Daniel Levin Becker - "What's Good" - Maureen Miller
Daniel Levin Becker will discuss What's Good: Notes on Rap and Language. He will be joined in conversation by Maureen Miller.
Presented in partnership with The Point
Virtual event
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About the Book: What’s Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis, a set of freewheeling liner notes, and a love letter to the most vital American art form of the last half century. Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker considers how rap’s use of language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies. Ranging from Sugarhill Gang to UGK to Young M.A, Rakim to Rick Ross to Rae Sremmurd, Jay-Z to Drake to Snoop Dogg, What’s Good reads with the momentum of a deftly curated mixtape, drawing you into the conversation and teaching you to read it as it goes. A book for committed hip-hop heads, curious neophytes, armchair linguists, and everyone in between. You can read a short conversation about the book with Becker and Miller on the City Lights blog.
About the Author: Daniel Levin Becker is a critic, editor, and translator from Chicago. An early contributing editor to the groundbreaking lyrics annotation site Rap Genius, he has written about music for The Believer, NPR, SF Weekly, and Dusted Magazine, among others. His first book, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard UP, 2012), recounts his induction into the French literary collective Oulipo, of which he became the youngest member in 2009. His published translations include Georges Perec's La Boutique Obscure (Melville House, 2013) snf Eduardo Berti's An Ideal Presence (Fern Books, 2021); he is also co-translator and co-editor of All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963–2018 (McSweeney’s, 2018) and the editor of Dear McSweeney’s: Two Decades of Letters to the Editor from Writers, Readers, and the Occasional Bewildered Consumer (McSweeney’s, 2021). He is a founding editor of Fern Books, English editor for the French nonfiction publisher Odile Jacob, senior editor at McSweeney’s Publishing, and a longtime contributing editor to The Believer. He lives in Paris.
About the Interlocutor: Maureen Miller, MD MPH is a board-certified pathologist and epidemiologist who researches blood transfusion. Her poetry, prose, and performance art has appeared in The Atlantic, the Occupy! special issue of n+1 magazine, Paris Review Daily, The Awl, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and other places. As a contributing editor to the music and lyrics website Genius, an experience she recounted in her essay collection A Taste of My Own Medicine (Kindle Singles, 2012), she collaborated with her Yale classmate Daniel Levin Becker as he developed what became What's Good. She is working on a novel about health care worker burnout and suicide.
