Sam Anderson, admittedly illiterate in hip-hop, reviews the new Anthology of Rap:
See also:
A History of Rap As Literature
[It shows] one of the great paradoxes of rap: The toughest, coolest, most dangerous-seeming MCs are, at heart, basically just enormous language dorks. They love puns and rhymes and slang and extended metaphors; they accuse enemies of plagiarism and brag endlessly about their own hard-core habits of revision. A book like this, then, is the ultimate homage.
A crash course in rap.
