Lesson 4: Dissecting Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture

Rap's greatest practitioners are not simply performers but they are poets, shaping language through rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay. In this weeks lecture we discussed how the characters within rap music have a literature point of view to their music. The essence of rap's poetic identity lies in its artful use of rhythm, rhyme, and creative wordplay; it lies in its emphasis on concision and emotive expression. The artists themselves express various subliminal messages through there music. They use slang to hide the true meaning of their stories and through their storytelling.
Since its emergence in the late 1970's, rap has always sparked controversy and created cultural norms that evolve from generation to generation. The lyrics to a song, and lyric poetry share a common lineage through one word: LYRIC. Lyric stems from the Greek term used to describe verse set to the music of the lyre. Rap music simply replace the lyre with twists and turns, with two turntables and a digital sampler.
One might assume that to study rap music and its lyrics can preclude the pleasure of the sound its performance. I believe the contrary, understanding the inner workings of the language of the lyrics can actually cultivate greater appreciation for the aesthetic pleasures embodied in the song as a whole. Rap music richly reward the attention we convey to their patterns of rhythm, rhyme, and figurative language.

The Anthology of Rap, is a publication that gathers nearly 300 lyrics by dozens of artists across rap's four decades. It was written by Andrew DuBois who tries to convey the message that rap is indeed poetry. In a recent online review of The Anthology, the poet Kevin Young made several observations to the book and rap music in general: "Hip-hop’s pleasure is often its Whitmanesque contradictions, embodied in the delicate dance between the beats and the bars that the rappers spit; unlike Whitman, the form and the feeling don’t often fit. It is a music of breaks, after all: A big part of hip-hop’s poetry results from the tensions and changes in these jarring shifts, as well as the jibing between the lyrics and the music.” Many of those tensions and changes are apparent in the lyrics alone; others only reveal themselves when one reads the lyrics along with the song. What is unmistakable, though, is that rap’s “delicate dance between the beats and the bars” has produced a poetry that commands attention and demands response.
 

Rappers have been referring to themselves as poets since rap began. JDL from the Cold Crush Brothers rhymed these lines back in 1982:
“Well, I’m here to be known and I’m known to be / As an electrified prince of poetry.”


A few years later, KRS-One performed an entire song called “Poetry,” which included this clear self-identification:
"I am a poet, you try to show it yet blow it
It takes concentration for fresh communication
Observation, that is to see without speaking
Take off your coat, take notes, I am teaching".