The Book of Rhyme & Reason

In the mid-nineties, documentarian Peter Spirer embarked on a three-year odyssey to offer a realistic view of Hip-Hop and the people and culture it encompassed, interviewing over 80 artists involved in the art form. Spirer managed to capture a seminal moment as the culture balanced on the cusp of the mainstream. As Ice-T comments in his foreword to the book, ''Rhyme & Reason is one of the few films that was there to document us before Hip-Hop truly exploded.'' Spirer''s goal was to make a film, ''for anyone who''s at a traffic light and gets intimidated by another car pulling up with a fat sound-system. I wanted to give an understanding of where that was coming from and what it was all about.'' While filming, Spirer took accompanying stills using a medium format Rolleiflex camera. It is these photographs that form THE BOOK OF RHYME & REASON. ''The Rollei allowed me to capture some amazing moments: Puffy getting a trim in his office while doing three tasks at once, Biggie opening record plaques on his couch, Ice-T and Mack 10 hanging with their homies, Heavy D at the barber, playing pool. There was the Jack The Rapper convention with Death Row making a statement, at a Disney World Hotel, that ended in chaos. There were magical moments such as Redman and Erick Sermon freestyling on the mic to amazed onlookers at a block party in Newark and watching Wu-Tang Clan chop it up on the block in Staten Island on a cold winter''s day before they exploded.'' This coffee table volume features over 130 of Spirer''s photographs from 1994 to 1997. As Hip-Hop commemorates its fiftieth anniversary in 2023, it is particularly fitting that many of these images from this formative period are being seen and published for the first time.