Eight Page Turning Hip-Hop Must Haves for the Holidays

Hip-hop has always prided itself on its oral traditions—rappers, at their core, are street griots who provide corner reportage on varied topics: ghetto tales, politics, relationships, the drug game and, what Jay-Z would term “the life.” This year, in particular, saw those accounts documented and anthologized in great detail. With the holidays in full swing, XXL decided to offer its picks of the best hip-hop books to buy this season. —Jason Parham

Decoded
Jay-Z
Spiegel & Grau

“I wasn’t even in high school yet and I’d discovered my voice,” writes Jay-Z of his time growing up in Brooklyn. “But I still needed a story to tell. Hip-hop was looking for a narrative, too.”

Fourteen years and 10 solo albums since the debut of his gangster polemic Reasonable Doubt, not only has Jay-Z told his story—often heart-wrenching (“Song Cry,” “Lost One”), almost always vivid (“Coming of Age,” “Where I’m From”)—he has largely defined, and at times even controlled, the hip-hop narrative. In Decoded, part memoir (ghostwritten by veteran rap scribe Dream Hampton), part song index, Jay-Z offers a narrow glimpse into the life of Shawn Carter vis-a-vi selected tracks. Which begs the question: What isn’t Jay-Z telling us? Why these songs? Still, for a man known for his cryptic rhyming, the book is a treat for die-hards who’ve yearned for more clarity on songs like “Can I Live?”

“I’ve never been a linear thinker,” Jay-Z said of the book, “which is something you can see in my rhymes. They follow the jumpy logic of poetry and emotion, not the straight line of careful prose.” But that’s just it with Decoded, which debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times Bestsellers List in November: it is a book of careful and generous documentation—it’s a love story by, and of, rap’s most successful son.

The perfect gift for: Jay-Z stans who insist Kingdom Come isn’t that bad of an album.

The Anthology of Rap
Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois
Yale University Press

Ever since Adam Bradley, a professor at the University of Colorado, published Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop in 2009, he’s been on a crusade to substantiate rap lyrics as high art, as poetry akin to, say, a Walt Whitman or Langston Hughes verse. The attempt is both condemning and cause for celebration. It’s problematic because, as Bradley says, “we must understand rap as poetry or else ignore the vanguard of poetry today,” which, to be fair, only further confines what hip-hop has come to represent. On the other hand, Bradley is smart in that DMX’s “Who We Be” or Big L’s “Ebonics (Criminal Slang)” or Snoop Dogg’s “Gin & Juice” (Snoop is “the gangster-stoner-poet-pimp of rap” according to Bradley) are deserving of canonization within the academy. With The Anthology of Rap, Bradley and Andrew DuBois’s encyclopedic love letter to hip-hop, these formidable scholars pull together songs from over 100 rappers as a testament to the genre’s lyrical and, yes, poetic depth. At nearly 900 pages, it’s an impressive tome of undeniable and indelible substance.

The perfect gift for: The grad student doing their thesis on the intersections of rap lyrics and futurist percussive poetry.

Atlanta: Hip-hop and the South
Michael Schmelling, Kalefa Sanneh and Will Welch
Chronicle Books

“People talk a lot about Atlanta hip-hop, but almost never about the Atlanta sound, which makes sense, because there isn’t one. Which is to say, there are plenty.” So writes Kelefa Sanneh, former New York Times pop music critic, in Atlanta: Hip-hop and the South—a photo book as engrossing and wide-ranging as the music and culture it celebrates. Collected within are photos by Michael Schmelling, Q&As with rap stalwarts Andre 3000 and Ludacris, among others, and essays by Sanneh. The milieu—gritty, glamorous, unfailingly colorful—from which Schmelling captures his subjects is, to be sure, the elusive Atlanta sound Sanneh hints at: a sound defined by struggling rappers, emboldened dance moves and flashy automobiles—or, as he notes in the essay titled “The Sound of Atlanta Hip-hop,” one that is “a bit more raw, a lot more fun.”

The perfect gift for: Regional rap die-hards and Magic City regulars.

Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic
Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzi
Basic Civitas Books

Nas, if nothing else, is a storyteller. Nowhere is this more evident than on 1994’s Illmatic—his first and, by most accounts, his best album. On “Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park)” he affirms, “I drop the ancient manifested hip-hop, straight off the block.” In a way, he’s right: there was prophecy in his wordplay—he told cautionary tales and gave first-hand accounts of growing up black and poor in 1980s New York. The album, heralded as “a masterwork” and “groundbreaking,” would go on to inspire a generation of budding lyricists—Eminem, The Game and Fashawn, to name but three, all credit Illmatic as inspiration, rap scripture from which they formulated their own talents. The album also inspired Born to Use Mics, a nearly track-by-track meditation by today’s leading academic scholars. The book is a collection of pedantic essays and provides dissertation-worthy analysis for songs like “One Time 4 Your Mind” and “It Ain’t Hard To Tell.” Much like the album it pays homage to, Born To Use Mics* reads like a master class for hip-hop purists.

The perfect gift for: Intelligent-minded hip-hop heads that yearn for a deeper understanding of the seminal rap album.

Invincible: A Novel
Styles P
One World/ Ballantine

In his debut novel, Yonkers-born Styles P tells the story of the tough-minded Jake Billings, a man that finds himself face to face with a hard truth: trust no one. “In his world,” writes Styles, “there was no such thing as fair play—not from the thieves, not from the police, not from women, not from family or so-called friends. As far as Jake was concerned, only God could be trusted.” It’s the same DIY approach he’s taken throughout much of his own career—first as a member of the LOX, then as a solo artist and, now, as aspiring author. In a way, the novel, a sort of hip-hop thriller, mirrors those of Chester Himes, who often employed the characters of his black detective mysteries with keen introspection. Invincible, akin to A Gangster And A Gentleman or Time is Money, offers a street narrative as enticing as it is entertaining.

The perfect gift for: Street lit readers who never quite grasped the metaphysical undercurrents of HBO’s The Wire.

The Boombox Project: The Machines, The Music, And The Urban Underground Book
Lyle Owerko
Abrams Image

Lyle Owerko, a New York-based photojournalist and filmmaker, wears the hat of hip-hop historian and pop cultural archivist with The Boombox Project, his stunning visual timeline of the age-old machines that figured into the early rise of rap. An oral history accompanies the photo-documentation (though the images are stunning by themselves) with accounts from Kool Moe Dee, Fab 5 Freddy, Lisa Lisa and LL Cool J, among others. More importantly, though, The Boombox Project is a snapshot of a bygone era—a time when graffiti reigned supreme and shell-top Adidas were hip-hop de rigueur. “There was no sense in having a boombox,” writes director Spike Lee in the foreword, “if you did not play it at ear-drum shattering levels. You also had to be ready to fight if somebody dared asked you to ‘turn that shit down.’ This fine book superbly documents the boombox in all its loud glory.”

The perfect gift for: History buffs who felt a special connection with Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing.

Public Enemy’s ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’
Chris Weingarten
Continuum

Has there ever been a more prophetic statement on hip-hop than Public Enemy’s searing declaration; “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back”? The album, considered a rap staple, is politicized rhetoric on wax. Just listen to a rebellious Chuck D on “Bring the Noise;” he spits, “Follow for now, power of the people, say/ Make a miracle, D, pump the lyrical.” It’s an arresting statement, to say the least, but not one without precedent. This is where Chris Weingarten comes in, uncovering the science behind Public Enemy’s landmark album—the raw sound, the radical lyrics, the impassioned sentiments. With a kind of obsessive accuracy, Weingarten digs deep and comes up big. The result is nothing less than a rap nerd’s guide to perhaps the greatest hip-hop album of all time.

The perfect gift for: The sagacious rap critic who thinks they know everything there is to know about It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (by which we mean, you don’t!).

The Big Payback: The History of The Business of Hip-Hop
Dan Charnas
New American Library

Money, power, respect—you know the tale. Or do you? Dan Charnas, one-time Source writer and eventual Vice President of A&R at Def Jam, pays particular attention to the seminal Q-Tip line, “Industry rule #4080/ Record company people are shady.” In his epic, Charnas charts hip-hop’s multi-million dollar rise and influence as a cultural force. “In my years as a record executive,” writes Charnas, “I saw plenty of exploitation. But I also saw plenty of businesspeople who were honest and sincere, moved by a love for hip-hop culture; and artists, producers, and DJs who cared nothing for the culture and permitted themselves to live without ethics. My goal for this book was to toss the platitudes and show how hip-hop was co-created by the artists and by the people who pushed them into that world.”

The perfect gift for: Budding moguls and general hip-hop connoisseurs interested in the politics of the music industry.