The Rap Year Book (Chapter Sample)

by

foreword by

illustrated by

SHEA SERRANO

ICE-T

ARTURO TORRES

The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed

1989 “Fight The Power”

1990 “Bonita Applebum”

1991 “Mind Playing Tricks On Me”

1992 “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang”

1993 “C.R.E.A.M.”

1994 “Juicy”

1995 “Dear Mama”

1996 “California Love”

1997 “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down”

1998 “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem”

1999 “My Name Is”

2000 “Big Pimpin’”

2001 “Takeover” vs. “Ether”

2002 “Grindin’”

2003 “In Da Club”

192

The Rap Year Book

2009

Best I Ever Had

WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT It’s about a guy who likes a (lot of ) girl(s), and a lot of time is spent reasserting his assessment of them.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT It was the insta-start of Drake’s career, and Drake went on to widen rap’s purview by making it undeniably okay to rap about your feelings, and by actualizing the Internet to propel him to fame, when everyone before him had failed to pull this feat off.

193

It’s easy to make fun of Drake, and so a lot of people do that. Sometimes, even when you aren’t trying to do that, you still do that. The art for this chapter, it’s Drake doing pottery.

It wasn’t meant as an insult, and it’s not an insult.

I told the illustrator, “Do something cool and something that Drake would do but that’s not rapping or rap-related,” and a few days later that picture was in my inbox. And when I saw it I said, “Well, that’s pretty perfect.” Drake probably doesn’t do pottery, but Drake might do pottery. Drake might do anything. It doesn’t matter what you say after “Drake doing . . .” There’s a possibility he’d do it, or has already done it, and that’s half the reason it’s funny, and the other half is because he’s Drake.

Drake riding a ten-speed bicycle.

Drake opening a ketchup bottle.

Drake shopping for a fern.

Drake making a Where the Red Fern Grows joke while shopping for that fern.

None of those things are insults, but they kind of are, but they’re definitely not. So Drake might do pottery. And if he doesn’t do it sincerely, he’ll (almost certainly) do it ironically. Because he’s funny and charming and transcendent, and sometimes only two of those things, and sometimes all three. When he was on Ellen DeGeneres’s show there was a segment where he read the side effects for an antidepressant drug in a sexy voice (funny). When he hosted the Juno Awards1 he did a thing where he hung out with old

DRAKE SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

192

The Rap Year Book

2009

Best I Ever Had

WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT It’s about a guy who likes a (lot of ) girl(s), and a lot of time is spent reasserting his assessment of them.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT It was the insta-start of Drake’s career, and Drake went on to widen rap’s purview by making it undeniably okay to rap about your feelings, and by actualizing the Internet to propel him to fame, when everyone before him had failed to pull this feat off.

193

It’s easy to make fun of Drake, and so a lot of people do that. Sometimes, even when you aren’t trying to do that, you still do that. The art for this chapter, it’s Drake doing pottery.

It wasn’t meant as an insult, and it’s not an insult.

I told the illustrator, “Do something cool and something that Drake would do but that’s not rapping or rap-related,” and a few days later that picture was in my inbox. And when I saw it I said, “Well, that’s pretty perfect.” Drake probably doesn’t do pottery, but Drake might do pottery. Drake might do anything. It doesn’t matter what you say after “Drake doing . . .” There’s a possibility he’d do it, or has already done it, and that’s half the reason it’s funny, and the other half is because he’s Drake.

Drake riding a ten-speed bicycle.

Drake opening a ketchup bottle.

Drake shopping for a fern.

Drake making a Where the Red Fern Grows joke while shopping for that fern.

None of those things are insults, but they kind of are, but they’re definitely not. So Drake might do pottery. And if he doesn’t do it sincerely, he’ll (almost certainly) do it ironically. Because he’s funny and charming and transcendent, and sometimes only two of those things, and sometimes all three. When he was on Ellen DeGeneres’s show there was a segment where he read the side effects for an antidepressant drug in a sexy voice (funny). When he hosted the Juno Awards1 he did a thing where he hung out with old

DRAKE SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

194

2009 “Best I Ever Had” — Drake

people and formed Old Money, a takeoff of the Young Money record label he’s signed to (funny and charming). When he hosted the ESPYs2 he blew into the ear of a basketball player named Lance Stephenson because Lance had done it to LeBron James a few months earlier in a play-off game (funny and charming and transcendent). Could you ever even picture one single other rap superstar blowing into Lance Stephenson’s ear, or that of any player from the Charlotte Hornets3 for that matter? No, you cannot. Only Drake.

Drake is a force. Drake is a force created by the Internet.

Drake is a force created by the Internet and Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak album and also some Andre 3000 verses. His

first proper single, “Best I Ever Had,” was an instant success that verified his creative existence before he’d fully developed it.

Drake’s funny on “Best I Ever Had” on purpose, like when he says, “When my album drop, bitches’ll buy it for the picture / And niggas’ll buy it, too, and claim they got it for their sister.” And he’s funny on it by accident, like when he says, “I be hittin’ all the spots that you ain’t even know was there,” as though he’s discovered a new area of the vagina, as though he is the Ferdinand Magellan of vaginas.

Drake accidentally making a Ferdinand Magellan of vaginas joke. ♦ Quick stats: “Best I Ever Had” was nominated for two Grammys, and that’s crazy because it was basically from a mixtape,4 and so this is a really good example of how Lil Wayne turned rap inside out with his mixtape run from 2006 up through 2008. “Best I Ever Had” rose to number one on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and also their Hot Rap Songs chart, which are two different things. It’s been downloaded from iTunes more than two million times, a feat more impressive than the (already impressive) number would suggest, given that it was easily available for free on the Internet. ♦ In the “Best I Ever Had" video, Drake is the coach of a female basketball team full of large-breasted women who are very bad at basketball and never ever wear bras. His team plays a game against what would appear to be a team of Amazons. And they get pummeled. With two minutes left in the fourth quarter and his team down 42–4,5 Drake calls a time-out. He brings his girls close, gives them a motivational speech, then sends them back out to finish the game in what is to be the most stirring comeback of all time. Except it never materializes. We see a shot of a girl on his team trying a jumper and getting it blocked, then the next shot shows thirty seconds left on the clock and

The Rap Year Book

now his team is down 91–14, and then the game is over. Four things: 1. D rake is not that great at rah-rah speeches. That’s surprising.

2. I don’t think I understand the rules of the Music Video Basketball Association, and I say that because as the aforementioned girl was preparing to take the aforementioned shot, she looked especially hopeful, a hopefulness that was matched only by dejection in Drake when he saw it get blocked. Nobody looks that irritated when a shot gets blocked unless that shot carries with it the potential to win a game. So I figure maybe she was shooting a 78-pointer, like from a special spot on the floor or something? That would have given her team a one-point lead. I guess it’s like MTV’s Rock N’ Jock basketball game, only except without Dan Cortese.

3. T he Amazons scored forty-nine points in ninety seconds at the end of the game. That’s astounding. That’s the most dominant stretch of basketball that’s ever been played.

The 2012 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team beat Nigeria by eighty-three points, and that’s the largest margin of victory in the history of Olympic and professional basketball, but even there their points-per-possession rating is way subpar to the Amazons. You can blame Drake for the defeat if you like, but that hardly seems fair. He was up against an unprecedented mismatch.

4. T he song is all about the best girl(s) Drake has ever had.

That’s the whole point. He’s so happy and excited about it. But then in the video it ends with him sad and alone in his coach’s office. The dichotomy would seem to serve as an indicator for the manner in which Drake navigates relationships, in that even when they are very good, they are also historically bad and unsettling. Which circles to:

195

Kanye West directed the “Best I Ever Had” video, and I’m happy about that because it allows for an easy transition to talk about 808s & Heartbreak, the album that West made in 2008 that was the template for Drake’s professional angst, and also the (unintentional) permission for him to be able to pursue it, and not just to pursue but to be successful at it.

To be short: 808s was an album where Kanye, already a star, emoted for fifty-two straight minutes about the spiritual consequences of love, sometimes literally (there’s a song called “Heartless,” there’s a song called “Welcome to Heartbreak,” things like that) and sometimes aesthetically—the last three minutes and fifteen seconds of “Say You Will,” for example, there aren’t any words, just a couple of cold and lonely drums, two robo-tinks, and lots of chilled gray air to walk around in and explore your feelings. 808s wasn’t panned, but it wasn’t revered like West’s prior three albums had been.6 The quickest, best summation came when Jon Caramanica wrote “Drake took Mr. West’s self-examination and stripped it of all its agitation, preserving only the emotional turmoil” in the New York Times in September 2013.

There are parts of this book where conclusions and connections are made, where insight is developed or deduced based on evidence of observations. The Drake to Kanye (and Andre) thing, though, that’s not one of them. I mean, it’s an easy observation to make. But in this instance, there were no parts to snap together. Drake just said it: “I think Kanye deserves a lot of credit and Andre 3000 deserves a lot of credit for the shift in what you have to be to be a rapper, and what your music has to sound like,” he told the Daily Beast in 2011. “Those guys made it OK for melody to be introduced. They made it OK to not necessarily be the most street dude.” It was a long interview. He clarified: “For me, I started to believe more in myself when I saw those two guys. I thought, ‘I’m good at rapping, so if they just respect the talent

1. The Juno Awards are “Canada’s Music Awards.” You have to have lived in Canada for at least the last six months of the eligibility process to receive one.

2. The ESPYs are sports awards handed out by ESPN. (You can live wherever you want.)

3. Lance Stephenson played for the Indiana Pacers when Drake did the ear-blow thing. He plays for the Charlotte Hornets as I write this. Fingers crossed he stays there a bit so that this tiny section is accurate. I had not anticipated being emotionally invested in where a toothsome shooting guard works when I started writing a book, but that’s just the way the universe works sometimes.

4. So Far Gone, which Drake ultimately rebundled and rereleased as a seven-song EP for sale. It was somehow the ninth-best-selling rap album of 2009, despite having only two new songs on it and despite having been released in September.

5. I don’t know if you follow basketball a lot or not, but 42–4 is not that great of a score.

6. 808s & Heartbreak is a mammoth album, and its influence has been just as big as any other album he’s made. It’s his third-best solo album. It goes: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Graduation, 808s, Late Registration, Yeezus, The College Dropout.

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

194

2009 “Best I Ever Had” — Drake

people and formed Old Money, a takeoff of the Young Money record label he’s signed to (funny and charming). When he hosted the ESPYs2 he blew into the ear of a basketball player named Lance Stephenson because Lance had done it to LeBron James a few months earlier in a play-off game (funny and charming and transcendent). Could you ever even picture one single other rap superstar blowing into Lance Stephenson’s ear, or that of any player from the Charlotte Hornets3 for that matter? No, you cannot. Only Drake.

Drake is a force. Drake is a force created by the Internet.

Drake is a force created by the Internet and Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak album and also some Andre 3000 verses. His

first proper single, “Best I Ever Had,” was an instant success that verified his creative existence before he’d fully developed it.

Drake’s funny on “Best I Ever Had” on purpose, like when he says, “When my album drop, bitches’ll buy it for the picture / And niggas’ll buy it, too, and claim they got it for their sister.” And he’s funny on it by accident, like when he says, “I be hittin’ all the spots that you ain’t even know was there,” as though he’s discovered a new area of the vagina, as though he is the Ferdinand Magellan of vaginas.

Drake accidentally making a Ferdinand Magellan of vaginas joke. ♦ Quick stats: “Best I Ever Had” was nominated for two Grammys, and that’s crazy because it was basically from a mixtape,4 and so this is a really good example of how Lil Wayne turned rap inside out with his mixtape run from 2006 up through 2008. “Best I Ever Had” rose to number one on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and also their Hot Rap Songs chart, which are two different things. It’s been downloaded from iTunes more than two million times, a feat more impressive than the (already impressive) number would suggest, given that it was easily available for free on the Internet. ♦ In the “Best I Ever Had" video, Drake is the coach of a female basketball team full of large-breasted women who are very bad at basketball and never ever wear bras. His team plays a game against what would appear to be a team of Amazons. And they get pummeled. With two minutes left in the fourth quarter and his team down 42–4,5 Drake calls a time-out. He brings his girls close, gives them a motivational speech, then sends them back out to finish the game in what is to be the most stirring comeback of all time. Except it never materializes. We see a shot of a girl on his team trying a jumper and getting it blocked, then the next shot shows thirty seconds left on the clock and

The Rap Year Book

now his team is down 91–14, and then the game is over. Four things: 1. D rake is not that great at rah-rah speeches. That’s surprising.

2. I don’t think I understand the rules of the Music Video Basketball Association, and I say that because as the aforementioned girl was preparing to take the aforementioned shot, she looked especially hopeful, a hopefulness that was matched only by dejection in Drake when he saw it get blocked. Nobody looks that irritated when a shot gets blocked unless that shot carries with it the potential to win a game. So I figure maybe she was shooting a 78-pointer, like from a special spot on the floor or something? That would have given her team a one-point lead. I guess it’s like MTV’s Rock N’ Jock basketball game, only except without Dan Cortese.

3. T he Amazons scored forty-nine points in ninety seconds at the end of the game. That’s astounding. That’s the most dominant stretch of basketball that’s ever been played.

The 2012 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team beat Nigeria by eighty-three points, and that’s the largest margin of victory in the history of Olympic and professional basketball, but even there their points-per-possession rating is way subpar to the Amazons. You can blame Drake for the defeat if you like, but that hardly seems fair. He was up against an unprecedented mismatch.

4. T he song is all about the best girl(s) Drake has ever had.

That’s the whole point. He’s so happy and excited about it. But then in the video it ends with him sad and alone in his coach’s office. The dichotomy would seem to serve as an indicator for the manner in which Drake navigates relationships, in that even when they are very good, they are also historically bad and unsettling. Which circles to:

195

Kanye West directed the “Best I Ever Had” video, and I’m happy about that because it allows for an easy transition to talk about 808s & Heartbreak, the album that West made in 2008 that was the template for Drake’s professional angst, and also the (unintentional) permission for him to be able to pursue it, and not just to pursue but to be successful at it.

To be short: 808s was an album where Kanye, already a star, emoted for fifty-two straight minutes about the spiritual consequences of love, sometimes literally (there’s a song called “Heartless,” there’s a song called “Welcome to Heartbreak,” things like that) and sometimes aesthetically—the last three minutes and fifteen seconds of “Say You Will,” for example, there aren’t any words, just a couple of cold and lonely drums, two robo-tinks, and lots of chilled gray air to walk around in and explore your feelings. 808s wasn’t panned, but it wasn’t revered like West’s prior three albums had been.6 The quickest, best summation came when Jon Caramanica wrote “Drake took Mr. West’s self-examination and stripped it of all its agitation, preserving only the emotional turmoil” in the New York Times in September 2013.

There are parts of this book where conclusions and connections are made, where insight is developed or deduced based on evidence of observations. The Drake to Kanye (and Andre) thing, though, that’s not one of them. I mean, it’s an easy observation to make. But in this instance, there were no parts to snap together. Drake just said it: “I think Kanye deserves a lot of credit and Andre 3000 deserves a lot of credit for the shift in what you have to be to be a rapper, and what your music has to sound like,” he told the Daily Beast in 2011. “Those guys made it OK for melody to be introduced. They made it OK to not necessarily be the most street dude.” It was a long interview. He clarified: “For me, I started to believe more in myself when I saw those two guys. I thought, ‘I’m good at rapping, so if they just respect the talent

1. The Juno Awards are “Canada’s Music Awards.” You have to have lived in Canada for at least the last six months of the eligibility process to receive one.

2. The ESPYs are sports awards handed out by ESPN. (You can live wherever you want.)

3. Lance Stephenson played for the Indiana Pacers when Drake did the ear-blow thing. He plays for the Charlotte Hornets as I write this. Fingers crossed he stays there a bit so that this tiny section is accurate. I had not anticipated being emotionally invested in where a toothsome shooting guard works when I started writing a book, but that’s just the way the universe works sometimes.

4. So Far Gone, which Drake ultimately rebundled and rereleased as a seven-song EP for sale. It was somehow the ninth-best-selling rap album of 2009, despite having only two new songs on it and despite having been released in September.

5. I don’t know if you follow basketball a lot or not, but 42–4 is not that great of a score.

6. 808s & Heartbreak is a mammoth album, and its influence has been just as big as any other album he’s made. It’s his third-best solo album. It goes: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Graduation, 808s, Late Registration, Yeezus, The College Dropout.

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

196

2009 “Best I Ever Had” — Drake

and don’t crucify you for what your past is or who you are, then I should be OK.’” ♦ Drake shifted rap in observable ways, the most important being that he commoditized the investigation of heartache better than any rapper ever had, and that made it an acceptable business model, and so now there are one hundred thousand rappers rapping about their ninth-grade girlfriend, and you can go either way with that. But there’s also his relationship with the Internet.

His music had traveled from Canada to Houston via the Internet, and then from there to Lil Wayne,7 so there’s an actual functional aspect there. But he was the first (and thus far only) rap giant that the Internet actualized, and from there it was fine if the Internet was part of your origin story. The Internet tried to push Wale up into the clouds in 2008, but Wale was always too goofy and never interesting enough for the throne. It tried to shove Kid Cudi up there after that, too, but Cudi was always too weird and too untrustworthy to be given the crown. There were others, and there will certainly be others to come,8 but those were the first true ones. And they failed. Drake was the one.

I remember watching Drake in concert early on in his career—this was right around the time Thank Me Later had crystallized his arrival; it shipped more than a million copies, he’d been nominated for five Grammys, all that.

Near the end of the show, he stopped the music and asked for the lights to be turned up. Then he started pointing out peo-

The Rap Year Book

ple in the crowd, making jokes, engaging them. He did it with the same ease that Dave Chappelle does stand-up,9 the same ease that Jay Z interacts with interviewers. It’s always been easy to see that Drake was a king.

7. Jas Prince, son of J. Prince, founder of Houston’s Rap-A-Lot Records, is credited with having put Drake’s tape in front of Lil Wayne.

8. Compton’s twitchy Kendrick Lamar will hopefully get there next.

9. Before he went nuts, obvs.

REBUTTAL: “LEMONADE” GUCCI MANE

Gucci Mane was in prison when 2009 started, and he was back in when it ended. He still found a way to own the year completely. In the eight or so months Gucci was free, he rapped on hundreds of songs, cranked out mixtapes at a baffling rate, and had more fun talking shit than anyone else. Gucci made it possible to be the hardest rapper out there while playing nursery-rhyme language games, wheezing like a grandma, and making entire (great) songs about

how he was “wonderful” or “gorgeous.” “Lemonade” was Peak Gucci. It banged hard enough to start club riots, despite being a goofy meditation on the color yellow with a maddening kids’-choir sample. Its stupidity transcends: “Lemonade my townhouse in Miami, I want yellow carpet / Woke up in the morning, fuck it, bought a yellow Aston Martin.” Gucci’s mania, the thing that made him great, derailed his career soon enough. But we’ll always have his 2009.

—TOM BREIHAN

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

197

196

2009 “Best I Ever Had” — Drake

and don’t crucify you for what your past is or who you are, then I should be OK.’” ♦ Drake shifted rap in observable ways, the most important being that he commoditized the investigation of heartache better than any rapper ever had, and that made it an acceptable business model, and so now there are one hundred thousand rappers rapping about their ninth-grade girlfriend, and you can go either way with that. But there’s also his relationship with the Internet.

His music had traveled from Canada to Houston via the Internet, and then from there to Lil Wayne,7 so there’s an actual functional aspect there. But he was the first (and thus far only) rap giant that the Internet actualized, and from there it was fine if the Internet was part of your origin story. The Internet tried to push Wale up into the clouds in 2008, but Wale was always too goofy and never interesting enough for the throne. It tried to shove Kid Cudi up there after that, too, but Cudi was always too weird and too untrustworthy to be given the crown. There were others, and there will certainly be others to come,8 but those were the first true ones. And they failed. Drake was the one.

I remember watching Drake in concert early on in his career—this was right around the time Thank Me Later had crystallized his arrival; it shipped more than a million copies, he’d been nominated for five Grammys, all that.

Near the end of the show, he stopped the music and asked for the lights to be turned up. Then he started pointing out peo-

The Rap Year Book

ple in the crowd, making jokes, engaging them. He did it with the same ease that Dave Chappelle does stand-up,9 the same ease that Jay Z interacts with interviewers. It’s always been easy to see that Drake was a king.

7. Jas Prince, son of J. Prince, founder of Houston’s Rap-A-Lot Records, is credited with having put Drake’s tape in front of Lil Wayne.

8. Compton’s twitchy Kendrick Lamar will hopefully get there next.

9. Before he went nuts, obvs.

REBUTTAL: “LEMONADE” GUCCI MANE

Gucci Mane was in prison when 2009 started, and he was back in when it ended. He still found a way to own the year completely. In the eight or so months Gucci was free, he rapped on hundreds of songs, cranked out mixtapes at a baffling rate, and had more fun talking shit than anyone else. Gucci made it possible to be the hardest rapper out there while playing nursery-rhyme language games, wheezing like a grandma, and making entire (great) songs about

how he was “wonderful” or “gorgeous.” “Lemonade” was Peak Gucci. It banged hard enough to start club riots, despite being a goofy meditation on the color yellow with a maddening kids’-choir sample. Its stupidity transcends: “Lemonade my townhouse in Miami, I want yellow carpet / Woke up in the morning, fuck it, bought a yellow Aston Martin.” Gucci’s mania, the thing that made him great, derailed his career soon enough. But we’ll always have his 2009.

—TOM BREIHAN

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

SAMPLE CHAPTER. COPYRIGHT © THE RAP YEAR BOOK BY SHEA SERRANO,

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTURO TORRES. PUBLISHED BY ABRAMS IMAGE, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS, 2015.

197