Tom Wolf - OTL 48: T.M. Wolf Excerpt #3 - The "Hip-Hop Novel" lyrics

SameOldShawn: You've talked about Sound as a "hip-hop novel." Normally, those words have a very different connotation. It's a novel about hip-hop in some way, or people on the come-up in the industry, or what's euphemistically referred to as an "urban novel," or whatever. Sound is none of those things. So I was wondering if you could go into what you meant by calling it a "hip-hop novel." T.M. Wolf: In terms of making it a hip-hop novel, what I was interested more in was not creating a novel where everything rhymes or creating a novel that translates into prose form the kind of stories that you hear when you listen to rap, but a book that was constructed using formal principles that I had drawn out of the music I think you see this particularly at the macro level of how the plot plays out. To the extent that the plot plays out, it doesn't have a cla**ic rising action-climax-denouement. The idea instead is that things are proceeding in this book through cycles and repetition with variation. So later chapters are remixes of earlier chapters. There are not just words, but phrases that recur frequently. And the idea is that we're going to cycle our way through an experience. And by the end of it, we're going to be changed in some way, and we're going to see some things, and things are going to evolve. But there's not going to be a resolution in the way that cla**ical plot structures would demand. And all that is just something that you take from listening to sample-heavy music.