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Rap and Hip Hop Culture . By Fernando Orejuela . New York : Oxford University Press , 2014. 272 pp. ISBN 9780199987733
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The availability of academic texts for classroom use on rap and hip hop has not kept pace with the growing global appeal of one of the world's most popular music genres. Although there are many books on the subject - such as Adam F. Bradley's Book of Rhymes, with the requisite bibliography, glossary, index and so on - not many have been written that exclusively address the concerns of a college audience, without sidebars that speak to general trade book readers. This gap in the market for accessible, engaging and revealing textbooks on rap is exactly what Fernando Orejuela's title Rap and Hip Hop Culture attempts to fill, and this is a task that it accomplishes admirably.
The book comes equipped with a bevy of classrooms aids that will make both the teacher and student's job easier. For the student, every chapter begins with a list of learning objectives to be achieved during that week's reading. Each chapter is clearly laid out in a straightforward manner, with headings and subheadings that keep that chapter's pedagogical goals at the forefront of a reader's attention. The visual graphs, charts and photos that populate all 10 chapters are clean, clear and abundant, making the internalization of content not just convenient, but engaging. As just one example, the global map that charts the geographical flow of the African slave trade immediately imparts the scale, cultural exchange and brutal efficiency that defined that human trafficking system. Additionally, every chapter concludes with a summary, a glossary of key terms and study questions for further investigation that help to make any work outside of classroom meetings as productive as possible.