When this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were announced (the actual ceremony is on March 12), I had the sneaking suspicion that Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five would be the first practitioners of hip-hop to make the cut. A quick check of the inductees since the hall’s inception indicates as much, and while I’m not stunned, I’m also somewhat perplexed.

Sure, it’s the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but this is America, the melting pot, a metaphor that can be applied to our native music. Everything, in theory, mixes, and the results are often exciting and, as in the case of hip-hop, world-shaking. Before it even turned 25, hip-hop music and culture boasted a global audience, from Brazil to Japan. And already seven years into the 21st century, hip-hop still has a hold on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart.

Strangely, as popular as hip-hop is, it still doesn’t generate that many hit trade nonfiction books (the magic formula seems to be put “Tupac” or “Notorious B.I.G.” in your title). For the most part, I still see the stuff of African American studies syllabi, a la T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (April, NYU Press). Commercial houses, meanwhile, will try their luck this spring with the anthology Beats, Rhymes, and Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip-Hop (May, Harlem Moon) and Roni Sarig’s Third Coast: Outkast, Timbaland, and How Hip Hop Became a Southern Thing (May, Da Capo).

Then, again, I shouldn’t forget street lit. We tackled the genre in a collection development article last summer (“Streetwise Urban Fiction”), and it’s no stretch to say it’s probably the most powerful propagator of the “thug rapper” lifestyle outside of MTV. This platinum-selling pulp will be the subject of our best sellers list in July, and our own Barbara Hoffert moderated a panel on street lit at lasts year’s Day of Dialogue in Washington, DC. For a recap complete with authors and titles mentioned, click here.