ego trip publishes 'The Book of Rap Lists'

Why it matters

ego trip's Book of Rap Lists came out in October 1999, on St. Martin's. The authors were Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, and the designer Brent Rollins. The book is exactly what the title says: hundreds of lists about hip-hop, from "Rappers Who Did Time" to "Songs Built on Other Songs" to "MCs Who Have Played a Cop in a Movie." The book is a touchstone for a generation of hip-hop critics and editors. The ego trip crew (Wilson would later edit XXL, Jenkins would later edit Vibe and become an Emmy-winning documentary director) treated hip-hop the way Greil Marcus treated rock: with full critical seriousness and full pop-culture lightness, refusing to separate the two. The Book of Rap Lists became, for a lot of people who would later become rap journalists themselves, the book that proved the genre could be written about with the same density of trivia and care as baseball. You should find a used copy if you can. It is one of the foundational documents of late-1990s hip-hop literary culture, and it is also funny on basically every page.