The material practices of hip hop – taking and deploying the past in a specific manner, consuming, juxtaposing and recycling recording music to produce something new through a dynamic process of artistic re-layering and reconstitution – have been much commented upon over the years. Musicologist Justin Williams makes this the fulcrum of his original and stimulating monograph. As Williams indicates, musical borrowing has a long history. He refers to the use of Gregorian chant by Renaissance composers and the prevalence of borrowing in African-American music: ‘Hip-hop, like blues and jazz is an “open source” culture, and this particular character of these musical cultures is crucial to their aesthetics’ (p. 167). In this thought-provoking study, Williams demonstrates convincingly how borrowing acquired new levels with hip hop's ‘unconcealed intertextuality’ (p. 7). Following the work of the late Adam Krims, who supervised the doctoral thesis on which this book is based, the author stymies criticisms levelled against musicologists by other popular music scholars, emphasising the need to analyse ‘musical texts’ in a wider context by ‘seeking a deeper understanding of meaning within these recordings and what their reception says about larger cultural practices’ (p. 6). Since ‘sounds are historically, social, and spatially situated’, this presupposes considering audience reactions and other variables that constitute a ‘third dimension of musical signification’ (p. 71). To be sure, despite some significant flaws that will be addressed later, this study complements Krims’ excellent Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity.

The most welcome chapters in this study are the final three (Chapters 3–5). Chapter 3, which focuses on Dr Dre's ‘G-Funk’ gangsta rap oeuvre, specifically The Chronic (1992) and Doggystyle (1993), provides an innovative analysis of musical borrowing as it applies to playback spaces. Combining detailed musicological analysis with aspects of spatial and geographical analysis, Williams demonstrates how west coast hip hop is effectively ‘driving music, ready-made to blare out of car windows and share with the world’ (p. 88) and ‘fill the automotive listening space’ (p. 99). These ‘jeep beats’, specifically designed for car stereo, are contrasted with what Williams argues is the more ‘cerebral’ east coast sound, created for playback on personal headphones on public transport.

Chapter 4 (‘The Martyr Industry’) is an original assessment of the digital, ‘postmortem sampling’ of hip hop ‘martyrs’, Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur, and is concerned with ‘the close proximity of death in gangsta rap culture and the power of stardom functioning as a type of religion within popular music culture’ (p. 104). While, as the author recognises, this cultural dimension of death is far from specific to hip hop, the genre's widespread sampling practices mean that borrowing the voice of a deceased artist can result in ‘symbolic immortality’ (p. 105) and thus contribute to ‘new narratives within the imagined community of hip-hop culture’ (p. 109). These claims are based on a trenchant analysis of representative works by Jay-Z and Nas, who, we are told, invoke the voices of hip hop ‘martyrs’ to ‘appeal to an authority to reinforce their own status as dominant rappers’ (p. 138). Similar themes are explored in the final chapter, which analyses ‘borrowing and lineage’ in the work of Eminem and 50 Cent. Williams concludes that ‘postmortem sampling’ by the living rappers reveals their ‘historical self-consciousness [that] contributes to the constructions of continuity and tradition within the hip-hop world’ (p. 141). These two chapters are highly suggestive, although perhaps some discussion of the experience of death in black America would be welcome, since there are many cases of rappers hailing from communities in which their male peers struggle to reach the age of 30.

But it is the first two chapters of this book that prove to be extremely problematic. In Chapter 1, following the work of Stanley Fish, the doyen of anti-foundationalism, a creed that negates the idea that fundamental principles underpin knowledge or, in this case, a musical genre, Williams reveals an overriding objective: to debunk what he sees as the etiological folklore surrounding hip hop's birth in the Bronx. Thus, he suggests that most commentators on hip hop, as well as hip hop practitioners and aficionados, have canonised early hip hop through ‘the pursuit of origin’ and their ‘fetishization of and nostalgia for the past’ (p. 44). Accordingly, Williams rails against what he portrays as an obscurantist coalition that ‘romanticise[s] the pre-recorded period of hip-hop’ (p. 29) and defends the ‘scripture’ (p. 45) that a ‘street’ or popular movement was devoured and distorted by big business (i.e. the record companies). This approach is seriously flawed. In general terms, Williams dons a theoretical strait-jacket and represents hip hop as essentially backward looking, downplaying creative impulses within the genre. Anyone familiar with the evolution of The Roots’ oeuvre over the last 20-odd years will recognise that they have no interest in preserving sonic ‘sacraments’. More specifically, to sustain his thesis, he ignores contradictory evidence. A case in hand is his discussion of The Sugarhill Gang's ‘Rapper's Delight’ (1979), the first major commercial hit associated with hip hop. In keeping with his anti-foundationalist approach, Williams rejects interpretations that see this recording as a ‘sell out’ or distillation of hip hop's ‘essence’ as clichéd nonsense. Nevertheless, prior to this release, there exists considerable evidence of a record company frenzy to commercialise hip hop and of the reluctance of the practitioners of what was essentially live music performed by one or more MCs and a DJ to accede. Meanwhile, it is incontrovertible that ‘Rapper's Delight’ eschews some of the most basic identifying features of early hip hop (such as turntable scratching) and resembles more a disco recording than anything from the first wave of recorded hip hop.

Chapter 2 tackles the jazz rap sub-genre, which Williams constructs as a ‘high culture’ riposte to gangsta- and pop-oriented hip hop (p. 47). Much of his analysis of jazz rap appears to be based on an uncritical reading of the music media. This is somewhat surprising since elsewhere he warns that the press ‘often portray information in highly stylized ways’ (p. 84). This is not the only apparent inconsistency in Williams’ approach. In his discussion of Tupac, he argues convincingly that liner notes play an important role in the reception of music (pp. 119–20). However, when analysing Digable Planets, a group he takes as the epitome of a ‘bourgeois high art’ current (p. 64) within jazz rap, he ignores their highly politicised sleeve notes that borrow from the (unfinished) history of the collective struggle of sectors of the urban black working class, something far removed from what he suggests is Digable Planets’ ‘will to elitism or hipness’ (p. 72). While Williams notes correctly that ‘Jazz is, of course, by no means univocal’ (p. 66), he displays a creeping reductionism by emphasising the New Yorkness of both jazz and of jazz rap, despite the fact that the first remixing of jazz and hip hop was by DJ Jazzy Jeff in Philadelphia, a city that was, at different times, home to John Coltrane and Sun Ra. Finally, given the scant attention paid by academics to jazz rap, the absence of any discussion of Tom Perchard's Reference Perchard2011 article on the subject is perplexing.

For all its unevenness, by addressing one of hip hop's most fundamental practices, this is clearly a welcome contribution to the existing scholarship of the genre. Moreover, despite the somewhat rudimentary index, there is much here that will provoke stimulating debate on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.