Rudolph Delson‘s ‘Maynard & Jennica’, Gary Shteyngart‘s ‘Absurdistan’ and Benjamin Kunkel‘s ‘Indecision’ all have something in common besides the frequency with which they’re spotted on NYC’s subways: These popular books all contain homages to hip-hop. We could try to tease out the sociocultural implications of these (white) authors’ occasionally funny, sometimes tone-deaf parodies of rap, but this isn’t grad school, it’s a blog. So let’s just see whether Delson, Kunkel, or Shteyngart are going to win any freestyle battles anytime soon! Get ready. Or, as Delson’s invented rapper Puppy Jones would put it, “Y’all can’t rhyme for (scratch). Puppy’s got a list. And he’s gonna learn y’all, yo. Uh oh, here we go!”
Puppy’s track “Prime Time” is, in the book, a huge hit that, after 9/11, becomes a symbol of everything that’s wrong with America (somehow). It features a long list of phrases that rhyme with themselves, like so:
“Airfare, blame game, brain drain, Care Bear/
Fake bake, hair bear, late date, hair care”
In the book, this song is playing on Hot 97. Okay!
‘Absurdistan’ is narrated by a portly Russian named Misha Vainberg who spent his college years at an Oberlinesque liberal arts institution, where he discovered “the old-school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public Enemy.” Early in the book, he declaims “a Detroit ditty I enjoy on summer days:”
“Aw, shit
Heah I come
Shut you mouf
And bite yo tongue
Aw, girl,
You think you bad?
Let me see you
Bounce dat ass.”
And then of course there is the improbably political Kunkelian hit “Electric Chair,” “off Quality of Life’s Embarrassment of Bitches CD”:
“Bushy go to Yale
like me I go to jail
I think tha’s really fair
cause I think that’s pretty funny
you be laughin in the chair
whi’ they rakin up they money”
You know, I think we might have to call this battle a draw.