Signifying Rappers

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present

First edition cover
Author Mark Costello and
David Foster Wallace
Country United States
Language English
Publisher Ecco Press
Publication date
November 1990
Pages 140 pp
ISBN 0-88001-255-2
OCLC 20992523
Preceded by Girl with Curious Hair
Followed by Infinite Jest

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present is a nonfiction book by David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello. The book explores this music's history as it intersects with historical events, either locally and unique to Boston, or in larger cultural or historical contexts.

Title

The title is based on the track "Signifying Rapper" on the album Smoke Some Kill by Schoolly D. The teasing, taunting, and insulting tradition within African American culture is referred to as "signifyin'", though the word's other meanings are perhaps reflected in Wallace's title. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written extensively on the Signifyin (or Signifying) Monkey, its origins and meaning, and how the monkey's attitude and effort to overcome evolved into the "Your motha is so fat" back-and-forth that was part of hip hop's original culture.The slang of rap, like all slang, may include words that signify others, such as "cut" (turntable technique), "bite" (stealing someone else’s rhymes), "dope" (great), "dawg" (male friend) and such neologisms as "edutainment" (KRS-One) or "raptivist" (Chuck D of Public Enemy), but it is not an important use of the idea of signifying in rap or hip hop. Signifying in critical theory usage is also meaningful, as signifier in critical theory, Ferdinand de Saussure.

Publication history

The work was initially published as a shorter 20 page essay in (Wallace & Costello 1990), and then expanded to book size and the first edition published in late 1990. A second edition was published in 2013, following the death of the first author Wallace, and includes a new preface by second author Mark Costello.

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