Outside Reading: Book Review due 11/15/10

11/14/10

“Hip-Hop Goes to Harvard” by Matt Labash

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704141104575588352291226856.html

Matt Labash's book review of Yale University's Press's “Anthology of Rap” is hilarious. He spends most of the review showering the book with praise heavy with sarcasm. He mainly derides the seriousness with which the book takes itself. Labash successfully discredits the book by proving his points through irony and fake sincerity.

Any reader can immediately pick up the author's mocking tone by his opening line, “Few book titles this season will cause as many involuntary titters as Yale University Press's 'Anthology of Rap.' Perhaps the 'Harvard Encyclopedia of Ridin' Dirty' or the 'Oxford Companion to Crunk' could do the same”. Diction is the main tool Labash uses to create a fake seriousness when writing about the book. For example, he refers to the editors as “Mssrs. Bradley and Dubois” and calls their book a “poetic canon”. When “defending” the artistry in rap, Labash claims “their flow, their authority, their wordplay, their verbal dexterity and pyrotechnics, are not talents easily acquired. Real craft goes into what they do. As rap legend Kool Moe Dee once rhymed: 'To say rap is not work is ludicrous / Whoever said it must be new to this.'"

Labash also uses allusions to enhance the ridiculousness of what he is stating. For example, he commends the writers for attempting to recast today's hip-hop into the “timeless poetry of tomorrow, with the 50 Cents and Lil' Kims serving as our modern Wordsworths and Dickinsons”. He even goes as far as to place lyrics like "You say, sex is good, sex is on / If it wasn't for sex you wouldn't be born / Think about it” and “The Waste Land” by T.S. Elliott on the same playing field.

At the end, Labash abandons his facade and is outright with his denouncement of the book. He refers the reader to a purposefully humorous book on dissecting rap. Labash sums up his piece with the lines “If you suspect the difference is that one is a serious book and the other an unserious one, you'd be wrong. They are both actually unserious books. It's just that only one of them knows it.”

As for the critical perspectives at work, this piece does not seem to employ any of the ones we are familiar with. This review seems to be written solely to entertain the reader and to make fun of the “pseudo-scholarship” the book takes on. This review's writing style reminds me of Stephen Colbert's “I Am America (And So Can You!)”. Both works are hilariously sarcastic and very entertaining.