'Hip-hop started out in the heart, now everybody's trying to chart," rapped Lauryn Hill in her 1997 song Superstar. A critique as pithy as it is damning, Hill's rhyme is brought to mind by a new (and huge) book charting rap's evolution over the past three decades, from underground artform to global pop movement.
With previously unpublished photographs, essays and a foreword by Afrika Bambaataa, its publishers claim Hip-Hop: a Cultural Odyssey (£249.99) is the first book of its kind. It's almost certainly the biggest; we have trouble lifting the thing.
