“Clearly the coarse vernacular of rap, which has inspired more than its share of censorship and congressional hearings, has done much to prevent its lyrics from being taken seriously as poetry. But [co-editor and University of Toronto professor Andrew DuBois] is quick to note that even today’s highest culture was risqué in its day. “There’s a book on my shelf right now called Shakespeare’s Bawdy, by the great scholar Eric Partridge, which is a dictionary of all the filthy, dirty terms used by Shakespeare – and it’s 200 pages long! Wanna know what ‘withered pear’ means?”

What immediately sets rap apart from conventional poetry is its emergence out of African oral tradition rather than the written tradition of Western literature. The outmatched “trickster” figure who survives on quick wits and verbal verve traces its origins to plantation-era African-American folklore (see Br’er Rabbit); and even further, to African mythology. “Ol’ Dirty Bastard might not have put it into [academic] terms,” says DuBois, of the late Wu-Tang Clan rapper, “but I do think he might have conceived of himself as a trickster.”