Includes bibliographical references, discography, filmography, and index.

As one of the most influential and popular genres of the last three decades, rap has cultivated a mainstream audience and become a multimillion-dollar industry by promoting highly visible and often controversial representations of blackness. This book argues that rap music allows us not only to see but also to hear how mass-mediated culture engenders new understandings of race. It traces the changing sounds of race across some of the best-known rap songs of the past 35 years, combining song-level analysis with historical contextualization to show how these representations of identity depend on specific artistic decisions, such as those related to how producers make beats.