Hip-hop Harvard
Hip-hop at Harvard? Well, yes. Harvard not only has its Hiphop Archive, part of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research since 2003, and the first of its kind. But it also has bragging rights on “The Anthology of Rap” (Yale University Press, 2010), edited by two young scholars who earned their doctorates in English at Harvard in 2003. The hefty book is the first major print collection of lyrics from the musical form that in three decades has swept the world. The foreword is by Du Bois Institute director Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard’s Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor. “Rap’s tradition is as broad and as deep as any other form of poetry,” he wrote, though rap’s immediate antecedents go back to rhetorical street games called “the Dozens,” or signifying, or to “toasts” — long oral poems — that date back at least to the eve of...