“Coming to You Live and Direct!”: Performing Liveness and Immediacy on Record

Abstract

Focusing on popular rap songs from 1978 to 2010, this chapter considers the enduring emphasis of rap MCs on collective participation in mediated performances and provides insight into the creative process of their lyrics. To bolster the argument of rap lyrics as a “mediated-live” conversation, it surveys a corpus of over 350 relevant songs from 1978 to 2010.