While I was teaching the graduate seminar on being responsible rap scholars, two very different articles about rap crossed my desk at nearly the same time. The first article was “Notes on Trap” by Jesse McCarthy, published in 2018; the second was “Regional Variation in West and East Coast African-American English Prosody and Rap Flows,” by Steven Gilbers, Nienke Hoeksema, and Kees de Bot, and Wander Lowie, which was published in 2020. The former article was published in n+1, “a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics”; the latter appeared in the journal Language and Speech.[1] McCarthy is a professor of English and African-American studies at Harvard; Gilbers and his colleagues are linguists and based at academic institutions in the Netherlands. I remember being struck by how very different in almost every way these two essays were, yet both dealt with the same subject matter—the sound of rap music—in their own detailed and thoughtful ways. In this section, I take these articles as emblematic of two broader trends in rap scholarship at the start of the 2020s. The first strand, exemplified by “Notes on Trap,” represents a more personal, subjective engagement with the music, where the writing style is more literary than “academic.”[2] The second strand shows authors using powerful technology to study a corpus of music in great digital detail. The results of these studies are more like what you might expect to find in a science journal than a music journal.
McCarthy’s essay comprises 35 aphoristic fragments, all of which present a perspective on “trapping” in its various meanings and contexts. Among selected definitions of “trap” from the Oxford English Dictionary and quoted lyrics from T.I., Kodak Black, and Future, McCarthy writes “Trap is the only music that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like. It is the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made.”[3] In contrast to the disembodied, distanced project of Gilbers and his associates, “Notes on Trap” offers a personal, embodied understanding not only of rap music but of being a Black man in contemporary America. McCarthy’s first note is a masterclass in figurative language and offers a vision of an experience that he undoubtedly shares with many:
The beat, when it drops, is thunder, and causes the steel rods in whatever you’re riding to groan, plastics to shudder, the ass of the seat to vibrate right up into your gut. The hi-hat, pitched like an igniter, sparks. Snare rolls crescendo in waves that overmaster like a system of finely linked chains snatched up into whips, cracking and snapping across the hull of a dark hold.[4]
He seamlessly combines images of listening to music in a car with the bass thumping through a subwoofer with being chained in the dark hull of a slave ship on a stormy sea. “Chains” and “whips” carry multiple meanings—they Signify. The sizzle of the snare drum is due to chains that reverberate along the bottom head of the instrument; at the same time the word evokes restraints. “Whips” does double duty as a weapon and a slang term for car. McCarthy’s use of language to conjure complex images offers one way to help us visualize rap music (or perhaps the experience of rap music).
The unconventional structure is key to the essay, as McCarthy tells the Harvard Gazette:
The form I was using was getting in the way of making sense of the subject. Once I realized that, I adopted a different form altogether based on the discarded notes form that Susan Sontag famously used in her essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Once I posed the questions in that form, it actually changed how I listened. I could hear differently. It changed how I thought about the subject.[5]
McCarthy’s description of these fragments as discarded notes is worth exploring. Leaving aside the obvious—that these obviously were not discarded because we are reading them in print—these fragments lead us to wonder what could they have been a part of? The idea that they were discarded suggests unrealized potential. The notes are also personal, intended for the author’s eyes only. In sharing them, we get a peek into what may have been. We are tasked with putting the pieces together and making meaning for ourselves.
The Introduction to Heidi Lewis’ book Make Rappers Rap Again (2025) also comprises a variety of notes: “Notes to self and to you, the reader.” The notes are organized chronologically and lead into a more “conventional” introduction that is interspersed with more notes (mostly directed “to you”). This strategy, especially in the introduction, gives us a window into Lewis’ creative process. Because she distinguishes between notes to herself and notes to the reader we find ourselves in the midst of a kind of conversation, some of which is public, some private.
“Regional Variation in West and East Coast African-American Prosody and Rap Flow” is a very different article from “Notes on Trap,” one that is more conventionally “academic.” Gilbers and his colleagues do everything they can to create a controlled environment for their experiments (I use the word “experiment” very deliberately here). They went to Ranker.com to find the top New York City-based and Los Angeles-based rappers to compare. Rappers are ranked by fans going to the site and voting for their favorites. The authors took these lists and removed “all artists that did not fit the study’s demographic criteria (i.e., artists that were not male, African-American, or not originally from the right city) or that were not actually rappers but rather singers (e.g., Nate Dogg) or deejays (e.g., DJ Yella), for instance.”[6] Given that the purpose of the project is to study regional variations in African-American English prosody it makes sense that they selected only African-American artists, and that they excluded singers and DJs. What is not immediately clear to me is why they excluded women from their study. The rappers they chose comprise a fairly wide chronology, too, starting with Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” (1991) and concluding with Nipsey Hussle’s “Ocean Views” from 2016 (it bears mention that the list is bookended by West-Coast rappers).
From here they isolated both the rappers’ rapping and speaking voices, choosing to analyze “official” a cappella versions of the songs (as opposed to versions where they removed the beats, a process which could have left artifacts in the sound file) alongside clips of interviews from television, podcasts, and other sources.
Their article is highly technical: they discuss in detail how to calculate pitch values in Hertz (Hz; cycles per second) and include formulas for calculating the “normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI), for example, which “reflects variability across the stress-timed/syllable-timed continuum.”[7] Much of the more technical material in this article is not accessible to anyone who is not a specialist—in this case, probably someone with an advanced degree in linguistics. Lest I conjure the spirit of Milton Babbitt, I would like to think that there is a place for this kind of hip hop scholarship, that which is written with a small number of specialists in mind. But who ultimately benefits from an article like this? I found it compelling enough to read it several times over the years (and taught it once); I have not cited it because this kind of research does not figure too much into my own. Is there a way that we can frame the kind of work that Gilbers and his colleagues (and others like them) are doing as part of a larger antiracist project?
Gilbers and his colleagues choose to focus on the East Coast-West Coast rift, essentializing the two coasts to what happens in their largest cities. They choose to focus only on men rappers “who are widely known among both fanatic and casual hip-hop listeners, and who are held in high regard by fans and critics alike.”[8] Their study reifies the fairly narrow focus (or if we’re being generous, foci) of academic rap studies that there are canonical rap artists from significant regions in the United States whose music is worth studying. A logical next step for their study would be to include Southern hip hop, but as Matt Miller, Roni Sarig, Regina Bradley, Lewis, and others point out, “Southern” is a label that is often used to stereotype a wide variety of distinct regional sounds.[9] It would be interesting to consider how the researchers’ positionality as white scholars from the Netherlands influence their perception and reception of rap music. As with many articles in science fields, the article includes a funding/conflict-of-interest disclosure at the end, the purpose of which is to disclose any contributions that may have introduced an element of bias into their scholarship. But given the nature of the topic under consideration, shouldn’t we consider the biases (both positive and negative) that the researchers bring to the table?
Research like this strives to be as objective as possible, to eliminate any kind of bias from the procedure. But objectivity is a myth, and I contend that the dissolution of this myth is crucial for the future of rap scholarship and pedagogy. Western music scholarship tends to approach music as an object (or a combination of objects) that can be excavated from the people and societies that created it and studied in terms of objective truths.[10] In their work on objectivity in psychology and management research, Brittany Torrez, Cydney H. Dupree, and Michael W. Kraus remind us that Western science is rooted in both objectivity and positivism, that we can study something in such a way that our approach is free from bias (objectivity) and that our assessments of that subject are with respect to some universal idea of truth (positivism). While music theory is not science, per se, it owes a lot to the scientific method, and this is clear when we look at articles such as the one by Gilbers and his colleagues. Various subdisciplines of music theory have strong foundations in mathematics, physics, or acoustics. And as part of a campaign to gain legitimacy in academic circles it has constructed and maintained a veneer of scientific objectivity.[11]
Torrez and her colleagues argue that scholarship about race is fundamentally incompatible with objectivity and positivism for two reasons:
First […] because people’s racioethnic identities and associated contexts shape perception and judgment there is no pure form of social science that can be fully colorblind or wholly extracted from its context10. Second, racial scholarship often rejects principles of neutrality, and instead, directly or indirectly highlights existing racialized power structures.
Historically, music theorists have approached music through the veneer of objectivity, concerned only with “the notes on the page” and disregarding the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to both the notes and the page. They also sought to distance themselves as much as possible from the music being studied. Such an approach effectively masks the systems of oppression—indeed, such an approach is a system of oppression--that facilitate specific types of music rising to prominence in music-academic circles. Separating the music from the context of not only its creation but also its reception signals that the identities of neither the artist nor the analyst have any influence on the act of analysis.[12] There is often a power differential implicit in this kind of analytical project; namely, some people are “qualified” to analyze music while others are not. Academic institutions tend to define what counts as analysis and what does not, as well as who counts as an analyst and who does not.[13]
Objectivity—freedom from bias—and positivism work in tandem to separate both the work being studied and the person (or people) studying that work from its contexts. As a result any activity like this appears on the surface to be race-neutral. Given that a considerable amount of the academic work done on rap music in the first two eras of rap scholarship was conducted by white men, such a smokescreen was necessary in order to mask the power dynamic at play. But rather than being truly race-neutral, reinforces the racial hierarchies that sustain predominantly white institutions.
One thing we can take from the Gilbers et al article is the value of collaboration: Hip hop has always been a collaborative effort: the MC and the DJ or producer providing music for the dancers. Humanities fields continue to privilege single-author papers for tenure and promotion consideration; however, as expertise becomes ever more narrow it is crucial to work in community. Heidi Lewis suggests that the field of hip hop studies has grown considerably since its inception that it may no longer suffice to consider oneself a “hip hop scholar”: “perhaps the field should be more deliberately comprised of Old School schools, Golden Age scholars, Nas scholars, Tupac scholars…”[14] Music studies historically has split into various subfields: musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, and within those you might be a post-tonal theorist, a Schenkerian scholar, a 19th-century French specialist, or a scholar of the music of Brazil. We might choose to specialize in an artist, a region, a style or genre. We might be practitioners, making beats, writing raps, learning how to scratch. Part of acknowledging hip hop’s place in the academy is recognizing that it is every bit as varied and complex as classical music and (more recently) jazz, the two genres that have historically dominated the academy.
It is important, too, to remember and reinforce that most of us got into this field because we care deeply about—we love—what we study.
[1] https://www.nplusonemag.com/about/
[2] I struggled a bit with word choice here. I don’t mean to say that the essay is “more relaxed” or “more casual” or anything else other than apply that it is somehow less that rigorous or scholarly. Such language, I believe, would do more harm than good if we’re trying to make the case for a hip hop form of scholarship.
[3] McCarthy 8.
[4] McCarthy 1.
[5] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/06/jesse-mccarthy-discusses-his-new-essay-collection/
[6] Gilbers et al, 719. In a footnote, they mention that some artists who were high on the list had to be excluded due to the lack of available a cappella tracks or interview with good, clean audio to analyze.
[7] Gilbers et al, 723.
[8] Gilbers et al 719.
[9] big fn here.
[10] “Separation between musical object and human subject which Jairo Moreno (2004, 1) attributes to “Western music theories” (my emphasis), understood in broad terms as “discourses that address the organization of musical objects” with descriptive or prescriptive aims.Blum 9.
[11] This needs some healthy citations…
[12] I’m using the term “artist” here to include both composers and performers.
[13] fn hisama, Ewell, Blum.
[14] Lewis 22.