Being Dope is a book that will challenge what you think you know about rap and rappers. It is not a typical memoir and is as much about genre as it is about anything else: history, hip hop scholarship, storytelling, and theorizing through rap. Each section features A.D. Carson's mixtap/e/ssay lyrics alongside poetry, reflective prose, and critical analysis that provide social, historical, academic, and personal context. Being Dope is about permission and sanctioning. As Carson demonstrates, dope is distinct from drugs like illegal is distinct from legal and illicit is distinct from licit. Being Dope is about the rapper as genre, a contested category of human relegated to subhuman status in the public imagination. The book is, therefore, a refusal of this refusal: the rapper being, on his own terms.
Dope is rooted in the experiences of Black people in the U.S., including histories of people treated as property, chattel, technology, and the "War on Drugs" - a war on people - its casualties and aftermaths. Dope is also a measure of quality, of cool. Being Dope is about the presence of pasts and futures - methods of intoxication - more than it is about the absence of humility. Being Dope is the beautiful, ugly, abundant, and otherwise art made from the ruins of war and the carnage it leaves.
Being Dope is a book that will challenge what you think you know about rap and rappers. Written in lyrics, prose, and poetry, this book presents cultural criticism and analyzes form through the lenses of the social, historical, academic, and personal. It aims to disrupt the colonization of hip hop by academia and situate rappers and other hip hop artists as the makers of knowledge that academics and general audiences should study rather than reduce to tired tropes and stereotypes. Being Dope is not about hip hop; it is a book that uses hip hop to help make sense of the world that created it and continues to do so after more than five decades.
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