Review Excerpt:

The book's crisp black and white photography and appropriate design (its pull-quotes rendered in the Gothic typeface Fraktur) recall two other genre primers of enduring worth -- Steven Davis' Reggae Bloodlines from the 1970s and a more immediate antecedent from the following decade, David Toop's The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hiphop.

In the larger measure, Palmer's survey compares favourably with these books . . . Palmer defines 'crunk' with the multivalence an Eskimo might reserve for describing snow. . . The stories of rappers such as Stat Quo and Young Buck focus on business models and personal drive. Clearly these qualities appeal to Tamara Palmer, who with her first book has mapped a landscape of flashpaper wealth and bruising poverty, of tits and beats and beefs, of marginalised voices who commandeered the microphone.