"What am I doing? / What am I doing?": Introduction

First off, let's be clear.  I am doing this blog primarily because my favorite rap blog/lyric explaining site doesn't have any entries on Canibus' 2003 hip-hop masterpiece, Rip the Jacker.  If they had already covered it, I wouldn't be here.


Aside from that, I really enjoy reading and writing about hip-hop and RTJ is my favorite album ever, so this seems like a natural extension of all of that.  I must add a few pre-cautions though:

1. I am notoriously bad at keeping up with blogs with regularity.  I make no promises that I will ever update this blog again.
2. I am an MA candidate in English as Literature at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.  I thoroughly enjoy close reading and in-depth textual analysis.  I'm also a nerdy white kid who wears glasses and owns a vinyl copy of Olivia Newton-John's Have You Never Been Mellow.  I am not cool and will not pretend to be.  I plan on using "rap" and "hip-hop" as synonyms.  Deal.
3. I think rapgenius's criteria for judging a talented MC are pretty spot-on.  Everyone places importance on different aspects of rapping.  Some think swagger is more important than lyricism, some think rhyme density (great term, directly stolen from rapgenius) is the bee's knees, some people even like crunk.  I fall into the second category in the sense that I put a high emphasis on lyricism and prefer artists like Big Pun and Eminem to artists like D4L and Afro Man.  Just kidding, no one likes D4L and Afro Man.  Also, I use phrases like "bee's knees" sometimes.  This is seeming like a worse and worse idea.