Someone who bought my book and found my website reached out to me and asked me to recommend some books about rap. Here’s my reply (may be of interest to others):
You'll be happy to know (if you haven't seen already) that one of the appendices in the book is my top 25 texts on rap music. If I had to pick five, hmmm... I'll do a "classic 5" and a "contemporary 5"; take the following lists with a grain of salt, since I don't know your background.
1. Everything begins with Tricia Rose's Black Noise. It's the first significant book-length academic treatment of rap music.
2. Jeff Chang's Can't Stop, Won't Stop is a classic history of the genre
3. Imani Perry's Prophets of the Hood is a book I didn't love at first, but find myself now coming back to over and over again.
4. Adam Krims' Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity is another must-read, one of the first books to really connect the music with identity (race) for me.
5. Joseph Schloss' Making Beats is very thought-provoking in terms of how the tracks are put together both technically and aesthetically.
More recently:
1. Loren Kajikawa's Sounding Race in Rap Songs really got me thinking about the connections between sound and race
2. Eric Nielson and Andrea Dennis' Rap on Trial is a must-read that lays out what's truly at stake when we talk about rap music
3. Is a tie: Lauron Kehrer's Queer Voices in Hip Hop and Shanté Paradigm Smalls' Hip Hop Heresies offer gender-based rethinkings of the classic tales of hip hop history. I've read the first one; the second one is on my shelf and up next...
4. I haven't read his book yet (it's backordered, last I checked) but Mitch Ohriner's Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music is definitely on this list (I've read many of his articles and have seen him present, so I get the gist of what he does).
5. Mark Katz's Groove Music is a good companion piece to the Schloss above, that looks at the art of turntablism.
Happy reading!