David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap
music and culture.
Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime
friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable,
somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music
called rap/hip-hop."
The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music
scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance,
glitz and gangsterdom. Signifying Rappers issued a fan's challenge to
the giants of rock writing, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, and Lester
Bangs: Could the new street beats of 1989 set us free, as rock had
always promised?
Back in print at last, Signifying Rappers is a rare record of a city
and a summer by two great thinkers, writers, and friends. With a new
foreword by Mark Costello on his experience writing with David Foster
Wallace, this rerelease cannot be missed.