To contribute a little to an excellent post: The best class I ever took was Race, Rhetoric, and Poetry, which stitched together early African-American poetry a

To contribute a little to an excellent post: The best class I ever took was Race, Rhetoric, and Poetry, which stitched together early African-American poetry and hiphop. The central thesis of the class was that self-expression is proof of humanity, especially for African-Americans: one of the most iconic parts of being a slave (and thus being subhuman) was illiteracy; just as Wheatley, Hammond, et al argued their humanity through their works (explicitly and implicitly), generations of hip hop artists escaped their fates by recording their life and finding success in the written and spoken word. There's a lot of depth and lineage in hiphop, lurking barely under the surface: whether it's Drake sampling Gil Scott-Heron who references Nat Turner, or Kanye cribbing Nina Simone's cover of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit (which of course was written by Abel Meeropol). There's a reason that self-glorification and bildungsromans are such pervasive motifs; it's not just self-aggrandizement, its self-affirmation. If hip-hop was a codebase, it would be a massive lump of spaghetti, spiraling into itself with migraine-inducing dependencies. It would be impossible to refactor or decouple, and I mean this in an incredibly positive way.