It didn't occur to me that maybe, just maybe, no one has any idea what I'm talking about. This never occurs to me, which is one of the chief problems of my life.
When I say that the ultimate goal of this blog is to present a "Norton Critical Edition" of Canibus' Rip the Jacker, what exactly does that MEAN? Some background, then.
This is the Norton Critical website. Norton is the company that puts out the important literature anthologies and that pretty much owns English graduate students and their lives. They also offer Norton Critical Editions of famous literary texts, which, in their own words, "combine the most authoritative text available with contextual and critical materials that bring the work to life for students. Careful editing, first-rate translation, thorough explanatory annotations, chronologies, and selected bibliographies make each text accessible to students while encouraging in-depth study."
So, essentially NCEs provide original texts with all kinds of amazing annotations and then follow that up with contextual pieces, criticism, bibliographies, and all sorts of other goodies that English nerds like me go crazy for. They're beast in every way a book can be beast.
A Norton Critical Edition of Rip the Jacker then is just a shorthand way of saying that I plan to explain what's going on in Canibus' allusion-rich musical text and also to provide important context, references, and criticism. It's a project that I think is useful because the record is very complicated and requires explanation, but no one has really gotten out there and done the hard work of trying to piece together the puzzle Canibus has set out before us. I'm taking this project on, mostly because *I* want to see what the whole puzzle looks like when it's put together myself.
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