A hip-hop syllabus—for fans, by fans.

September 11, 2024, 1:25pm Questlove, best known as one of the more famous drummers to ever live and co-founder of The Roots, released a memoir this month called Hip-Hop is History. Co-written with his regular collaborator, Ben Greenman, this personal narrative builds on a growing canon of hip-hop lit. Fans will be pleased to know that there’s a lot of industry tea spilled. But there’s also a guiding arc to this autobiography, which traces the rise of hip-hop as an art form. The collections below also explore the best American music form (there, I said it) as both a cultural phenomenon and a revolutionary force. The authors are theorists, critics, and historians. But before all that? They were just like Questlove. Which is to say, they were fans. Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip-Hop This one came up on a recent episode of Reckon True Stories, the excellent new podcast from authors Kiese Laymon and Deesha Philyaw. Perry’s close looks at Lil’ Kim, Outkast, and De La Soul (among other groups) are trenchant and wise. This is a work of readable narrative scholarship, nestled in a fan letter but predicated on the Afrocentric argument that...