ALTHOUGH THE EARLIEST academic research on rap music is now close to thirty years old, over the last decade in particular the field has witnessed the rapid development of a body of literature with an explicit music-analytical orientation.1 Studies of rap have become prominent in journal publications and conference presentations, and a diverse range of methodologies have emerged to address the sonic particularities of this musical practice. Much has changed since Kyle Adams (2008: para. 2) wrote that “many still hesitate to accept rap music as a valid art form, and even those who readily accept it are not necessarily interested in analyzing it.” Mitchell Ohriner's Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music is an innovative contribution to this discipline that mobilizes a corpus study of approximately two hundred verses by anglophone emcees to theorize the rhythmic dimensions of lyrical delivery, the titular “flow.” Formalizing notoriously slippery...

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