The Rap Yearbook has garnered a lot of attention since its release last month. Part of why it has been a success so far is the careful consideration author and journalist Shea Serrano took in choosing the songs that were to be featured in the book.
Recently sitting down with HipHopDX Senior Features Writer Ural Garrett, Serrano broke down how he came to the decisions of the songs that would represent each year.
“When I first put the list together of songs I had a couple of different people look at it to make sure it was OK,” he said via a segment of today’s (November 4) DX Daily. “You try your best to put everything in there but that’s just how it goes.”
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Shea Serrano also relayed how important putting bias aside was into creating a fair list of tracks for the book.
“There’s no way to write about rap without doing that,” he explained. “Everybody has people they like. For example, I really like Kendrick Lamar right now. I think he is the best one, the best rapper of the last five years as far as the new guys go. He has a song with Taylor Swift, the ‘Bad Blood’ song. When he did that song I was like, ‘This is a bad song, whatever.’ If J. Cole had done it, who is a rapper [whose music I’m not a big fan of], if he had done it it would be this big horrible thing but because I like Kendrick it wasn’t a thing. When you’re working on the book there’s always biases. That’s why I tried to get opinions from other people.”
Watch the full DX Daily segment below:
