Vox populi

ego trip's Book of Rap Lists

by Alex Pappademas

The #1 reason most hip-hop books suck: they expend way too much energy attempting to justify their choice of subject matter. Books about hip-hop tend to read like overgrown book proposals -- writers spend so much time defending the notion that the music merits intellectual examination between hard covers that they forget to convey what excited them about the music in the first place, ending up with half-assed sociology, post-structuralist cultural-studies chin music, and all that other schmutz stuck between their needle and their groove. Which is another way of saying that if I have to read another essay about the semiotic displacement of the phallus and the construction of black maleness in N.W.A's Efil4zaggin, I'm gonna go Conquest of the Planet of the Apes-shit and lead an urban assault on the nearest graduate school.

Enter ego trip. Between 1994 and 1998, the freaks at this New York 'zine put their collective mack hand down on the pulse of cool-music culture. The self-described "Arrogant Voice of Musical Truth" became a bracing tonic for the craven, stilted, creatively bankrupt, 'hoes-to-the-stars discipline known as hip-hop "journalism": it covered rap (and indie rock, and hardcore, and heavy metal) with an unprecedented degree of sarcastic fun, insight, and authority, adding inestimable value to the bathroom-reading time of all who encountered it. Obviously, it was way too good to last -- after four years of calling the wack wack, alienating record-label suckas, and producing the funniest in-house ads in publishing history, the crew called it a day, griping, "Who wants to support a music magazine characterized by integrity, intelligence, humor, and innovation? No one in the music industry!"

Maybe not, but if there was anyone on Earth capable of compiling a hip-hop tome worth blowing your record-buying dollars on, it was ego trip's furious-five editorial board: Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Brent Rollins, Gabriel Alvarez, and Chairman Mao. Like the publication that spawned it, ego trip's Book of Rap Lists (St. Martin's Griffin) takes the notion that hip-hop is the most exciting music of our time -- worth writing about, and (more important) worth writing about well -- as a given. Wilson and company don't have to waste time or words justifying their love, because the depth and the breadth of information and opinion presented here make a more compelling case for hip-hop's artistic validity than a truckload of doctoral theses.

As you probably surmised from the title, this is a book of lists that catalogues the hip-hop phenomenon in all its frequently irrational glory. And I do mean "all" -- its sheer density of detail recalls the similarly exhaustive theme tracing in Chuck Eddy's The Accidental Evolution of Rock & Roll, but in structure it's more like the work of hyper-literate New York thugs bum-rushing David Letterman's Wahoo (Nebraska) home office: contentious and razor-sharp itemizations of the fundamental (the 10 greatest MCs of all time, with KRS-1 edging Rakim for the Sgt. Pepper slot), the invaluable (rundowns of hip-hop's greatest singles/albums by year), and the ridiculous (Kool Keith's favorite places to pleasure himself in public: "#5. Sbarro").

We get lists both instructive, as in "DJ Mister Cee Names The 10 Best Ways For DJs To Get Ass," and spit-out-your-Moet hilarious, as in the five things the flamboyant Southern-rap album-cover illustrators at Pen & Pixel Graphics won't put on an album cover: "We wouldn't knowingly illustrate blowing up somebody's car that belonged to a client's competitor. (But it's happened. Twice.)" Lists of the seminal moments in rap liner-note history (most succinct: "Slick Rick would like to thank Columbia Records and all other rappers") and the worst rap ad copy (example: "He's the East Coast Rapper Who Offers Novel Insights Into Teenage Romance And All The Latest Developments On The Neighborhood Street Corner," for Talking Heads-sampling hip-house footnote KC Flight). The names of all the Negro League baseball players mentioned in the Ultramagnetics MCs' classic "The Saga of Dandy, the Devil and Day"; the names of all the hip-hop "headz" pictured on the cover of A Tribe Called Quest's Midnight Marauders.

If hip-hop were a Star Trek convention, the ego trip guys would be the cats at the back of the hall commiserating in flawless Klingon. Their magazine has enjoyed a Biggie-like life after death at www. egotrip.com, where a letter from ego trip's fictional, 40ish, white Ebonics-speaking publisher, "Ted Bawno," avows that the mag is "alive like Peter Frampton and darker than Fred Hampton cold lampin' in the Hamptons." And Rawkus is putting out an old-school soundtrack to complement the book. But until the 'zine itself is reanimated, there's only one place to check out both a list of six seminal hip-hop albums that were panned in Rolling Stone and many, many pictures of rap celebrities hanging out with a Biz Markie puppet.