When Gucci Mane announced that he’d written a memoir called The Autobiography of Gucci Mane last week, he joined a small but charming offshoot of the literary canon: the hip-hop autobiography. The genre is full of fascinating people, many of whom have used their intelligence and drive to overcome the sorts of economic and social inequalities that a sizable portion of their fanbases can’t begin to fathom. At their best, hip-hop memoirs function both as windows into the creative world of incredibly talented individuals, as well as reflections upon the communities that America has left behind. But needless to say, for every frank and thoughtful book like Scarface’s Diary of a Madman, there is one like Kanye West’s Thank You And You’re Welcome, a 52-page collection of Kanye-isms that’s so laughably pointless that perhaps even Yeezy himself would rather you forget it. What follows is a selection of the best – or at least most fascinating – entries into the hip-hop literary canon.

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DJ Khaled: The Keys

DJ Khaled’s evolution from Miami pirate radio DJ into the PT Barnum of hip-hop is a testament to possessing the correct combination of charisma, a penchant for self-promotion and a borderline delusional belief in your inherent right to fame and fortune. The Keys is structured as half memoir, half self-help manual, combining Khaled’s signature catchphrases (“Secure the bag!” “You played yourself!”) with anecdotes from his life to produce a series of parables – aka Keys – which teach the reader how they, too, can overcome haters and live a life stuffed to the gills with successes, wins and other nonspecific manifestations of achievement. The ultimate “key”, it seems, is that you can sell anything in DJ Khaled’s world – even a book! – as long as you remember the only product worth pitching in our late-capitalist technocratic dystopia is yourself.

The RZA: The Wu-Tang Manual

Part of the fun of being a Wu-Tang fan is they are a hip-hop subgenre unto themselves. Between the Staten Island group’s six albums (seven, if you count Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the only copy of which is owned by late-capitalist villain Martin Shkreli) and the myriad projects released by individual Wu members and their affiliates, the Wu-Tang Clan have created a hermetically sealed world characterized by dense thickets of slang drawing from martial arts culture, chess, comic books, the New York criminal underworld and the teachings of the Five-Percent Nation. You literally need a textbook to understand it all. Fortunately, that’s exactly what Wu mastermind RZA and journalist Chris Norris created in The Wu-Tang Manual, breaking down the geography, media, philosophies and unique language that combined to shape the wonderful, weird world of Wu.

Prodigy of Mobb Deep: My Infamous Life

In addition to being half of the legendary duo Mobb Deep and a hip-hop trendsetter par excellence, the rapper Prodigy is an undeniably tragic figure. He was born into a family that included notable jazz musicians, singers, dancers and academics – his grandfather was famed saxophonist Budd Johnson, and his great-great grandfather founded Morehouse College – and while Mobb Deep albums, such as The Infamous and Hell on Earth, more than live up to his family’s musical legacy, Prodigy’s most fruitful creative years were fraught with violence, drug abuse, missed opportunities, pointless beefs and straight-up mistakes. My Infamous Life is at its best when it details a New York hip-hop scene in which the line separating the studio and the streets was often porous to the point of nonexistence – Prodigy’s rhyme partner Havoc accidentally shot the record executive who they were trying to get to sign them, and Mobb Deep once booked a show with a rival rap crew because it gave them an opportunity to beat up one of the rappers. The rapper wrote My Infamous Life with the assistance of journalist Laura Checkoway while incarcerated on a gun charge, and the book very much functions as a hip-hop tell-all, candid in its disclosures and casual about the harrowing situations the author often found himself in.

Jay Z: Decoded

Few rappers are as publicly successful and privately enigmatic as Jay Z, whose 2010 book Decoded functions as part memoir, part critical self-analysis, detailing the experiences that shaped his music. Decoded shines brightest when Jay turns his eye to his own lyrics, unpacking the sly profundity underpinning his writing and in the process making the case for hip-hop as a capital-A art form. Given Jay’s on-record precision – as well as the presence of co-author Dream Hampton, one of the all-time great hip-hop journalists – it’s unsurprising that Decoded’s prose is in a class above most other books in its category. While Jay is generous when it comes to using his unique, astute perspective to comment on race and class in America, there are some topics – his relationship with Beyoncé most prominent among them – that he glosses over or avoids altogether, creating the same sense of curated intimacy found in his music. Still, when it comes to rap autobiographies, Decoded just might be the gold standard.

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Violent J of Insane Clown Posse: Behind the Paint

Jay Z’s Decoded is a great book in part because it’s a nuanced, well-written work of literature that’s mysterious and guarded in all the right ways. Violent J’s Behind the Paint is the exact opposite. While Decoded is very clearly the product of tireless writing, revising and editing, Behind the Paint reads like the profanity-laced ramblings of Violent J, who literally starts the book with his first memory and doesn’t let up for 600 pages. But for all its goofiness, Behind the Paint is legitimately fascinating. Violent J is unflinching when delving into the poverty, violence and abuse that defined his impossibly bleak childhood in Detroit. He writes of his birth father stealing the family’s life savings out of his mother’s hand, having been sexually abused by his stepfather, and reveals that before Insane Clown Posse was a rap crew, they were simply a gang. He also writes of the absurd, borderline Sisyphean efforts required of all musicians hoping to make it big with remarkable candor and cheer. “I refuse just to talk about the happy parts of ICP,” he writes while discussing the multiple times he and his bandmate Shaggy 2 Dope burglarized a Kinko’s because they couldn’t afford to pay to print out flyers. “Instead, I’d rather dump it all on you.”