Since his suicide, David Foster Wallace has made the transition from major writer to major industry. Hence this UK issue of a slender work of music history got up for a small US press in 1990 by a young Wallace and his college friend Mark Costello. The premise: it’s the early days of rap, and two overeducated white kids who like it produce a sampler considering What It’s All About.
That it’s dated doesn’t matter much. That it’s juvenilia does. Its cleverness is that of a writer in possession of an immense talent but not yet remotely in control of it: a learner driver doing doughnuts in a powerful car. Almost every sentence is arch or overwrought. Here is a tame example (in the course of a discussion of the dope, the def and the fly):
The def rapper MCs a def rap, which rap def-ly tells of its own (and the rapper’s) def-ness — so def, as MC/manager/entrepreneur Russell Rush Simmons brags, that it had to be on a label called Def Jam.
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