Winner: Association of American Publishers (AAP) 2021 PROSE Award— Best E-Product

- AAP PROSE Awards

"While a slew of scholarship over the past twenty-five years has situated hip-hop
as artistic expression with both didactic and symbolic intellectual content,
Carson’s professorial and artistic concerns pushes this assumption to another
level. Carson uses the art of music to participate equally with literature as a form
of cultural criticism."
—Guthrie Ramsey, University of Pennsylvania

- Guthrie Ramsey

"i used to love to dream breaks new ground, speaks to compelling issues in our
time, and is clearly rooted in both scholarship and Black rhetorical traditions,
even as it intervenes in both."
—Adam Banks, Stanford University

- Adam Banks

"Saying that A.D. Carson’s i used to love to dream is a good listening experience
would be like saying that the experience of being high is a strange breathing
experience, or that the experience of an overdose is a bad measuring experience.
The project cannot be reduced to the sounds, images, texts, and thin genre
descriptions that comprise it. With this disturbingly personal offering, Carson
gives us a dope critical process of inhaling and engaging today’s most pressing
questions about home and national identity, empire and the geography of
oppression, and the intimate politics of survival and transformation. I urge you to
spend time with this project. Submerge your entire body in it. Argue with it.
Demand that it explain why it approaches things the way it does. I’m not sure if
disciplines—as currently embodied—deserve or can handle this hit, but all of us
need what is revealed on this journey."
—Chenjerai Kumanyika, Rutgers University

- Chenjerai Kumanyika

"i used to love to dream is a historic recording and piece of popular music scholarship. It is also a major addition to the catalogue of great hip-hop music. Accordingly, A.D. Carson should be celebrated for the integrity and character of his work."
—Journal of Popular Music Studies

- Anthony Kwame Harrison

"Digital rhetoric and writing scholars have long argued about the depth and richness that digital texts are capable of. A.D. Carson delivers rich sonic textures and layers. He delivers important contexts and arguments. But above all, you can feel the author’s presence in a way that academic texts are usually incapable. This, I hope, is the future for how we continue to build and create knowledge."
—Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy

- Victor Del Hierro

"Overall, I Used to Love to Dream is an important and much-needed contribution to popular music scholarship, pedagogy, and tenure practices that will be of great interest to a broad array of music scholars, historians, educators, and students. Specifically, to have these distinct sonic and visual signifiers of Blackness accepted as legitimate academic discourse is an important means
of broadening what is considered tenure-worthy scholarship"
—Journal of the American Musicological Society

- Jasmine A. Henry