Title: Signifying Rappers
Content:  Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present is a nonfiction book by Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace. The book explores the music genre's history as it intersected with historical events, either locally and unique to Boston, or in larger cultural or historical contexts.
Title: Signifying Rappers
Content: 1990, Ecco Press, 140 pp, ISBN: 0-88001-255-2. ; 2013, Back Bay Books, 176 pp, ISBN: 978-0-316-22583-0. The work was initially published as a shorter 20-page essay in and then expanded to book size. The first edition published in late 1990. A second edition was published in 2013, following the death of the first author Wallace, and includes a new preface by second author Mark Costello.
Title: Signifying Rappers
Content:  The title is based on the track "Signifying Rapper" on the album Smoke Some Kill by Schoolly D. The teasing, taunting, and insulting tradition within African American culture is referred to as "signifyin'", though the word's other meanings are perhaps reflected in Costello and Wallace's title. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written extensively on the Signifyin (or Signifying) Monkey, its origins and meaning, and how the monkey's attitude and effort to overcome evolved into the "Your motha is so fat" back-and-forth that was part of hip hop's original culture. The slang of rap, like all slang, may include words that signify others, such as "cut" (turntable technique), "bite" (stealing someone else’s rhymes), "dope" (great), "dawg" (male friend) and such neologisms as "edutainment" (KRS-One) or "raptivist" (Chuck D of Public Enemy), but it is not an important use of the idea of signifying in rap or hip hop. Signifying in critical theory usage is also meaningful, as signifier in critical theory, and in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Title: Signifyin'
Content: Myers, D. G. "Signifying Nothing". New Criterion 8, February 1990, pp. 61–64. ; Rappe, Michael. Under Construction, Köln: Dohr Verlag, 2010. 
Title: Rapping
Content:  had a significant impact on the modern vernacular of this portion of the population, which has diffused throughout society. The effects of rap music on modern vernacular can be explored through the study of semiotics. Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, or the study of language as a system. French literary theorist Roland Barthes furthers this study with this own theory of myth. He maintains that the first order of signification is language and that the second is "myth", arguing that a word has both its literal meaning, and its mythical meaning, which is heavily dependent on socio-cultural context. To illustrate, Barthes uses 
Title: The Anthology of Rap
Content:  The Anthology of Rap is a 2010 rap music anthology published by Yale University Press, with Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois as the editors. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote the foreword, while Chuck D and Common wrote the afterwords. Bradley and DuBois are English professors, at the associate level at the University of Colorado and University of Toronto Scarborough, respectively. It was published on November 9, 2010. The book is about 800 pages long. It includes rap lyrics, sorted by chronology and era from 1978 until the book's publication. It also discusses the history and cultural influence of the genre. Sam Anderson of New York Magazine described the book as "an English major’s hip-hop bible, an impossible fusion of street cred and book learning." Andrew Pettie of The Daily Telegraph characterized the book's idea, under "grave, academic intentions", as: "rap lyrics should be treated by academics with the same chin-stroking seriousness they traditionally reserve for poetry."
Title: Sacha Jenkins
Content: with Elliott Wilson, Jeff Mao and Gabe Alvarez, ego trip’s Book of Rap Lists, St. Martin’s Griffin (1999) ; with Elliott Wilson, Chairman Jefferson Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, and Brent Rollins, ego trip’s Big Book of Racism, Harper Perennial (2002) ; "The Writing on the Wall: Graffiti Culture Crumbles into the Violence It Once Escaped," a chapter in And It Don't Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, Raquel Cepeda, editor, Faber & Faber (2004) ; with Eminem, The Way I Am, Dutton Adult (2008) ; with David Villorente, Piecebook: The Secret Drawings of Graffiti Writers, Prestel (2008) ; with David Villorente, Piecebook Reloaded: Rare Graffiti Drawings 1985-2005, Prestel (2009) ; with David Villorente, World Piecebook: Global Graffiti Drawings, Prestel (2011) ; with Carlo McCormick, Sean Corcoran, Lee Quiñones, City As Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection, Skira Rizzoli (2013) ; with Howie Abrams, The Merciless Book of Metal Lists, Harry N. Abrams (2013) ; with Henry Chalfant, Training Days: The Subway Artists Then and Now, Thames & Hudson (forthcoming October 2014) 
Title: Black Noise (book)
Content:  In the book, Rose examines rap music and black culture by looking at urban culture politics and rap's racial politics. She also reflects on videos, song lyrics, and interviews with musicians, producers, and other people involved with the rap music industry.
Title: How to Rap
Content:  to Rap for a good "general" overview. Dana Gioia, poet and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts wrote, “How To Rap marks a cultural coming-of-age for Hip-Hop… [it] is the first comprehensive poetics of this new literary form. …Edwards has made his bid to become the Aristotle of Hip-Hop poetics”. It also received positive comments from hip-hop journalists and authors such as Kembrew McLeod, Dan LeRoy, Alex Ogg, Mickey Hess, Russell Potter, and Pancho McFarland, and from artists such as Georgia Anne Muldrow, Egon of Stones Throw Records, Badru Umi, and Speech of Arrested Development. In a review of the Kanye West album Yeezus, news outlet The Daily Beast praised the book, saying: "In Paul Edwards’s comprehensive tome How to Rap, the author surveyed a plethora of rap emcees—104, to be exact—in order to demystify the rap process."
Title: Erik Nielson (academic)
Content:  Erik Nielson is Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Richmond who has become well known as an expert in the use of rap music as evidence in criminal trials. His book Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, with co-author Andrea Dennis, was published in November 2019 and received the Hugh Hefner Foundation First Amendment Award in October 2020. Nielson's research focuses on the relationship between African-American culture and policing, as well as the relationship between hip hop and politics. He has written for the New York Times and other mainstream news outlets on these issues. He was the lead author of three amicus briefs with the US Supreme Court, two of which were jointly submitted with his frequent collaborator, Killer Mike. Nielson and Travis L. Gosa edited The Hip Hop & Obama Reader. Nielson was a featured participant in WRIC News' series Richmond and Race, a discussion among community leaders about race relations and police accountability in Richmond, VA.

Question: Who is the author of Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present?
Answer: David Foster Wallace.
David Wallace.