Posthuman Rap
Justin Adams Burton
Reviews and Awards
"Posthuman Rap ties together choice references and pertinent case studies to offer a compelling account of the political potential of never stopping the party." -- Steven Gamble, Popular Music
"Posthuman Rap is an alive account of the vibrations, secret exits, echoes, and ad-libs permeating rap and its trap, crunk, and ratchet iterations, attuning readers to sonic worlds that elude politics as we know it. Burton's prose bumps, knocks, and claps in time with his musical subjects, producing an exhilarating account of why we need to work harder to hear and feel the sounds emanating from the club, the car, and the radio that suggest to us other ways of being."--Adrienne Brown, University of Chicago
"Exploring recent music by artists that are wildly popular but often misunderstood, Posthuman Rap makes a signal contribution to hip hop studies, which has tended to favor the 'golden era' of the 1980s and 1990s. Interdisciplinary in the best sense of the word, Burton's writing demands that we acknowledge how a new generation of rap artists and fans imagine alternative futures and resist the current racialized economic order. Burton's passionate and politicized reading of trap aesthetics in the context of contemporary black politics is the most ambitious and thought provoking meditation on rap music since Tricia Rose's Black Noise."-- Lorean Kajikawa, University of Oregon