There are certain tendencies in writing about rap, the most striking of which is perhaps an overintellectualisation of the form – an overconcentration on its socio-economic, historical and community importance. Another related tendency is the writer becoming so wrapped up in the rhetoric of rap's importance as a movement that he or she forgets to say how strong, how powerful it sounds. Despite all the book's virtues, this is undeniably a fault of Signifying Rappers, a slim volume first published in 1990 and long out of print before this reissue. For all the authors' intelligence and knowingness, they spend too long telling you what it's like to be two white guys about to graduate from Harvard listening to a predominantly black music, and giving the context and a critique of rap. There is too little interaction with the music on a visceral level, heads nodding in between the booming kick drum and the exploding snare – the ebb and flow, the urgency of the lyrics.
This is an early, minor work by Foster Wallace, mighty author of Infinite Jest, and if you dig around you can find references to his later being a little embarrassed by it. But perhaps what matters is how he felt at the time: he couldn't help but get swept up in the birth and infancy of an emerging music. In fact some critics claim that his illustrious career was kick-started by this exercise in rap theory, co-authored in an Amherst apartment, in what his former roommate Mark Costello describes in the foreword to this edition as part of the "soup stock of our friendship … co-reading, passing paperbacks around like mashed potatoes at a family dinner". (Costello writes about how, though he didn't know it when he moved in with him, Foster Wallace had already tried to kill himself: he kept it from Costello to avoid "the tepidities of kindness".)
As an account of an "uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctly white enthusiasm" for rap, the essay, described by Costello as "a sermon, really: lucid, brave, abrasive", seems at times – despite the knowingness – more like an extended joke. It could never be confused with, say, the in-depth reportage of a heroic rap commentator such as Nelson George. There's a nerdiness and excitable outsider feel to the chapters, which are delivered like two rappers swapping verses (or rather constructing "three chapters aping the Hegelian thesis, anti-, synthesis" – rap, Foster Wallace argues, "resolves its own contradictions by genuflecting to them"). The first one's called "entitlement", and it puts at the centre of the stage two dudes in their mid-20s, called Costello and Wallace, and their reactions to a new music in all its power and glory, a sound so raw that no one knew yet quite what to make of it. Rap had not yet received much notice from the critics; there was no yardstick by which to measure it. When rappers rhapsodise now about the golden age, about the old skool, this is what Wallace and Costello are addressing.
They write cleverly of lyrics "spoken or yelled, often rhymed or assonant, but always metered, complicating and complementing the marriage of back-bass, scratches and drums, creating a dense diachronic rhythmic layering instead of the harmonic or contrapuntal synchronicities that have marked most western music". Which is fine, but for me there is some distance between this and the battlecry of empowerment that greets you when Chuck D urges: "bass, how low can you go".
When it is simple and reflective and not too obsessed with the authors excusing themselves for their whiteness, the book hits home, not least in the nature of the authors' admission that their interest in rap came from its "hard edge", and their deconstruction of the relationship between violent music and a violent society.
Costello's foreword is illuminating. Looking back on that time and the interest he and his friend shared, he describes the pair's admiration for the great rock critic Lester Bangs, whose reviews and columns still impress with their single-minded, drug-fuelled, pernickety passion. This book's dedication to Bangs is telling: in some ways it must be a homage to the man who made his name slinging words at the rock'n'roll establishment for much of the 70s and 80s.
Costello talks about living with Foster Wallace: his habits, how he would write with his legs crossed, for instance. And much like the mixtape of B-sides, remixes and instrumentals that often accompany a rap record, this piece of work might well be for admirers only – of Foster Wallace, that is, rather than rap (fans of which might be better off with Nelson George, or even Chuck D). What to make of Signifying Rappers now that we know what happens afterwards – rap becomes hip-hop, a mainstream monolith used for selling fizzy drinks? That's its inherent contradiction – the truth of the old rap adage "It's not where you're from, it's where you're at." But then, as Foster Wallace puts it aptly: "Rap's easy to move to, hard to dissect."
