This episode explores Gangsta Rap and the set of production techniques that musicologist Adam Krims described as the "Hip Hop Sublime." The first segment discusses the rise to prominence of gangsta rap and its social, political, and aesthetic place in the 1990s. The second segment examines the notion of the sublime as illustrated in the writings of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-François Lyotard. The third segment examines the notion of the "Hip Hop Sublime" and the manner in which gangsta rap plays on the tension between the mediated and the immediate. 

The photograph used for the episode art is by Premeditated: Premeditated, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons