In his collection, These Are The Breaks, Idris Goodwin addresses race, class, culture and rap in essay and prose poetry. He takes a sprawling and diverse topic and does what this sort of work does best: filters it through the lens of the human I.
The I in “I like rap” isn’t like it used to be. There are plenty of rap fans going to work as cops, lawyers, teachers and civil servants every day. Hard to believe that there are many but, statistically speaking, it’s inevitable there are rap heads who are also dedicated Republicans. It used to be it was a lot more monolithic, what rap was. It was conscious, or gangsta, or radio-friendly pop and that was about it. Those were your options. As the genre has matured, there has come to be a lot of what some would call bloat and others would call diversification.
