Shea Serrano

Shea Serrano’s ‘Hip-Hop (And Other Things)’ Is The Rap Book You Need To Read

by
Shea Serrano Hip Hop And Other Things
Getty Image

Since the last time I spoke with Shea Serrano, he has reached another historic career milestone. His newest book, Hip-Hop (And Other Things), the third in his (And Other Things) trilogy along with Basketball and Movies, has reached the New York Times bestsellers list, making him and his collaborator, illustrator Arturo Torres, the first Mexican-Americans to reach the list four times (Serrano’s second book, The Rap Yearbook, was his first bestseller). The New York Times Book Review has been published weekly since October 12, 1931. Nearly 100 years. Just a huge accomplishment.

That’s the sort of odd factual tidbit that finds its way into Serrano’s writing, along with footnotes, off-kilter observations, funny asides, affecting personal anecdotes, and more than occasionally, startlingly astute insight into the various subjects about which he writes. The books are framed around questions that he poses that sometimes read as goofy or less than serious and the answers that he provides, which can seem goofy until he makes a comparison or uses a metaphor that whacks you over the head with a sound like a thunderclap, and you realize that you’ve just — shudder — learned something.

The questions in Serrano’s latest book range from the sort of thing that often crops up in conversation, like “Which was the most perfect duo in rap history?” to double take-inducing daydreams like “Is Action Bronson a good travel partner?” There’s a hypothetical interview with a chicken. There’s a debate between Kendrick Lamar’s magnum opus (undoubtedly Good Kid, MAAD City) and Kanye’s (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — questionable), and an extended analysis of Black Thought’s 10-minute Funkmaster Flex freestyle, which Shea can be seen evangelizing on Twitter every few months.

Over the course of our Zoom call, the author and I addressed some of these questions and more, but then things started to get really philosophical and personal — as they tend to do in the book, as well. It seemed fitting and it was funny and a grand time was had by all. Buy the book — you’ll thank me later.

What was the logic behind making hip-hop, the last one in your (And Other Things) trilogy?

Arturo and I, when we pitched the idea for the end of the thing series, we did it as a three-book thing and we knew we were going to do movies, basketball, and hip-hop. And so we just put them in order of what’s the one we want to do the most. And we both voted that it was hip-hop. And so we said, okay, well, let’s save that one for last, that way we could end on it. By that point, we will have been working on it for six years; we’re going to both be pretty tired. We’re going to both be ready for it to be over and so you end on the thing you’re most excited about. That way, it feels less like work and more like you’re celebrating the end of whatever journey it is that you’ve been on.

Even though it’s about hip-hop, I find it really amusing that you almost can’t talk about rap music without talking about basketball or movies and kind of vice versa.

I think those three subjects naturally fold over onto themselves. We’ve seen literal examples of it, of a person who was a basketball player, and then they would star in a movie.

Shaq!

Shaq, who was a basketball player, starred in Blue Chips and then put out a platinum-selling rap album. Tupac was a rapper and then he was in a movie about basketball. They’re all always together. For me, growing up, watching these movies, listening to this music, playing basketball, just felt like these were the three coolest things. So, of course, it makes sense that the three coolest things populated by the coolest people on the planet are all sort of co-mingling.

Bun B’s intro is such a cool full-circle moment. How did you feel when you finally got a chance to get Bun B to do this because he’s sort of the reason we’re even here talking about this? [Serrano’s first book was the Rap Coloring Book, a collaboration with the Port Arthur rapper.]

I was incredibly proud and humbled and Bun is, in my history of being a journalist, one of the three or four smartest people I’ve ever talked to. Whenever you have a conversation with him, he talks in paragraphs, which to me is crazy. You’re listening to me on this podcast now. And every six words, there’s a pause in there because I have to collect the things I’m going to say next that are coming out. He doesn’t do that. He has fully coherent thoughts about every single thing you could ask him. And I think it’s the most interesting thing, he also is just incredibly insightful. You ask him a question about one thing and he answers it but really he answers the question that you were meaning to ask that you didn’t quite ask. He’s just the best. To have Bun do the foreword for it was just a super cool moment. It really meant a lot to me.

The questions are always really funny in the context of these books but this one really goes super-duper left field, like the chapter where you do the Hunger Games hype music [“What’s The Order Of The Lottery Pick Songs?”]. Do you know which ones are the ones or is it a process of whittling them down? Do you pitch them?

I don’t pitch the ideas to anybody else. I might ask the editor, “What do you think of this? What do you think of that?” Or I might hit up somebody like you and be like, “Hey, tell me how you feel about this idea.” I’m fortunate to be friends with people who are smarter than I am, so I could throw something at them, and then they might say a thing that activates something else and then we end up with a new idea, but mostly it’s just sort of me sitting there trying to figure out how to write about a thing in a way that hasn’t been done yet.

I think a very common conversation people might have is, “What song would you have play as your walk-up song if you were a baseball player?” Or “If you were a boxer, what song would you have play when you come walking out to the ring?” In the movie, Creed, Donny has Tupac playing when he walks out to the ring. That collection of chapters is essentially a version of that conversation but you have to figure out a way that hasn’t been done yet. I searched all around and I didn’t find nobody had written about it in this particular way. It doesn’t always work a lot of times it starts out as one thing. And then you get 2000 words into it and you, it’s not as much fun as I thought it would be. It’s not as clever as I thought it would be. It doesn’t let me do all of the little tricks I want to do. So, you’re just trying out there and hoping it works.

I can’t talk about all of the successes and everything that has happened for you without talking about the FOH Army. I’m not sure how many Uproxx readers are going to know about the FOH. I know you’re tired of explaining it, but man, it is an incredible thing.

I’d never get tired of explaining it because it’s very important, it’s wildly important. The FOH Army is like a generic or general name somebody came up with for basically the group of us who interact or play around on Twitter or whatever, that’s what it is. And sometimes we’re doing philanthropic work, other times, we’re just sharing music, other times we’re buying books or whatever it might be. But it started out as this small thing in 2015 or so and then it has just grown and grown and grown and gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and more powerful.

This is the whole reason that any of my books have made the bestseller list. We’ve got four of them so far, and it’s not a coincidence that the first one happened right around when the sort of FOH was starting up because it was just like, “All of a sudden you have 30,000 people or whatever it is who will show up and buy a thing.” We sold 8,000 copies of The Rap Yearbook the first week, which at the time was like, holy crap. This is tremendous. We were supposed to sell 800. But we didn’t sell 8,000 copies to 8,000 people. We sold 8,000 copies to like 3000 people. So now, because of that, I have this remarkable freedom in my career where I can sit down with a publisher and I’ll be like, hey, I would like to write a book for y’all and they will just go, great. Here’s a check. They won’t ask me what it’s going to be about. They won’t ask me when I’m going to turn it in. They’re just like, that sounds good to us because they know what I know.

Then you’re going to give all the money away because you have this tendency of doing that. You are the first person to promote your work by doing things for other people. The last question is the question that I end all my interviews with. You do so many interviews. You get asked the same questions all the time. What question do you wish interviewers would ask where the answer is something you really want to talk about but they never have?

See the thing of it is, I’m not super interested in talking about myself or talking about how I feel about things. That’s the point of writing. This is why I like writing so much. Cause I can just put it on the screen and send it off and then everybody can see it. And then there you go.

That would be great if that was the only part of the writing job. It’s not. You have to do all the other stuff. You have to do all of the… when a book comes out especially, I start getting nightmares and shit like that. It’s a real thing because I know for the next three weeks or whatever, all day, every day, I’m going to have to be in these interviews and people are going to ask me questions and I’m going to be like, you just start to feel like, “Why are they talking to me?”

In the Time Is Illmatic documentary, there’s this really great part when they’re looking at a picture of Nas right when all the stuff was about to take off. It’s him and a bunch of other people sitting on the bench outside of where he grew up. The guy is going through person by person in the picture. He’s talking about a kid in the picture, grew up and this kid went to jail for this many years, this guy was in and out for this many years and he’s just going through it. And then while they’re hearing it, we’re watching Nas who’s listening to this as well.

And he is just overcome by grief almost. And he’s like, “Man, how lucky was I that this part didn’t happen to me. You look at everybody in that picture. This is one person, I happened to be the one person that, that didn’t happen to.” It might be one of my three or four favorite Nas moments. ‘Cause he’s so smart and so insightful. Very rarely is there a time where he doesn’t immediately have the right answer. And right there, you see him sit with it for a second and it’s going to be like, “Oh! Does he not know what to say here? Or is he going to say a stupid thing?” Nope. He starts talking and you’re like, “That’s exactly perfect.” That’s Nas. That’s what Nas does. But yeah, it’s some version of that feeling.

Shea Serrano And Brandon ‘Jinx’ Jenkins Explain What Makes A Rap Album ‘No Skips’ Material

by
Getty Image / Paul Rosales

In the fifth episode of The Ringer’s No Skips podcast — the one about DMX’s debut album It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot — the show’s hosts make an unsettling, insightful, and surprisingly comforting observation. Shea Serrano, author of The Rap Year Book and superfan of the film Blood In, Blood Out (his Twitter profile picture is Damian Chapa’s Miklo, which still causes no shortage of confusion among that app’s users), points out that DMX’s baseline for concern is the threat of death. In other words, nothing phases the Dark Man; any insinuation of potential loss or harm pales in comparison to the thought of his ultimate demise.

Co-host Brandon “Jinx” Jenkins, a veteran journalist who most recently profiled J. Cole for Slam magazine’s June/July 2021 cover (the first time an entertainer has accomplished this feat, although technically Cole also counts as a pro hooper), is blown away by Shea’s observation, and the two embark on a long aside in which they contemplate several hypothetical iterations of this newly discovered maxim. It’s thoroughly entertaining, it’s instructive, it’s funny as all hell; it’s everything a podcast should be. I am not a podcast guy by any means, but I have been locked in. Every Thursday when a new episode drops, I am locked in, eager to hear what sharp witticisms or goofy tangents these two intriguing hosts are willing to share.

The show is, ostensibly, about hip-hop — specifically, the albums that helped make hip-hop what it is today, the seismic, landscape-altering, culture-defining meteorites that seemed to fall from someplace beyond our atmosphere to throw up massive mushroom clouds of cosmic dust and rearrange everything we think we know about The Way Things Are. The two hosts, who couldn’t be more different, yet have this one thing in common — a deep, lasting love of hip-hop and an overlapping existence with its most explosive era — explore the impacts of albums like Lil Kim’s Hard Core, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, MAAD City, and most recently, Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt, but they also joke about basketball, movies, and being kids in the ’90s, all while roundly abusing their effects-laden producer Kerm (Jonathan Kermah) and taking cues from Deena Morrison, who presides over silly debates and drops gems of wisdom throughout each episode while keeping them in line.

When I was given the opportunity to interview Shea and Jinx about the show over Zoom, I leaped at it; after all, the thing they have in common with each other, I have in common with them. The result was, as expected, every bit as hilarious and insightful as their show, with all the deviations, non-sequiturs, in-jokes, and surprising, sharp insights that make their show such a joy to listen to. Check it out below.

So guys, thanks for sharing this time with me, and taking the time out of your busy schedules. I know you guys are both doing a lot. Let’s get right into it. So, No Skips. From soup to nuts, can someone please explain to me, how the show came to be?

Shea: Ew! What is that? What is that saying? “From soup to nuts?”

It’s a real saying, Shea!

Shea: That’s not a real saying, people don’t say that. Who says that?

It’s an actual saying from when they used to have soup at the beginning of dinner, and they would have a port or a sherry with warm nuts at the end. Like, dessert.

Shea: Is that a real thing? Brandon, have you ever heard of that?

Yes, I just looked it up. I specifically wanted to say it just to see what you would say.

Shea: Well, you got a reaction. Because that’s gross. That’s gross.

I don’t know how it went for Brandon. I know on my end, the idea of doing a music version of The Rewatchables had been floating around in the Ringer universe, in Slack for a while. A couple of years. TD hit me up one day and he said, hey, we’re going to do this show, No Skips. It’s like rap Rewatchables. Do you want to do it? And I was like, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to do that. Who else is going to be on it? And they said, “Oh, we’re going to try and get Brandon Jenkins.” And then I was like, Yeah, I want to do it now. Sign me up.”

Jinx: That’s pretty much how it went for me. As soon as they said it, I was like, alright. Because I think everyone that’s a fan of The Rewatchables has sort of imagined, What would this be like for music? I was like, all right, yeah. I’ve been DM-ing Shea for like four years.

So walk me through the construction of an episode, from the conception. Like, deciding the album. How do you guys decide on the album? And then what goes into the process of making the episode?

Jinx: Before even the paperwork was done, Shea and I both went to our respective corners. We both showed up on DM like, “Yo, I made a list.” He’s like, “Yo, I made a list too.” And we both had a lot of overlap. So we’ve kind of picked a big pool of albums that we want to rock with. And then Shea, Deena, and I, and then the rest of the production team, we all just started to list out what we thought would be a dope impact. We’re basically sequencing episodes how you’d sequence an album.

Shea: We lean on Deena for a lot of that stuff. For me, I always feel comfortable being very specific in a very small window. But I’m not good at getting a big picture and being like, “Well, here’s how you make a whole thing good.” So I lean on Deanna a lot for that: To be like, “How do I make that?”

If it was just me, we would’ve done like a two-year stretch of windows of albums that came out that I only cared about. And that would be the whole thing. And Deena was like, “No, no, no, let’s build it this way.”

In a prime incident of great minds think alike, I was actually about to ask, what is the story that you’re trying to tell with each episode and the sequence?

Jinx: Shea says this thing a lot, of these moments that used to happen on the internet more frequently and less frequently now, where everyone cared about the same thing. So when we’re picking albums, it’s thinking like that. That was a big moment, when Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ came out, everyone cared about this album. And we think about trying to structure episodes like that. Like, what’s going to be the things in these episodes that everyone’s going to care about or talk about? And it might not be every category, but we’re thinking about looking at the albums like that.

So when you get Lil Wayne’s The Carter III, that’s a totally different tone than Get Rich Or Die Tryin’. Completely different. Or you get an album that’s a little slower, like Good Kid, MAAD City has a whole different ethos, tone, content. And sometimes these artists are talking about the same thing, right? Growing up or coming of age, but from these different corners of the world, different times. So for a lot of it, what we’re doing is knowing that no albums the same. So we’re not trying to approach each one in the same. Like, The Carter III is going to be a way more insane episode than Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, MAAD City, because Wayne’s music is so much more insane.

Shea: Yeah, that sounds right. The primary goal is to just celebrate stuff that we like. And then the secret goal, the background goal is, probably, if we get to do all the albums that we want to do, we will have pretty much covered the history of rap. I think that’s, for me, the coolest part of the show is teeing it up in the beginning. Because for the middle hour and 20 minutes, it’s just me and Brandon making some jokes and having fun and doing whatever.

But in the very beginning and at the very end, it starts and Brandon does this thing, and I think that he’s the best person on the internet at doing this thing, where, in a two-minute stretch, he’s able to build out what was happening in rap at the time when this album came out and what was happening with this person when this album came out. So he does that for two minutes. And then at the end, we’re like, “Okay, this album came out 12 years ago, what has changed since then? What’s the legacy look like?”

If you were to take all of those pieces that he’s done, it’s like he’s building a map. And you’re like, “Oh, here’s the Lil Wayne section. Oh, it kind of overlaps with this Kanye section.” But just Venn diagram a little slice of it. He’s doing that with all these things. And by the end of it, he will have covered the entire history of everything. I think that’s a big-picture goal that I would like to see happen with it. But that’s what I look forward to the most because I don’t see that part when he does it. He just shows up and I’m like, “Alright, let’s go.”

One of the things I really love about this show is that you guys have a very classic, comedic duo chemistry, like an Abbott and Costello, or like Magic and Kareem, or Penn and Teller — on Nick, N-N-N, N-N-N-Nick… Just kidding. So what do you guys do when you can’t agree on an album to do, or when you can’t agree on what the perspective, or how to make this thing come together? Because you are coming from two different backgrounds, two different locations, age groups, all of that.

Shea: I don’t know that we’ve had that happen yet because the point of the show is not to agree on everything, the point of the show is to just talk about the thing that you like. I think that’s sort of what makes it the most fun is we both show up ready to celebrate a thing. The Kanye West Graduation episode will be out [after this interview]. And we show up and we start talking about it, and Brandon is like, “Oh, guess what? I really like ‘Drunk And Hot Girls.’ It’s an underrated song.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s a terrible opinion to have.” And so we’re arguing about this thing that we like, but we’re arguing because we like it in different ways. And ultimately it feels good. But it’s okay to not agree, it’s okay to just be like, “F*ck you, that’s wrong.”

So one of the things that you guys said during the Lil’ Kim episode, which really stuck with me. Jinx was really fascinated by the line that she says, “The rap Pam Grier’s here.” And that was the first moment that he knew what she was talking about. And then Shea was like, but it was a lot more fun when you had no idea and just made up wild shit. But was just how we grew up. And then kind of contrast that with, we have a world where Genius is a thing now, and kids can just look it up and they just kind of take it for granted.

Jinx: Man, that part was fun. Yeah, it’s sort of gone now. Me and Shea were actually talking about this. Yeah, just having that open field where you don’t know shit and that’s fun. Like how you used to argue sports stats and then be dead wrong. And now, there’s got to be a kid now who just pulls his phone out and you’re like, “Alright, I guess we’re all friends now.”

But I remember adding mad significance to lines. I remember interviewing Jadakiss one time. And he has this line on his second album. I think it’s on “Still Feel Me,” but I could have it wrong. But he says, “Hugged the kite and swallowed the stamp.” I know that a kite is a letter for someone in jail. But why would he eat the stamp? And then Jada’s like, “No, he’s not really eating a stamp. It’s just more like, he’s holding a letter close to his heart.”

It’s metaphorical.

Jinx: Yeah. And I was like, “Oh.” And then he’s just sort of like, “Why the f*ck are you interviewing me?” Like, you don’t get that. But it’s hearing rap, especially some of the albums, I mean, Shea talked about, we were a lot younger. So sometimes you hear this stuff, you interpret it based on what you know about the world, and then you don’t really revisit it because you move on to new music. And hearing a lot of these albums, I’m going back and being like, Oh, there’s a joy in kind of f*cking it up. There’s a joy in not having art explained.

Shea: I remember that being a thing just before the internet came out where if you didn’t know a thing, and none of your friends knew the thing, then whoever said an answer with the most confidence you were like, “Well, I guess that’s true, that must be the written…” A rap version of that is: We were just talking about Lil Kim and there’s a part in the episode where, where we were talking about some predictions that she made in the song, she has a line about “Money ruined this money ruined that, whatever money came between us…” In the mid-’90s, there was this whole big thing that happened with the Seattle Supersonics where this guy got a contract that the star didn’t get. And the team fell apart and you’re like, “Oh sh*t, I think she’s talking about the Seattle Supersonics right now.”

…And she wasn’t. Or there was a line that Raekwon had, where I found out later around the line is, “remember, I go deep, like a Navy Seal.” But he says it in that Raekwon voice where it sounds like, “Remember I got teeth like a baby seal.” And you’re like, “What? I don’t understand, I don’t know what this means. Why is he talking about a baby seal? Why he’s talking about my teeth?” And you’re trying to figure it out because, by this point, the Wu-Tang Clan was out there and everything they did had nine different meanings and you’re trying to figure it. And you’re just digging through whatever you can dig to try to figure out, Why is he talking about baby seal teeth? It was just like a fun time to listen to rap. It’s just great to not know.

So one of my favorite things about the show is the segment Flagrant Foul, which you guys renamed about three episodes in out of nowhere because you guys love to just throw a curveball.

Shea: Brandon came up with that. That was Brandon. That was all Brandon’s idea.

Do you guys have a favorite Flagrant Foul so far? Because our favorite rappers are very flagrant.

Jinx: I’m trying to think of one that really stands out. I think Lil Kim’s honestly. She has crazy stuff. She was like drying herself with a gun.

Shea: No, that was Lil Wayne. “The gun is my towel.” A big Lil Kim foul was when she said she was getting people from the Harlem Boys Choir performing oral sex on her or something like that. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

The Flagrant Foul thing is maybe my favorite category on there. And it was one of those things where we Brandon and I, over the course of a month or two, were work-shopping ideas and said, “Oh, we got to do this, and we got to do that.” A lot of the time, we would argue back and forth about a thing or talk back and forth about a thing. But when he said, “Oh, we should do this,” There was no argument at all. It was like, “Oh, that’s exactly what we should do. Exactly how you pitched.” It was just such a good, smart, fun idea. It just made me very happy. That was, that was all Brandon right there.

I do have to say you guys bully Kerm relentlessly. I need to know the origins of this. Why is Kerm constantly the target of the bullying? What did he do to deserve this?

Jinx: Look, I just met Kerm. But the thing with Kerm is he played ball. The first time we were like, “Yo, Kerm, maybe you should sing ‘One Skip.’” [This is sung to the tune of Ray J’s “One Wish” and it’s a screamer] And he was down. And then after that, it was like, “Alright, Kerm, maybe you should sing those skips like Ray J, maybe you should sing ‘One Skip’ like Lil Wayne singing like Ray J.” And so it just gets crazier and crazier, but Kerm is starting to turn on us. He’s starting to fight back in some ways, but Kerm’s great. The stuff he does in the show really takes it to the next level. Being able to bring in musical notes, he really gets the humor of the show. There are times where we invent a category essentially for the episode. And Shea’s like, “Kerm, give us these noises, give us these noises,” and Kerm goes, and they’re better than what we’re saying. I’m like, “Kerm, gunshots.” And he comes with a real noise.

Shea: But when you get on there, I know that Brandon is going to have his sh*t done. Deena is going to have hers done. Kerm is going to have his done. I’m going to have mine done. And it just works. But that’s like a good example. With the silliness of the gunshot noises, there’s real actual work that Kerm has to do for that. He works very hard on all that stuff. We cut out when y’all were talking about the bullying thing. I don’t know if y’all settled on an answer for that.

Jinx: But the funny thing is that Kerm is building his own Kerm-hive. And then they start to turn against us. So we need to play our cards right. Because I feel like Kerm is amassing an army that’s supportive of him.

It’s what happens! It’s the Fat Amy effect.

Shea: Then I’m like, what the hell? I’m busting my butt over here. Kerm comes in for 30 seconds. And that’s all anybody wants to talk about. Kerm can go to hell. That’s the title of this article when you can post it on Uproxx. “Kerm Can Go To Hell.”