Make Rappers Rap Again: Interrogating the Mumble Rap “Crisis”
Theorizing African American Music Series | Oxford University Press | August 2025
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“Make Rappers Rap Again is a brilliant, beautifully researched and written, and intriguing study. Lewis compellingly unpacks the culture wars, generational conflicts, and aesthetic complexities in Hip Hop. With this book, she places herself at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship on Black popular music and vernacular culture, and models how to do this work with nuance, sophistication, and heart.”
—Dr. Imani Perry, Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University, and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute
“Lewis reinvigorates the expanding cipher of hip hop scholarship. Well footnoted and academic but not without heart and soul, there is no denying Lewis’s authentic connection to the culture as she thoroughly charts the evolution of rap lyricism in the era of algorithm. Like many of my favorite rap albums, this made my head snap and will surely get repeat visits!”
—Idris Goodwin, Associate Professor of Music, Dance, and Theatre, Arizona State University, Playwright, Poet, Old Head
“Lewis is one of the few scholars who is perceptive and nimble enough to ride the pulse of the beat and stay in tune with the generational shifting discourses of an ever evolving hip-hop and tap into what needs to be said in a way that will shape our thinking for decades. Make Rappers Rap Again offers a powerful complication to what we think we know and the lies we tell ourselves about how to really study and appreciate hip-hop. Lewis’s groundbreaking book is a bold and provocative framework for understanding the ebbs and flows of hip-hop and will surely ignite sparks of change across Hip-Hop Studies. This is the one we have been waiting for. She got next!”
—Dr. Gwendolyn D. Pough, Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Syracuse University
“Overall, Lewis provides a compelling argument for mumble rap’s rightful place within hip hop, successfully countering several popular arguments aimed at diminishing—or subjugating—both the music and the artists involved. Beyond this, the book offers a theoretical justification for mumble rap’s musicality. While defending it on these terms is not necessary to justify mumble rap’s artistic value and cultural significance, by providing detailed descriptions of mumble rappers’ technical virtuosity, this book offers a compelling rebuttal to any claims that mumble rappers are lacking in musical ability or are simply derivative. Further, by drawing on their personal relationship and history with hip hop, and music more broadly, Lewis illustrates the complex relationships fans and artists form with musical genres and subgenres, and the risks of uncritically weaponising particular recollections of history against perceived difference (p. 46). While there are themes touched upon in this book that could have been explored in greater detail (in particular, the influence of social media platforms in driving certain elements of the mumble rap discourse, and mumble rap’s connection with cloud rap and the influence of European rappers), Lewis nevertheless puts forward a compelling argument for the legitimisation of mumble rap as a hip hop subgenre.”
—Lachlan Howells. Review of Make Rappers Rap Again: Interrogating the Mumble Rap Crisis. Context, vol. 51, 2025, pp. 15-8.
Photo Credit: Natalia de la Rosa Reyes