After 10 years, the Understand Rap website is no longer being maintained.

The main pages of the site have been preserved, but all user accounts and data have been removed. We no longer serve advertisements or track any visitor information as referenced in the Privacy Policy or Terms of Use.

You can still order the book from Abrams Books, Indie Bound, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.

I'd like to thank all the people in my life who inspired and supported this idea back in 2009, the artists around the world making rap music every day, the anonymous individuals on IRC who helped me implement the site, everyone who contributed content in the form of confusing lyrics or insightful explanations, the media outlets who reviewed the site and interviewed me, and Abrams Books for believing in the concept in book form and approaching me to draft a manuscript.

Privacy Policy

This is the privacy policy of Understand Rap (Web site).

We can be reached via the contact form on this website.

For each visitor to our Web site, our Web server automatically recognizes the consumer's domain name, ip address, and e-mail address (where possible).

We collect the domain name and e-mail address (where possible) of visitors to our Web site, aggregate information on what pages consumers access or visit, user-specific information on what pages consumers access or visit, and/or information volunteered by the consumer, such as survey information and/or site registrations.

The information we collect is used to improve the content of our Web site, used to customize the content and/or layout of our page for each individual visitor, used to notify consumers about updates to our Web site, disclosed when legally required to do so, at the request of governmental authorities conducting an investigation, used to verify or enforce compliance with the policies governing our Web site and applicable laws or to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our Web site, given to a successor entity in connection with a corporate merger, consolidation, sale of assets or other corporate change respecting the Web site.

With respect to cookies: We use cookies to store visitors preferences, record session information, such as items that consumers add to their shopping cart, record user-specific information on what pages users access or visit, alert visitors to new areas that we think might be of interest to them when they return to our site, record past activity at a site in order to provide better service when visitors return to our site, customize Web page content based on visitors' browser type or other information that the visitor sends and to confirm agreement to the site's Terms of Use.

If you do not want to receive e-mail from us in the future, please let us know by sending us e-mail at the above address.

If you supply us with your postal address, you will only receive correspondence for which you provided us your address.

With respect to Ad Servers: To try and bring you offers that are of interest to you, we have relationships with other companies that we allow to place ads on our Web pages. As a result of your visit to our site, ad server companies may collect information such as your domain type, your IP address and clickstream information. For further information, consult the privacy policies of: Google and Amazon

From time to time, we may use customer information for new, unanticipated uses not previously disclosed in our privacy notice. If our information practices change at some time in the future we will post the policy changes to our Web site to notify you of these changes and we will use for these new purposes only data collected from the time of the policy change forward. If you are concerned about how your information is used, you should check back at our Web site periodically.

Customers may prevent their information from being used for purposes other than those for which it was originally collected by e-mailing us at the above address or by deleting their account.

Upon request we offer visitors ability to have factual inaccuracies corrected in information that we maintain about them by sending us e-mail at the above address.