Book Review: The Rap Yearbook by Shea Serrano

For someone who claims to “like music,” as much as I do, one thing I don’t do is I don’t find myself reading a lot of music books.

Maybe that’s because a bulk of the ones I have read are horrible. Books I’ve read in recent memory include a biography of Yo La Tengo (too formally written and therefore way too confusing); a book on the history of the mp3 (interesting but way  too technical); The Tao of The Wu by The Rza (as good as one may expect [poorly written and kind of contradictory]); that biography of Ol’ Dirty Bastard that came out last year (also incredibly poorly written, kind of contradictory, and also just kind of sad).

Earlier in the year I tried reading Kim Gordon’s memoir, which I thought would be insightful and have a lot of neat history of Sonic Youth in it. I stopped around the time she started talking about the television show “Girls” and why young people are in love with the idea of New York City.

However, I figured things would be different with Shea Serrano’s The Rap Yearbook, and I was right.

The book breaks down what he considers to be “arguably the best or most important” rap song from every year, beginning in 1979 with “Rapper’s Delight,” and ending in 2014 with something by Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan, which I kind of question, but whatever. I also didn’t write a book about rap music, so I’m probably not in any position to question his decisions.

Needless to say, to get full enjoyment out of the book, it helps if you have more than a passing interest in the history of rap music as a subject, but even for the casual listener who has heard maybe only a handful of the songs, you’ll still take away something from learning about each selection and why he considers it to be the most important from its respective year.

The reason that this book works, and why it works so well, is Serrano’s command of language—he writes the way that we talk. The Rap Yearbook is flat out hilarious, using jokes, asides and amusing anecdotes to get his point across. It’s impressive, really, because the “argument” portion of the book becomes so indirect. Even if you don’t agree with a specific selection, by the end of each chapter, you may not have come around to Serrano’s way of thinking, but he will have presented you with enough evidence to at least make you respect his decision—explaining that the most important song of the year may not be the best, but rather it’s importance being based on what it did for the artist and what it did for rap music as a movement.

The Rap Yearbook specifically hits its stride during some of the “golden years” of the genre, including “Nothing But a G Thing,” “C.R.E.A.M.,” “Juicy,” and the Tupac double-shot of “Dear Mama” and “California Love.” This is rap music at its most interesting and captivating, historically speaking, and here; it is annotated with flowcharts that dive into the meaning behind lyrical content and impressive illustrations by Arturo Torres.

For a polarizing genre full of polarizing figures, The Rap Yearbook excels at humanizing the rap game by making it simply conversational. Serrano never talks down to the reader by allowing this to become highbrow music criticism. Instead, he takes the form of that friend who has better taste than you and is exponentially smarter than you, dropping knowledge on a genre and a movement, one year at a time.

Due to Serrano's strong social media presence, The Rap Yearbook is currently sold out on Amazon, but may be available from other online bookseller as well as independent bookstores.