 'Real' (viz. academic) U.S. poetry, a world no less insular than rap, no less strange or stringent about vocab, manner, and the contexts it works off, has today become so inbred and (against its professed wishes)…