What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language

A love letter to the verbal artistry of hip-hop, What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis.

"What's Good is, among a great many other things, a byproduct of joyful obsession and immersion into both language and sound, an intersection that offers a rich and expansive land upon which to play." — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

" . . . an often hilarious, surprisingly moving and always joyful paean to rap’s relationship to words."— Jayson Greene, The New York Times

"Rap, he is not afraid to say, is as close to a universal tongue as we have."— Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis, a set of freewheeling liner notes, and a love letter to the most vital American art form of the last half century. Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker considers how rap's use of language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies.

Ranging from Sugarhill Gang to UGK to Young M.A, Rakim to Rick Ross to Rae Sremmurd, Jay-Z to Drake to Snoop Dogg, What's Good reads with the momentum of a deftly curated mixtape, drawing you into the conversation and teaching you to read it as it goes. A book for committed hip-hop heads, curious neophytes, armchair linguists, and everyone in between.