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Rap music subordinates music to language. It is this emphasis on language that can make rap a vehicle for many ideas, if that is the rapper's intention. Playthell Benjamin, former academic and freelance writer for such magazines as the Village Voice and Emerge, believes that rappers can be divided into distinct groups, based on the message or non‐message conveyed. He groups rappers as “Narcissists, didactics, party‐time rappers, or gangsters” based on the content of their rapping. Any rapper who falls into one of these groups can have political significance for blacks, whites, women, liberals, conservatives, Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Narcissists frequently refer to women as mere sex objects, the worst example being the group 2 Live Crew, and less offensive examples being L.L. Cool J. and Big Daddy Kane. Didactics are the chief proponents of Afrocentric thinking and revisionist history. Representatives of this style would be Public Enemy, KRS‐One, and X‐Clan. Party‐time rappers, such as Heavy D and the Boyz or Biz Markie, are rarely serious, but sexism and homophobia can be elements in their raps. Gangster rappers N.W.A., Ice‐T, and Ice Cube are currently receiving a lot of attention from the press, and violent behavior characterizes their lyrics.

Commodification doubles self and work, life and object, uniqueness and standardization and art and management. For the artist, the unicity, beauty, inspiration and creativity of art is doubled in the sale, marketing, display, distribution and mass production of “art works”. Making art is intimate, personal and individual; selling art requires public display, pleasing the all important customer(s) and dealing with many sorts of in-betweens. What commodification is on the artist/art work level is doubling on the I/me, self/persona, private/public and in-group/out-group level. This paper aims to examine the commodification and doubling in the case of the Gee’s Bend quilt makers. The quilts foreshadowed the modernist aesthetic and are of the highest aesthetic quality. But, they were made in a traditional rural society by very poor, uneducated black women. The quilts were not made to be sold but were dedicated to familial remembrance and to immediate aesthetic pleasure. But now that they are on display: is escape from commodification possible?

Reprint for special issue.

Doubling, in the original article below, was tendentious but artistically and politically to be overcome; doubling currently seems much more ominous, omnipresent and out of control. Signifyin(g) has become bomb throwing. Present day doubling apparently produces terror and not just commodification.

Invited for publication.

This annotated list represents a selection of outstanding poetry titles published in the USA in 2003 and the early part of 2004.

The authors selected the titles in this list from the 2,100 titles received for the 2004 Poetry Publications Showcase at Poets House in New York City, held in April 2004.

The authors selected titles for this list that would be both accessible and challenging to library users.

This list can be used as a guide to collection development for contemporary poetry.

The purpose of this paper is to pursue the themes of feminine identity, doubling and (in)visibility; first in terms of “signifyin(g)” as a cultural and literary strategy, and second, in terms of quilting seen from the fiction of Alice Walker to the quilting of Gee's Bend. In the background, there plays the relationship between art and commodification.

The paper examines “commodification” and “doubling” in the case of the Gee's Bend quilt makers. The quilts foreshadow the modernist aesthetic and are of the highest aesthetic quality. They were made in a traditional rural society by very poor uneducated black women. The quilts were not made to be sold, but were dedicated to familial remembrance and to immediate aesthetic pleasure.

Commodification doubles self and work, life and object, uniqueness and standardization, art and management. For the artist, the unicity, beauty, inspiration and creativity of art is doubled in the sale, marketing, display, distribution and mass production of “art works.” Making art is intimate, personal and individual; selling art requires public display, pleasing the all‐important customer(s) and dealing with many sorts of in‐betweens. What “commodification” is on the artist/art work level, is “doubling” on the I/me, self/persona, private/public, and in‐group/out‐group level.

The author proposes, from the example of quilt‐making, a wide‐ranging interrogation: “Is escape from commodification possible?”