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Signifying Rappers

Prepared byCabataña, Rieza Mariel

Signifying Rappers

ABOUT THE AUTHORDavid Foster WallaceBorn: February 21, 1962 at Ithaca,New York, US

Died: September 12, 2008 atClaremont, California

Occupation: novelist, short storywriter, essayist, college professor

Genre: Literary fiction, Non-fiction

Literary Movement: PostmodernLiterature, Post-postmodernism,Histerical Realism

Period: 1987-2008

David Foster Wallace“He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy instorytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late'80s and early 1990s.” – David Ulin, Times Book Editor

Signifying Rappers

THE MAKINGDavid Foster Wallace returned to school in the

hopes of becoming an academic philosopher, like his dad, andhe asked his old Amherst College roommate and best friend,Mark Costello, to rejoin him.

Wallace was a machine of words during this time,and Costello was a writer who was doing a job that wasn’twriting.

By summer, Wallace was leaving out a partlywritten essay he was writing on rap music—he may haveundertaken it on his own or it may have been solicitedby Antaeus—and inviting Costello to add responses. IncludingCostello was kind, but it was also desperate: grad school wasapproaching in the fall, and Wallace had no idea how to finishthe work.

Costello remembers his roommate writing twenty-five hundred words in aday and then tearing them up. They collaborated, section by section, short calls andresponses, the article extending into a book.

AuthorsMark Costello, David Foster Wallace

CountryUnited States

LanguageEnglish

PublisherLittle, Brown and Company

Publication DateJuly 23, 2013

Pages153

Preceded byGirl with Curious Hair

Followed byInfinite Jest

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present is a nonfiction book by David FosterWallace and Mark Costello. The book explores this music's history as it intersects withhistorical events, either locally and unique to Boston, or in larger cultural or historicalcontexts.

Signifying Rappers

TITLE

Based on the track "Signifying Rapper" on the album Smoke Some Kill by Schoolly D.

Whas upWhas goin on

Before we start this next recordI gotta put my shades on

So I can feel coolRemember that law?

When you had to put your shades on to feel cool?

Well it's still a lawGotta put your shades on

So you can feel coolI'm gonna put my shades on

So I can't seeWhat you aint doin

And you aint doin nothin

Signifying Rappers

TITLE

Based on the track "Signifying Rapper" on the album Smoke Some Kill by Schoolly D.

You aint doin nothinThat I [unintelligible]

Well let's get on with this [bleep] anyway:Say it loud

I'm black and I'm proudSay it loud

I'm black and I'm proud!Say it loud

I'm mmm hum proudSay it loud

Mum hum hum proud!Black is beautiful

Brown is [sick? slick? stiff?]Yellow's OK

But white aint shit.

Signifying Rappers

SUMMARY

Finally back in print—David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant explorationof rap music and culture.

Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and long-time friend MarkCostello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, anddistinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop." The book theywrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolaritiesof rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom. SignifyingRappers issued a fan's challenge to the giants of rock writing, Greil Marcus, RobertPalmer, and Lester Bangs: Could the new street beats of 1989 set us free, as rock hadalways promised?

Back in print at last, Signifying Rappers is a rare record of a city and a summer by twogreat thinkers, writers, and friends. With a new foreword by Mark Costello on hisexperience writing with David Foster Wallace, this rerelease cannot be missed.

Signifying Rappers

REVIEWS“Costello and Wallace’s pioneering study is a dazzling performance: informative,provocative, funny, brilliantly written… great wit, insight and in-your-face energy” –Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Both a cogent explication of rap and a cutting, revealing parody of overinflated,pseudointellectual rap criticism.” – Seattle Weekly

"Self-conscious about their outsider status and given to lamenting how hard it is toget people on the rap scene to talk to dorky white people...Mark Costello and DavidFoster Wallace have nonetheless delivered...the only theoretically interesting bookon rap.“ – The Village Voice

“…We get a vivid picture of rap's real-life context in an area of poverty, drugs andvarious types of radical activity, an environment closed to upscale whites by thebarriers of fear and oppression.” – Publisher’s Weekly

“Rap’s here-and-now is always here-and-now; a music without a future tense can’t

but be immortal.”

Referenceshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/signifying-rappers-mark-costello/1102256676?ean=9780316225830

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/19/signifying-rappers-book-review