I propose dividing the history of rap scholarship into three eras (as musicologists are inclined to do!). The first era begins in the mid-1990s with works by Richard Shusterman, Tricia Rose, Russell Potter, Robert Walser, Cheryl Keyes, and their peers. Shusterman, Rose, Potter, and others were among the first to publish academic work on rap music. They approached the genre through philosophy, cultural studies, English, and American studies. Although some spoke in general terms about the music and may have done some lyrical analysis, these works are important because they lay the epistemological foundation on which music studies needed to build. In his 1991 article “The Fine Art of Rap,” philosopher Richard Shusterman argued that rap was a fundamentally postmodern art form and, as such, required a different sort of analytical lens. Potter’s work echoed Shusterman’s, arguing that rap music constitutes a form of subversive play, that the forms of hip hop culture generate meaning(s) as they push against modernist cultural and aesthetic norms. Both call attention, for instance, to rap’s time-consciousness (as opposed to the timelessness that we typically value in modernist Western aesthetics): think of Flavor Flav’s giant clock necklace or how KRS-One ends Boogie Down Productions’ song “South Bronx” by proclaiming it “Fresh for [19]86, you suckers!”
Tricia Rose’s first book Black Noise was published in 1994 and all subsequent rap scholarship owes a debt of gratitude to her work. Rose brings a wide range of approaches to the table, considering rap music and hip hop culture through lenses of race, gender, music, and politics more broadly.
Rap entered the field of music studies via ethnomusicology in the mid-1990s, an early marker of its status as Other among more “serious” musics. Perhaps in an effort to justify the inclusion of rap in academia, much of this scholarship was focused on overtly political artists like Public Enemy and N.W.A. Cheryl Keyes remembers encountering rap in an ethnomusicology class when she was a graduate student.[1] Her early scholarly works include some of the first efforts to transcribe rap music into Western staff notation and offer some keen musical observations about Old School rap (i.e., rap from about 1975-1985). Her 2002 book, Rap Music and Street Consciousness, was among the first book-length music-academic studies of rap music. Robert Walser’s essay on Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” brings together musical and political analysis to argue that rap is indeed a valid and important genre worthy of (music-)academic attention. As the study of rap gained traction in music departments over the next ten years, the methodologies for approaching it began to change.
Second era (2000-2015)
The second era begins around 2000 with the work of Adam Krims. Krims, Felicia Miyakawa, Kyle Adams and their peers. These scholars followed in Walser’s footsteps, performing what we might consider structural analyses or close readings of rap songs and developing theories of rhythm, form, and flow. Krims, Miyakawa, and others work diligently to situate their analyses in some sort of cultural context (Miyakawa’s studies of flow in the context of Five-Percenter rap, for instance) while others more closely uphold the music-theoretical ideal of “the music itself,” absent any significant cultural context. The repertoire under consideration here is (perhaps not surprisingly) more wide-ranging, with strong focus on the Golden-Age rappers like Wu-Tang, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, and the like. These artists were popular during the period that many of these scholars were in high school and early college, so it is not surprising that by the time they entered graduate school, they looked to this repertoire to study. Because the study of rap music was still very much in its infancy, it makes sense that the analytical tools they used to study the music were largely adapted from the prevailing theoretical approaches to Western European art music. To study the music in this way often meant transcribing it, a thorny issue that I take up in Chapter 3.
It helped that much of the music from hip hop’s Golden Age was characterized by complex wordplay about political subjects over dense beat collages: this is music that practically begged for the kinds of analysis that music theory was good at—text/music relationships, intertextuality, and rhythm. I would include myself in this group for the most part: my earliest work on rap analyzed music by Cypress Hill and Ice-T, both of who were popular during the time I was in high school (1989-1993). By the time I was in my doctoral program in the early 2000s, I had been a fan for about a decade at that point, and many of the available tools we had for studying rap were well suited, perhaps with a few tweaks, for analyzing that music. For me, the music—the “notes themselves,” as theorists like to say—were always at the center of a constellation of meanings.
Joseph Schloss’s book Making Beats (2004) is an important contribution to this second wave of scholarship in that it foregrounds ethnographic methods to study how DJs and producers actually make beats: his theorizing about how the music is composed is based on dozens of interviews that he conducted with artists. Schloss’s approach, which he would use again in his second book, Foundation, demonstrated the value of engaging in musical analysis that emerged from community as opposed to imposing a set of preexisting frameworks on musics for which they were not intended. Mark Katz took a similar approach in his 2012 book Groove Music in which he sought to understand how the craft of hip hop DJing evolved. Katz approached turntablism as a student and connected with dozens of prominent hip hop DJs around the country who taught him the basics as well as more advanced techniques and regional stylistic variations.
During the 2000s, we start to see the establishment of academic programs that focus on rap music. In 2002, Marcyliena Morgan established the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard University (the school from which Krims graduated in 1997). Cornell University’s Hip Hop Archive was founded five years later in 2007. Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive launched its Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellowship program in 2013. I discuss these two institutions in a broader discussion of archives in Chapter 2.
North Carolina is not often the first place that comes to mind when people think about rap music, but the state has been on the vanguard of bringing rap music into academia. In 2007, producer 9th Wonder and Christopher “Play” Martin (of Kid-n-Play) joined the faculty of North Carolina Central College as artists-in-residence. A few years later, Mark Anthony Neal brought 9th Wonder to Duke University in 2010. The music department at University of North Carolina’s flagship campus at Chapel Hill has a strong program in popular music generally, and has been Mark Katz’s academic home since 2006. He was instrumental in developing hip hop-centered classes and programs at UNC and in the broader academic community. [MORE—maybe mention Build]
Indiana University began to establish itself as a center for rap studies in part because of its strong ethnomusicology and folklore program. Cheryl Keyes and Felicia Miyakawa earned their doctorates there; Kyle Adams joined the faculty along with Fernando Orejuela, who published arguably the first undergraduate-level textbook dedicated to rap music.[2] Robert Komaniecki earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on rap music in 2019; Noriko Manabe joined the faculty in 2023.
The Peabody Conservatory, long known for training some of the world’s best classical performers, developed a bachelor’s degree in hip hop which launched in 2025. The program is significant because it focuses on performance as opposed to more academic approaches to hip hop. Students can choose to study rap performance, turntablism, beatboxing, or production. Applicants must pass a prescreening and complete a music theory proficiency assessment in order to advance to a live audition/interview with members of the faculty. At the time of this writing, the faculty featured hip hop legends DJ Babu and Lupe Fiasco (who had been teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as well as the award-winning composer, instrumentalist, and producer Wendell Patrick.
I posit Justin Williams’ Rhymin’ and Stealin’ and Loren Kajikawa’s book Sounding Race in Rap Songs, published in 2014 and 2015 respectively, as marking the end of this era of scholarship. Williams’ book develops a comprehensive theory of borrowing for rap music. It is a theory that feels organic to rap music in a way that many previous theories do not. Kajikawa’s book draws on theories of racial formation to inform his readings of rap songs, bringing a kind of nuance that had been missing from earlier work. [MORE] It was around this time that hip hop’s “blog era” was sunsetting just as social media sites like Twitter and Facebook started pulling attention away from longer-form writing. Widespread access to fast and inexpensive internet helped streaming media sites like Spotify reshape how we produce and consume music. These changes impacted how we teach and write about music as well.

[1] https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/the-view-from-the-front-row-a-profile-of-cheryl-keyes/
[2] A case could be made that anthologies like Strode and Woods’ or That’s the Joint! are more deserving of that honor but Orejuela’s was clearly marketed as a textbook.