you may be pushing it comparing the best of rap to sonnets: the purpose of the two things is so different that any comparison is surely moot. but i am prepared to say that it is certainly MUCH harder to write a shakespearean or petrarchan sonnet at a technical level than it is write a rap: the rules of sonnet writing are exceedingly strict. the metre and rhyme work as a means of crystallising a certain thought or feeling. rap is the opposite: it's strength is its looseness: in fact seems to put almost no emphasis on concentration of mood or meaning whatsoever: e.g., the T.R.O.Y. lyrics are a pretty random collection of unconnected thoughts. in fact, isn't this when rap works best, i.e. as a series of one liners? or at least a series of wildly contrasting items? i offer in support of my argument compelling melnges such as chuck d / flavor flav and the wu tangs, but any dozen or so examples are to hand.
I actually have no idea, which is harder. But I'll tell you a story. Before I went into journalism, I was actually a poet, and before that I was an MC. As a rapper, I sucked. I mean I was just awful. But I loved words, and I turned to poetry armed with the exact same logic that lucretius offers here--I thought it would be freer, because I didn't have to stay on beat, and thus easier. Ironic, no? So I turned out to be a so-so poet--a better poet than MC, definitely, though some of my early stuff is just embarrassing. I was going to get my MFA--even did a week long workshop at Provincetown with Pulitzer prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa. But what I quickly realized was that my essential problem was the same--just like in hip-hop, formal poetry put a premium on words. You had to find a way to say as much as possible, by saying as little as possible The premium for me was always Rakim--"I can take a phrase that's rarely heard\Flip it, now its a daily word."
The point is, in my time, I actually got to try my hand at both sonnets and hip-hop lyrics and I found them both very difficult for the same reasons. I think people who firmly believe that "formal poetry" is harder should do themselves and try to write some hip-hop verses and then offer them up to a knowledgeable audience. Or they can save themselves the embarrassment and listen to Wynton Marsalis laughable "Where Ya'll At" track. Whoever let him within ten feet of a microphone should be caned. And then water-boarded.But should you try it yourself, I think that you'll find that the rules for writing hip-hop lyrics are shockingly strict. Most frustrating, they change depending on the track--so it doesn't matter if you rocked it one track. Try doing it over twelve different tracks. Second of all, while it sounds like great hip-hop is just some guy freely talking, that's more a testament to the greatness of said artist, than a statement on its relative ease. The greatest compliment you can pay any artist is that they make it look it easy. It doesn't mean that what they're doing actually is easy.
One other point--the literal rules for writing sonnets, tankas, haikus etc. aren't
particularly hard to follow. It's following the rules and actually saying
something that's hard. You can write a sonnet that makes no sense, and
has no real power in the words. Likewise, you could write a rhyme
that's technically on beat and say nothing at all. One need look no
further than ex-Fugee Praz, reviled for debasing the entire art by
uttering one of the worst lines of hip-hop verse ever "And when I rest my
head on its on a pee-low\Uh beebeebee-beebeebee-beebeebee-yo." Sure he
was on beat, but it was nonsense.
Place a sonnet written by someone who is working just to follow the
rules, next to sonnet written by master and the difference is clear.
Likewise, when hip-hop is done be a rapper who is simply struggling
with the rules--who is fighting to stay on beat, who's desperate to make his words rhyme--and the difference is obvious. Ignore the dumb sample
below and the annoying hook, but listen to the difference between Puffy's
and Big on "Victory." There on the same beat, following the same form, and Puff isn't violating the "rules." But
Big gets so much more mileage out of his words, and, indeed, makes it sound easy. "In this world I clutch
two Auto, Matos/Used to call fatso, now you call me Castro." The
caveat, of course, is that you have to know the slang to get the point.
But if you can know the slang, you can hear the implicit beauty of what
he's doing and why he's so much better at it than Puffy. Anyone who doesn't get the slang, but is actually interested, should feel free to ask away. I don't get it all. But I got the basics, I think.
Last thing--This song is really profane. Know that before you play it.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I think this criticism is also really disingenuous because hip hop is also a performance. MC's have to write and then PERFORM their lyrics. Hip Hop MC's have to have a compelling voice to match their lyrics. Eminem would not be as profound an artist if he sounded like Ben Stein. Nas if he sounded like Colin Powell. To me this is just what white people and Luddite academics say to make themselves feel smarter/better about reading Melville, Shakespeare and Joyce.
Of course, the difficulty of writing either brilliant sonnets or rap lyrics pales when compared to the difficulty of writing truly brilliant blog comments.
It's tricky to rock a rhyme that's right on time.
This is why Jay-Z will always be considered one of the greats. He was always switching up his flow to go with the beats perfectly. Even if he might not have said the deepest shit, or had the best lines, they were always very good. But the flow man, the flow.
Still, for technical difficulty and brilliance, see: A Day in the Life of Benjamin Andre.
Oh c'mon.
This isn't a sonnet, but here's poetry:
It seems that out of battle I escaped
Down some dull tunnel long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleeper groaned
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Compare that to "I'm gonna take you to the candy shop, I'm gonna make you lick my lollipop" or whatever it is he says.
A diamond versus shit.
Treebeard,
I can't tell if you are serious or not, but for starters, your example is a chorus from a top 40 hit. Try harder.
Lucretius would say something like that. I mean, look at De Rerum Natura: the meter and rhyme is there, but with lines like "For naught gives increase and naught takes away /
On which account, just as they move to-day," you can tell he's totally forcing it. Plus, atoms swerving in a vacuum? Whaaat?
I do think Jay-Z has something to add to this discussion:
There's a pop/commercial imperative to hip-hop that makes it impossible to compare to classical poetry. Artists like Jay-Z have to marry technical skill to what is essentially populism. In that sense, the proper analog to today's great hip hop artists probably isn't Shakespeare or Donne but Charles Dickens. They're talented writers who produce a product inextricably linked to the imperatives of the mass market.
Shakespeare wasn't populist? Dude, he was writing for the theater.
Here's my closest approximation to a sonnet. Mock away...
The Diner
The booth we sat in, tricked with polished chrome,
shot flickers of formica; dark window glass
in bare frames, apple-greened aluminum,
repeated our gesticulations as
we fiddled with our lighters – platinum
gloss, mine, my counsel’s more elaborate,
a tatooed naked-lady, scrimshaw carved;
relaxing in the smoke, which danced a bit,
the buzz made us forget that we were starved.
A still-life on the table – napkin holder
to sugar jar, with salt-and-pepper shakers –
posed like a shrine around the jukebox; older,
more venerable by far than many acres
of redwood forest, or haunting gulfstream waters,
it played no song for us, who had no quarters.
As an MC, I think lucretius makes a valid point. A hip Hop verse isn't strict in terms of what form a rhyme must take. RHymes don't even have to rhyme all the time, as Sadat X was famous for showing us. But rhymes dont always consist of a collection of random unconnected thoughts either (in spite of lil Wayne's attempts to disprove me everytime he touches a mic).
A rhyme can be loose in structure while being incredibly cohesive in content and/or mood. Sometimes rhymes are tight in structure too. But theres no question about it, with its restrictive form, Sonnets are much more difficult.
So on point with this post. There are a lot of sucky MCs out there and there are a lot of sucky poets. But if you study the great MCs, you just can't deny the technical skill required to make a great verse.
Southpaw's quote was illustrative of that.
There are so many great MCs, but I suspect the people who think hip-hop is easy and loose (or worthless) aren't listening closely because they don't expect much out of the package. But come on. Jay-Z, Nas, Lupe Fiasco, Black Thought, and even Kanye and Weezy (when they're trying) can turn out a mind-blowing rhyme, with humor, wit, and incredible technical skill.
A good producer will only get an lame rapper so far.
I think KRS-One put it best when he said "and if I was in front of Shakespeare, I'd battle the punk and take his shit."
Man, if this isn't an apples to oranges argument, then I've never read one.
...with its restrictive form, Sonnets are much more difficult.
At times, though, writing under restrictions makes things easier. One less thing to worry about.
It strikes me that good hip-hop is extremely hard to create and that the form is just as demanding as a sonnet.
Hip-hop's weakness is that it pushes too hard to be contemporary and it draws on a code and an idiom which is (a) esoteric and (b) rapidly turns obsolete. To be honest, I have no idea what ""In this world I clutch two Auto, Matos/Used to call fatso, now you call me Castro." means. And twenty years from now? It will be very hard to gin up interest in it then (not to say that there won't be afficianados). Whereas the idiom of sonnets tends to be more general and to wear better over time.
The best MCs definitely concentrate on mood. Ta-Nehisi mentioned "Can I Live" earlier in the week, and for my money, Jay-Z does an amazing job capturing not only the lavish lifestyle that comes with being a fairly successful criminal (nothing out of the ordinary in hip-hop) but also the constant paranoia as well (something you don't often hear about).
There's a sense of dread as that first verse builds and builds, and when it finally explodes on "We can have a pleasant time sippin' margaritas", you can almost feel the release in your gut.
This line is actually pretty easy, let me take a stab.
1. "I clutch Auto, Matos"(I use automatic firearms and often shoot them from both hands)
2. "Used to call me fatso"(the kids used to be mean to Biggie because of his weight problem)
3. "Now you call me Castro" (Biggie now has a beard, wears a strange cap, and smokes cigars)
Someone hook me up with some street cred, please. Thank you.
Shakespeare wasn't populist? Dude, he was writing for the theater.
That's fair enough, and probably his plays are a more apt comparison than his sonnets.
As was mentioned above more freedom in structure doesn't mean it is easier to make a masterpiece. More freedom allows more room to push something deeper, to bring more interpretations and relationships in meaning to the design. If that extra room is used by the artist to create more nuance then that is hardly an easy thing to do.
Has Hip-Hop had a Shakespeare, from my limited knowledge no, but the english language has only had a few "Shakespeares" and poetry has been around a lot longer than Hip-Hop. Give it time and we will see.
"Hip-hop's weakness is that it pushes too hard to be contemporary and it draws on a code and an idiom which is (a) esoteric and (b) rapidly turns obsolete. To be honest, I have no idea what ""In this world I clutch two Auto, Matos/Used to call fatso, now you call me Castro." means. And twenty years from now? It will be very hard to gin up interest in it then (not to say that there won't be afficianados). Whereas the idiom of sonnets tends to be more general and to wear better over time."
I dont buy that. Most students of Shakespeare spend inordinate amounts of time trying to interpret exactly what he meant. Its so esoteric that Shakespeare scholars, who walk around quoting him, are viewed as snobs and elitists. And, I'd bet that the only people who study it are "afficionados".
As a major hip hop head as well as a Shakespeare fiend (if Richard III isn't the best play written in the English language then I will jump out my window right now) I'm going to have to disagree with Lucretius on a number of levels. Firstly, I disagree fundamentally that the purpose of a sonnet and the purpose of a hip hop track are "so different that any comparison is surely moot". For example, Elizabeth Browning's 43rd Sonnet from the Portuguese "How Do I Love Thee Let Me Count the Ways" is quite comparable to a love song in any musical genre, hip hop not excepted.
Secondly, it is generally a bad idea to try and quantify the difficulty factor of different art forms as an attempt to justify the alleged superiority of one over the other. For example, Lucretius' argument could also be applied to the difference between verse and prose and the results would be similarly unfortunate. Nobody with sense is going to say that Frost is a superior artist to Said or Baldwin after all. As for the supposed "looseness" and lack of "emphasis on concentration of mood or meaning" I'll just direct Lucretius to "Dance With the Devil" by Immortal Technique and leave it at that to change his mind.
Lastly, citing Chuck D and Flavs divergence as emblematic of hip hop is as flawed as assuming that all poets write in the same fashion as Lord Byron for example.
So ya, Lucretius...epic fail bro.
No, it is not more difficult to write a great sonnet than a great hip-hop verse. It's damned difficult to write either. The keyword of lucretius' statement being "great." Lame hip-hop lyrics and trite sonnets, on the other hand, are both quite easy to write.
The structure of a sonnet can make it easier, believe it or not. It could also make it harder. Depends on the writer. Marianne Moore, famous for intricately structured poems, simply couldn't write any other way.
Many artists will tell you sometimes having boundaries actually makes it easier to be creative. Don't know why, but it's some sort of jedi mind trick.
I would venture that to write a truly great haiku would be hardest of all. One of those deceptively simple things.
Absolutely, mjm. "Complexity" and "difficulty" aren't synonyms, despite the fact that "simplicity" is an antonym for both. Also, poets have always bent the rules with sonnets -- fiddling with rhyme schemes, line-lengths, and even the number of lines in the poem.
Sonnets are, and pretty much always have been, an elite/esoteric form meant to be read, while hip-hop is a popular form meant to be performed.
Is it harder to paint a 12" x 7" still-life, or a 50' x 15' mural?
The idea that music and poetry or rap and poetry is seperate is a fallacy. Poetry was by it's nature orignally lyrical which means that it was composed for the ear and originally sung over a lyre hence the term lyric.
Human sentiment is meant to be expressed in words and doing so over music or a beat adds to the value of what is sung or rhymed. Those that think that rap is somehow seperate from poetry do a disservice to both.Just for a minute compare tennyson with Tupac it might suprise you.
Shakespeare's plays are about 400 years old; yet people young and old can still enjoy them well enough. The esoteric aspects that scholars chew over are secondary. Whereas hiphop is born esoteric, and most of its lyrics will be unintelligible within a generation.
I'm not making any claims about metaphysics or greatness or universality. I think Shakespeare just wanted to please and tease everyone, whether they were kings or courtiers or the people in the cheap seats; and he was talented and lucky enough to succeed. I don't see hip-hop artists trying to encompass such a wide audience - nor for that matter do most contemporary poets.
The movies are the closest thing that we have to an art form with universal appeal, but the people who make the most popular movies put more effort into visuals than they do into the script, and the only idiom that characters are allowed to speak is naked prose.
Anyway, there room in the world for all sorts of art forms, and the best rap can be as breathtaking as anything else we have going these days.
Do you get paid by the first person pronoun? Your blog contains more than the entire website put together.
Although I do enjoy reading your blog.
Well Ta, thing is, there's too levels of hip-hop.
Love of the spoken word - those who can sling those words, incredibly, and, as you say, say so much, with so little.
But there also the commercial aspect. That song that you like so much, has to be felt.
Myself, so called "stupid pop-hop", as referred to above with the candy shop lyric, is usually fun because of the beat.
I have a whole list of commercial pop-hop - that sucks really, for lyrical value - but I love for going on a run.
The best lyricists though, don't necessarily have a really great hook - and those with great hooks, don't necessarily have great lyrics.
you CAN have both - but it doesn't happen a lot. Example - when I went to last year's Rock the Bells, had a banquet on the table - Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, Cypress Hill, and of course, the hard-rocking Rage Against The Machine.
Cypress Hill and Rage ROCKED IT!
Public Enemy was pretty good.
Wu-Tang was just boring, really...and I find that a lot in the straight New York lyricist rappers...
Seems like an argument by someone who may know a lot about sonnets but not a lot about hip-hop. Your points ring true, Ta-Nehisi. The best lyrics tell a story, ride the cadence of the particular beat and then create several different cadences within that rhyme scheme. All this using a venacular that changes almost daily.
If writing rhymes was easy then every critic who says it is wouldn't embarass themselves so thoroughly when they tried to do it.
Lamp, with all due respect, your point is demonstrably false. "Rapper's Delight" is not of my generation, nor is "The Message" or "Beat street" really. But when Melle Melle says "A newspaper burns in the sand\And the headline reads man kills man," I get it. It's not clear to me that everyone in England understood everything Shakespeare meant.
As for the specific example, Stacy you were very very close, you just effed up on the last one. They call him Castro because his power in the streets or in the hip-hop world approaches that of a dictator. It's an interesting contrast--the idea of being overweight as a sign of weakness, and the idea of being a dictator as a sign of complete strength.
On a completely other note, I have to tell you guys how thrilled I am to be having this discussion--more than any other--on the Atlantic website. It really is a treat.
I think this criticism is also really disingenuous because hip hop is also a performance. MC's have to write and then PERFORM their lyrics. Hip Hop MC's have to have a compelling voice to match their lyrics.
Posted by Ben | August 14, 2008 5:56 PM
Not hating, but this is completely wrong. One of the first rules of poetry is it has to work on the page as well as spoken, whereas hip hop only has to work out loud. They don't have poetry readings for nothing; few people read lyrics. Performance is essential, but what's even harder is with the best poetry, no matter who reads it out-loud, whether the writer, a professor, or a fledgling student, it has to have similar strength and profundity. I also LOVE hip hop, especially the era Ta-Nehisi refers to. (coming clean, I have a degree in poetry, the first poem I wrote was a sonnet and I didn't even know it. I had a lesson in iambic pentameter, and jotted 14 lines down comparing a cute girl to a ghost. My senior English teacher said "Do you have other sonnets" and I said "What's a sonnet?")
Hip-hop is pure poetry. It's no different than the Iliad or the Odyssey. The issues are the same: war, love, honor, pride, religion... The Helens, Menelauses and Parises just got darker, more modernized and put in urban centers.
I want to see a hip hop artist do the equivalent of an Obama: taking some life experience and some jargon from over here, and some life experience and jargon from over there, and some life experience and jargon from some place else, and combine them all and make it new, and try to address as broad a cross section of America as possible.
And don't be political; just be weird and contradictory, like Whitman and Dylan.
I think there are two questions people are conflating here:
1. Is it as hard to make rap as it is to make a sonnet?
and
2. Is rap equivalent to the sonnet in artistic merit?
The answer to 1=yes. Any long termed, honed skill that is valued by society in monetary and social prestige that you can name is as difficult as another. A surgeon works hard to become a great surgeon, and a fashion designer works hard to become a great designer. So, does it take hard work and talent to do a great rap? Yes. If it weren't, rappers wouldn't as elevated in pop culture, because anyone could do it. It takes hard work and talent of the same caliber to make an entertaining bit of science fiction literature as it takes to make Ulysses. And good rappers should be rewarded monetarily and in fame for being good, because they have talent and bring pleasure to a large number of people.
2. But is rap equivalent to a sonnet? no. It is a form of pop music. a 2-3 minute instantly forgettable piece of fluff, no different than rock, alternative, folk, or disco. There is no depth to a rap song beyond its appeal to make the rapper famous and rich and the people satisfied and, for a few minutes, perhaps distract them from the real world. It exists then disappears. It is the curse of the baby boomers that people feel that analyzing Dylan, the Beatles, Hendrix, Tupac or Biggie is on the same level as analyzing Mozart or Shakespeare.
Of course, Rolling Stone and progeny take offense to this: how dare I degrade such art! But therein lies the problem: only Rolling Stone and its progeny elevate such fluff as art, because, well, they declare it so. A straight comparison of a "great" pop song versus a great sonnet is like comparing a shadow to the man who cast it.
While I may listen to an album or song today made in these limited genres, I harbor no illusions. Jay-Z isn't on some higher level than others; he's just very good at turning out listenable, enjoyable cotton candy--and should be amply rewarded for it. I feel bad for those who have spent a part of their lives "deciphering" the Beatles or Jay-Z, or following them around; these folks are no more than wanderers heading to Alaska, trying to find the immortal beings who created the Northern Lights.
There is no way to say this without sounding like a nerd, BUT, I got the Castro line. I was just trying to make a funny!
Aww, c'mon, leave Wynton alone! He's carryin' a tradition. Rapping is a lot older than rap, if you know what I mean. Do you think Stevie did a better job at the end of Do I do?
Also, I think its hilarious of you to pick a Puffy/Biggie song. You also could've picked anything that Kanye West did on anybody's album. I fast forward thru Kanye's verse on Talib's In the Mood song everytime. Why can't producers just produce?
Jack M.
Your whole perspective is skewed because you're forgetting the winnowing effects of time. In Mozart's day, there were, I'm quite sure, dozens of other popular composers who are now completely and utterly forgotten or of interest only to specialists. In the century after Shakespeare, there were hundreds of other English playwrights who are now either forgotten or, again, studied only by literary historians. THEIR work was 'degraded' and 'cotton-candy' as well, and now it's forgotten. There is nothing special about the artform of opera or symphony or play; what was distinctive and lasting was the talent of those rare artists.
Now if you come along and list all the contemporary musicians, sure, 98% of them are not going to last. But there was neither more nor less talent among people in past than there is today, and that 2% will survive the test of time. And 400 years from now people will think of just two names when it comes to early 21st century music: say, Dylan and Tupac.
Anyway, the proportion of genius to ephemera is always the same, and has nothing to do with the particular artform. Pop and hip-hop and opera are in that regard all the same.
Aww, c'mon, leave Wynton alone! He's carryin' a tradition. Rapping is a lot older than rap, if you know what I mean. Do you think Stevie did a better job at the end of Do I do?
Also, I think its hilarious of you to pick a Puffy/Biggie song. You also could've picked anything that Kanye West did on anybody's album. I fast forward thru Kanye's verse on Talib's In the Mood song everytime. Why can't producers just produce?
Why can't producers just produce?
If Dr. Dre, Timbaland, Pharrell, Kanye, and (yes even) Diddy had stuck to producing, I think the world would have been the poorer for it.
The comparison between hip hop and sonnets has brought up Shakesphere, who preceded hip hop by some 400 years, I wonder what people will think about hip hop in 400 years. I don't know a lot about rap, but I do remember that quite a few people in the eighties acted as if the Reagan adminstration would outlive rap music.
Since I more left brain in my thinking I have a more difficult time comparing and contrasting different art forms. So I wonder if you compare rap to something like classical music, how will its longevity turn out. There were a couple centuries that spanned the lives of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. Composers of that style that produce today are not recognized as their predecessors of 300 or even 100 years were, so while it remains, modern musicians just don't churn it out like the masters did.
Since we now have a very saturated media and are more connected across the globe, I wonder how that will effect today's music. Will it shorted the shelf-life of hip hop, and by that, I don't mean that its relevence in the future would be diminished, but will its golden age be much shorter in duration than that of classical music and opera?
I understand that comparing vastly different eras brings about difficulty. A lot of composers centuries back had to gain the favor of the ruling class to have their music promoted, while today, even under corporate control of the industry, it is more democratic and people who rule the various western countries have little or no control over the content of popular music.
Stacy, your street cred is far more than mine.
I fall with apples/oranges. The thing is, huge amounts of both are crap. (In The New Yorker I love everything by Adonis--I rip those pages out to save, and try to no avail to find a book of his poems in translation; the rest of their poetry is between disappointing and pretentiously boring. How many of us would enjoy an open mike poetry read?) I recall an NPR interview with a guy who taught the poetry of rap, and he was excellent--with no soundtrack but a mesmerizing voice, he read one of his own pieces and made it work as both. Still wish I could have gotten more of his stuff.
So, who gets to assemble the best of rap, preferably stuff that doesn't need a Chaucerian guide to what "autos, matos" are in every line, for a comparison to the best sonnets of the centuries?
Serious question for nerds: Does anyone rap in Klingon? I'm pretty sure all the classic verse forms have been attempted, but I could really see rapping at a Trekkie convention.
(Trivia note: The lick it like a lollipop song established the car rule that if I have to try to really hear the lyrics and determine if this works on multiple levels (e.g. dancing with myself) or really is as filthy as it seems, I'm just going to skip the analysis and change stations.)
The comparison between hip hop and sonnets has brought up Shakesphere, who preceded hip hop by some 400 years, I wonder what people will think about hip hop in 400 years. I don't know a lot about rap, but I do remember that quite a few people in the eighties acted as if the Reagan adminstration would outlive rap music.
Since I more left brain in my thinking I have a more difficult time comparing and contrasting different art forms. So I wonder if you compare rap to something like classical music, how will its longevity turn out. There were a couple centuries that spanned the lives of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. Composers of that style that produce today are not recognized as their predecessors of 300 or even 100 years were, so while it remains, modern musicians just don't churn it out like the masters did.
Since we now have a very saturated media and are more connected across the globe, I wonder how that will effect today's music. Will it shorted the shelf-life of hip hop, and by that, I don't mean that its relevence in the future would be diminished, but will its golden age be much shorter in duration than that of classical music and opera?
I understand that comparing vastly different eras brings about difficulty. A lot of composers centuries back had to gain the favor of the ruling class to have their music promoted, while today, even under corporate control of the industry, it is more democratic and people who rule the various western countries have little or no control over the content of popular music.
I've written sonnets and rap too, for what that's worth. Making good art in any genre is always something of a miracle...which isn't exactly the same as saying that it's hard. Bach could write fugues in his head, apparently (though I doubt he could rap very well.)
The comparison between hip hop and sonnets has brought up Shakesphere, who preceded hip hop by some 400 years, I wonder what people will think about hip hop in 400 years. I don't know a lot about rap, but I do remember that quite a few people in the eighties acted as if the Reagan adminstration would outlive rap music.
Since I more left brain in my thinking I have a more difficult time comparing and contrasting different art forms. So I wonder if you compare rap to something like classical music, how will its longevity turn out. There were a couple centuries that spanned the lives of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. Composers of that style that produce today are not recognized as their predecessors of 300 or even 100 years were, so while it remains, modern musicians just don't churn it out like the masters did.
Since we now have a very saturated media and are more connected across the globe, I wonder how that will effect today's music. Will it shorted the shelf-life of hip hop, and by that, I don't mean that its relevence in the future would be diminished, but will its golden age be much shorter in duration than that of classical music and opera?
I understand that comparing vastly different eras brings about difficulty. A lot of composers centuries back had to gain the favor of the ruling class to have their music promoted, while today, even under corporate control of the industry, it is more democratic and people who rule the various western countries have little or no control over the content of popular music.
@ Jack M: Picking up on what lampwick said...
I'm a huge poetry buff so that's where I'm coming from on this.
Sonnets and such were a big pop art form back in their time. Paying a poet to write a sonnet for a woman you wanted to romance was common. Listening to a poet read his work was a form of entertainment. Maybe like all art it could have an element of private consumption, but it was intended for the masses.
The theatre in Shakespeare's time was a mess. It was common entertainment in the centuries before t.v. and radio. My English teacher told us they were very rowdy places, with vendors walking through the standing crowds on the ground level selling stuff while the play went on. Actors had to work above all the distraction. Shakespearean drama was not in it's time the tony genre it has since become.
Here are two more important factors to consider if you want to discuss the survival of artworks over the long duration:
First, decent audio recording technology has only been available for about a hundred years. If we want to discuss what Mozart sounded like back in his day, all we have is notation and some instruments. Five hundred years from now, people discussing 20th century music (from the comfort of their living rooms on Mars) will be able to go back to the original recordings. And presumably that's what they will do: as opposed to breaking out the lyrics and the sheet music.
Now, wrap your mind around this. Language changes - not just in its vocabulary, but in its sound; vowel qualities shift, intonations shift, elisions creep in, and so forth. And styles of singing change in analogous ways. If you listen to old recordings from the 20's, you can hear some of the changes that have occurred. A lot of singers, before the days of good recording, had very nasal deliveries, because it helped them to project; it sounds kinda weird and primitive to us now. The American dialect-sound is not timeless either: back in the early 19th century it would obviously have sounded a lot like a contemporary English dialect.
Anyway, my point is that the phonetic style of English as we speak it and sing it today will change once again in the future. And people in the future will be able to listen to it; and in all likelihood, our sung speech will sound really really bizarre to them, and probably be unintelligible. I mean, if you could be time-machined back to the Globe Theater c. 1600, could you have understood anything they were saying on stage? Very little, probably. And the same will happen to our music in the future.
Ok, one more thought experiment. How are future fans of music with words going to appreciate "Victory" or "Blowin' in the Wind"? Not by reading the lyrics, nor by reading the notation, presumably; and as I just said, the original recordings are probably going to sound like Chinese to them. No; if modern popular recorded music is going to survive for multiple generations and be enjoyed and appreciated, there is one way this is going to happen:
Covers.
hey t-n
am i a frequent commenter? i never commented before today, so i didn't think i was. anyway, glad to have started something.
will not even BEGIN on the 'stax is better than motown' issue..
No; if modern popular recorded music is going to survive for multiple generations and be enjoyed and appreciated, there is one way this is going to happen: Covers
So, Jazz hasn't been enjoyed by multiple generations from the original recordings? What about Frank Sinatra? What about Led Zeppelin? Modern popular recorded music has shown to be enjoyed by multiple generations without covers. It's the recording capabilities that have allowed music to be enjoyed across generations without a cover band. All the Romantic and Classic music mentioned here is performed by cover bands, we just don't call them that.
With that said, it's impossible to predict what popular music genre or artists now is going to be appreciated 20-30 years from now.
I'm with Shani. No picking on Wynton. I love the "Where Y'all At" tune. Granted the lyrics aren't perhaps so lyrical; but then again one listens to Wynton for lyrics like one listens to Guru for the riffs, melodic and rhythmic subtleties, and the power of the horn sections. Suggestion: Take Wynton's rhymes for what they are and focus instead on the music that shows up behind the words. If you do that, then I think you can develop an appreciation for Wynton's efforts with "Where Y'all At" like you might develop an appreciation for the jazz quality of Guru's Jazzmatazz effort.
I am always amazed how people seem to miss the obvious point that we're exposed to much more of the crap segment of contemporary art than of art from the past. The key thing to do here is to read some sonnets by sonneteers you've never heard of, preferably ones that even the English majors haven't heard of. Unsurprisingly, they're awful. Just like a lot of hip-hop. The best of most major art forms is really really good. If you don't think so, chances are very strong that the flaw is in you, not the art form.
I think I have a unique perspective on this. I teach kids how to rap and write rhymes from elementary on up. The notion that they are few rules to writing rhymes is garbage. There are rules. They are numerous and unwritten. Here are some basics.
Starting off the rhymes need to occur in a even meter. Whether this is done by rhyming on the fourth beat, the second and fourth beat, or rhyming on the fourth beat for three bars, then rhyming on the second and fourth to finish out a four bar phrase.
Sense rapping/emceeing is a verbal art form your delivery needs carry enthusiasm and maintain the beat at least. Your verse should make heads nod without a instrumental backing you up.
Also you have pay attention to your breath control. You must precisely time your breathing to provide with enough air to deliver your verse on beat without cutting off the starts and ends of words and worse losing the beat.
Those are a few of the many. So please don't say rhyming a freer form. It appears that way because they are numerous choices of styles to use but it takes work to master them enough to combine the styles and use how you see fit.
I think better question to ask is "Who would do better? A Emcee writing a sonnet or a poet laureate writing a rap verse. My vote goes to the Emcee, but I'm biased. :)
One,
DLUX: THE LIGHT
The Spoken Word Hip Hop Poet
www.dluxthelight.com
Check my new blog about the good in hip hop!
hiphopmotivates.today.com
P.S. The rules are unwritten so they can be broken.
Mr. Coates--You host the best dinner parties! Thanks again for the great conversation. And thanks for the audio clip--maybe I'll stop turning off the radio and listen with a more enlightened ear now.
Dlux,
Exactly. If you actually try to write a rhyme an d deliver, the many, many unspoken, uncodified rules become apparent. My first time out, I wrote a rhyme with no beat as I thought it should be. When I actually recited it over a beat, it was a complete mess. I encourage people to try it out, before they conclude that its easy and there are no rules.
lucretius,
Sorry dude. Thought I'd seen your name before.
Sybil,
Now you've gone too far. Regrettably, 99.9% of hip-hop on the radio blows. Unless you've got satellite.
For a poster above..."Rap is not pop, if you call it that then stop" Q-Tip
Can't really comment on sonnets, they bore me beyond measure. But, writing like this is not easy:
So follow me, and while you're thinking you were first,
Let's travel adventitious at speeds around the universe.
What could you say as the earth gets further and further away,
Planets as small as balls of clay?
Astray into the Milky Way, world's out of sight,
As far as the eye can see, not even a satellite.
Now stop and turn around and look.
As you stare into the darkness, your knowledge: took!
Neither is easy, in terms of quality writing.
Anybody can put words together, but it takes true skill to do it well.
Poetry is easier than emceeing for the simple fact you don't have to stay on beat, plus you also, you know, actually have to rhyme, unless you're Kool Keith.
Everybody loves to bash the lyricism in mainstream hip-hop, I fit into that category myself, but a lot of people don't realize that 98% of the artists you hear on the radio with their generally simple-minded tales of hedonism, drug abuse, murder and debauchery have a real gift. It's just that in hip-hop, you have to show and prove you have serious talent before you get the opportunity to sell records to the masses.
When looking at hip-hop artists, record labels generally look for artists with true ability, but they want to be able to use that ability and make money from it. You can work with people that have talent and polish their sound, change things up and make it more acceptable, but you can't do anything with somebody who just doesn't have "It".
Once the artist get the deal, then everything changes.
The audience is completely different.
Instead of rhyming in front of 200 underground heads who embrace the lyricism and rawness of hip-hop at it's very core, now you're making music for people who just want to shake their ass in the club, or want to hear you talk about sex, money and murder.
There is definitely a compromise there that most hip-hop artists have to make to be truly successful. Do you want to be true to yourself and make music for you and your people, or do you want to dumb things down and appeal to a broader range of listeners?
Guys like Jay-Z have the talent to appeal to both mainstream and underground fans. He has music for the clubs and the radio that garners all the fanfare, but he also includes tracks on his albums that don't get radio play but showcase his raw talent. His underground work was exceptional, he rapped fast and was real clever with the lyrics but he slowed the flow down, wrote songs that more people (ie white people) could get into and he's considered by many the best in his field.
If you only heard the stuff that gets radio play, you might think 50 Cent was mentally challenged, but before he was known, he was putting out high quality material on the street level, much more sophisticated work than you would expect from him. A lot of the subject matter was the same, but it was smarter.
Usually being smarter will get you ahead in life, but in the music industry, it will put you way behind.
Southpaw: I should clarify my question to say, why can't producers without rhyming skills stay off the mic? My ex was a great lyricist and producer so I can't argue that some people can do both. Dr. Dre is the only one on your list I agree with, for whatever an opinion is worth.
Ta: Sorry for digressing!
A lot of singers, before the days of good recording, had very nasal deliveries, because it helped them to project; it sounds kinda weird and primitive to us now. --lampwick
Thank you. You've just explained a lot of music I've heard in small places while travelling, especially from women.
Usually being smarter will get you ahead in life, but in the music industry, it will put you way behind. --Mike
As with the lyrics quoted at the top of the thread, a smart performer who wants to succeed (at least enough to make music/movies/etc a comfortable living rather than an expensive hobby) figures out exactly where to hit on the dumbing down. It's easy to be dumb; it's challenging to be unchallenging in exactly the right way. I've often heard the same thing said about very smart politicians--they know how to not sound quite so smart, or at least to sound smart in a way that's nonthreatening.
When the Star Wars prequels were coming out someone observed that creativity is born of constraints: the earlier special effects had to work within a lot more limits, yet come off as more "wow" than the stuff that's possible when anything Lucas can imagine can be slapped up there with some IL&M. I've since found this to be true in a lot of other formats--making a play work within the constraints of the stage and audience attention is quite different from the freedom to throw anything you can create up there.
(I confess, in all forms of art I find the people who break the rules after mastering the rules--of writing a 30-minute sitcom, or playing the clarinet, or writing dialogue, or the basics of any traditional form of dance--are producing things much more interesting than the people who never figured out how to work within the rules first.)
I wanted to add that, though the lyrics might be considered poetry, a more apt comparison between art forms would be rap and opera.
I know alot of the appeal of gangsta rap, at least for those who are not part of that world, is the thrill of living vicariousy through the rapper. If done well, the music accurately sets the mood. The better the rapper is at expressing himself in that vernacular the more authentic the experience. The better the producer is at articulating the musical notes, the more effective he is in recreating the emotional experience.
I've always thought this as I listen to Notorious BIG's Ready To Die. The album is arranged so it begins with the experience of his birth. It walks you through his life and ends with him committing suicide. TI's I'm Serious has the same sort of feel to it.
"I wanted to add that, though the lyrics might be considered poetry, a more apt comparison between art forms would be rap and opera."
Awesome comparison.
Don't even fall into this trap.
Rap is not poetry.
Poetry is not rap.
Only at the very basic level could you besmirch rap's name by calling it poetry. (I.E. in many cases, rap does rhyme line to line)
Remember what Cube said, "Who are they to be equal to?"
That might be too radical for this blog, but you'll never win trying to play in their game with their rules.
Can I speak up for Lil Wayne? I think he's a genius. That is all.
Cathy "What is Street Cred?" J.
An interesting discussion, and I take the original point about rapping cadence/assuming the character (and most popular rappers are "assuming the character", even if they often up inhabiting that character permanently once they make it large). However, when discussing something like The Sonnet vs. The Rap Game™, or, more loosely, poetry vs. hip-hop, it seems tragic to concentrate so much on the most popular successes, whether current (Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Eminem), or of past generations (Flava, etc.)
I would suggest that compared to a lot of other contemporary musical genres, popular hip-hop approaches the "good" metric far more often: more commercially successful hip hop artists are critically successful than is true of the rock/pop world. Despite this, I would suggest that the most "poetic" hip hop artists are commercially less viable, a fact that even many of the best hip-hop artists acknowledge (see: an earlier commenter's quotation of a Jay-Z track about rapping to make money).
I'm partial to Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein and will forever be disappointed that Vast Aire and Vordul couldn't work out their differences. Here's a choice selection from "Pigeon":
Vast Aire
In this frigid fragile capsule
That allows you to fly south before the winter winds trap you
I wrap my "hell I made it" wetsuit stitch
So I can swim in elevators crazy wet through piss
I'm just a pigeon with one mile left
That doggy-paddles through this bullshit ocean of death
And these rags-to-riches words will break bones
Like the assassination of two birds with one stone
That's why I don't associate with bird brains with their beaks in the air
Pelicans with wide jaws yap names for fish heads
You'll get tossed in the flames
Where some ornithologist will find your skeletal frame
[....]
Vordul
Eight arms working short circuit manufactured crack melted
Slinging shot guns through the mouth of cracked helmets, black felt it
Cats who pop flows shot heavy through the nostril
Brain sizzle grab the pistol and get hostile
He caught you alone fuse blown
Unemployed screaming "That's why I robbed you!"
An interesting discussion, and I take the original point about rapping cadence/assuming the character (and most popular rappers are "assuming the character", even if they often up inhabiting that character permanently once they make it large). However, when discussing something like The Sonnet vs. The Rap Game™, or, more loosely, poetry vs. hip-hop, it seems tragic to concentrate so much on the most popular successes, whether current (Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Eminem), or of past generations (Flava, etc.)
I would suggest that compared to a lot of other contemporary musical genres, popular hip-hop approaches the "good" metric far more often: more commercially successful hip hop artists are critically successful than is true of the rock/pop world. Despite this, I would suggest that the most "poetic" hip hop artists are commercially less viable, a fact that even many of the best hip-hop artists acknowledge (see: an earlier commenter's quotation of a Jay-Z track about rapping to make money).
I'm partial to Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein and will forever be disappointed that Vast Aire and Vordul couldn't work out their differences. Here's a choice selection from "Pigeon":
Vast Aire
In this frigid fragile capsule
That allows you to fly south before the winter winds trap you
I wrap my "hell I made it" wetsuit stitch
So I can swim in elevators crazy wet through piss
I'm just a pigeon with one mile left
That doggy-paddles through this bullshit ocean of death
And these rags-to-riches words will break bones
Like the assassination of two birds with one stone
That's why I don't associate with bird brains with their beaks in the air
Pelicans with wide jaws yap names for fish heads
You'll get tossed in the flames
Where some ornithologist will find your skeletal frame
[....]
Vordul
Eight arms working short circuit manufactured crack melted
Slinging shot guns through the mouth of cracked helmets, black felt it
Cats who pop flows shot heavy through the nostril
Brain sizzle grab the pistol and get hostile
He caught you alone fuse blown
Unemployed screaming "That's why I robbed you!"
I studied with Yusef K., too, for a semester, when he was still at IU.
Why not go for the gold, and write some hip-hop sonnets?
I studied with Yusef K., too, for a semester, when he was still at IU.
Why not go for the gold, and write some hip-hop sonnets?
Question for you Ta-Nehisi:
I'm a head and love biggie as much as anybody. His control and mastery on the mic is all over everything he touches no matter the subject. But here's my question, How do you defend lyrics like these against those who label hip hop a bad influence:
I'm sticking ice-picks on the tip of ya dick/give your testicles a swift kick, ain't that some shit?/I'm a hard hard core, harder than a plymouth/it ain't no lip, it's a nigga with a spliff/ and a chrome four fifth pressed on your back/so what you want nigga, how you gonna act?
Doesn't seem to be all that much happening between the lines here (or the rest of the track) and what's actually on the ledger is a little rough. Can we really say it's all about the aesthetic?
great yak- enjoyed reading this.
-the genius of T.R.O.Y. is inseparable from the context of its creation.
-great writing is great writing, regardless of form.
-"hip hop": i can barely discuss it with anyone who has only modern pop music as a basis for their hip hop opinions...kinda like me trying to discuss modern poetry with "love jones" and my local open mic as my sole point of contact.
great yak- enjoyed reading this.
-the genius of T.R.O.Y. is inseparable from the context of its creation.
-great writing is great writing, regardless of form.
-"hip hop": i can barely discuss it with anyone who has only modern pop music as a basis for their hip hop opinions...kinda like me trying to discuss modern poetry with "love jones" and my local open mic as my sole point of contact.
So I had an Idea I just remembered about Lord Buckley. I had an English teacher in High School that brought this in when I was a junior. This poetry/hip hop debate is like the formal language slang debate of earlier times.
Below is Mark Anthony's Funeral Oration after it is Lord Buckley. It's dated but the analogy still stands.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest--
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men--
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin' daddies,
Knock me your lobes,
I came to lay Ceasar out,
Not to hip you to him.
The bad jazz that a cat blows,
Wails long after he's cut out.
The groovey is often stashed with their frames,
So don't put Caesar down.
The swinging Brutus hath laid a story on you
That Caesar was hungry for power.
If it were so, it was a sad drag,
And sadly hath the Caesar cat answered it.
Here with a pass from Brutus and the other brass,
For Brutus is a worthy stud,
Yea, so are they all worthy studs,
Though their stallions never sleep.
I came to wail at Ceasar's wake.
He was my buddy, and he leveled with me.
Yet Brutus digs that he has eyes for power,
And Brutus is a solid cat.
It is true he hath returned with many freaks in chains
And brought them home to Rome.
Yea, the looty was booty
And hip the trays we weld(?)
Dost thou dig that this was Caesar's groove
For the putsch?
When the cats with the empty kicks hath copped out,
Yea, Caesar hath copped out, too,
And cried up a storm.
To be a world grabber a stiffer riff must be blown.
Without bread a stud can't even rule an anthill.
Yet Brutus was swinging for the moon.
And, yea, Brutus is a worthy stud.
And all you cats were gassed on the Lupercal
When he came on like a king freak.
Three times I lay the kingly wig on him,
And thrice did he put it down.
Was this the move of a greedy hipster?
Yet, Brutus said he dug the lick,
And, yes, a hipper cat has never blown.
Some claim that Brutus' story was a gag.
But I dug the story was solid.
I came here to blow.
Now, stay cool while I blow.
You all dug him once
Because you were hipped that he was solid
How can you now come on so square
Now that he's tapped out of this world.
City Hall is flipped
And swung to a drunken zoo
And all of you cats are goofed to wig city.
Dig me hard.
My ticker is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And, yea, I must stay cool til it flippeth back to me.
"How do you defend lyrics like these against those who label hip hop a bad influence:
I'm sticking ice-picks on the tip of ya dick/give your testicles a swift kick, ain't that some shit?/I'm a hard hard core, harder than a plymouth/it ain't no lip, it's a nigga with a spliff/ and a chrome four fifth pressed on your back/so what you want nigga, how you gonna act?"
I know I'm not Ta-Nehisi, but let me offer a response in the form of another question to you Justin. Homer's Odyssey is one of my favourite books and is considered one of the greatest literary masterpieces the West has ever produced. Here's a particularly lovely excerpt from it:
"Melanthius? They hauled him out through the doorway, into the court, lopped his nose and ears with a ruthless knife, tore his genitals out for the dogs to eat raw and in manic fury hacked off his hands and feet."
Very similar in subject matter. Genital mutilation, murder, and overall savagery. How do you defend lyrics like these?
Justin,
I don't defend it at all--in any respect. I think--in probably 75 percent of the cases--hip-hop's profanity hurts more than it helps. The gay-bashing and the misogyny never helps. Rakim is still my favorite because he eschewed that sort of sensationalistism. Nas--circa illmatic--knew how to use the profane economically.
But that said, I could say the same about a lot of art that some folks regard as pretty great. I find Quentin Tarrantino films to be unwatchable, mostly because of his utter worship at the throne of graphic violence. I understand why Goodfellas is a masterpiece, but again, a lot of the violence in the flick just seems over the top for me. I'm a huge comic book fan--but even the best writers in the business have been bedeviled by what's called the "Women In Refrigerators" problem--i.e. female superheros seem to be regularly dispatched in brutal fashion. Check out the link below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Refrigerators
Hip-hop isn't so much more violent or more misogynistic than most pop art--it's just more profane. But in terms of actual substance, I see little difference. I've yet to hear a hip-hop song that, in pure hatred of women, rises to the level of, say, torture-porn like Hostel 2 etc.
T.
First I will say that WS is in a different category from other writers. He is a world genius. To rope him in will only distort.
Silence, a guest, entertains the table.
The placeman’s goulash goes to waste.
Josh retails the history of a gable.
That pool of flesh you want to taste
where ribcage gives to belly, womb-knot, navel
(no muscle wrecks the half-perfect oval):
I have it here, beneath mahogany.
Your sockless feet agree.
The bed in time to fill with breathing;
the wall’s, the board’s to rank just bantamweight
in time. No heart is seething:
clever hands have bored lust to bait.
Ring, change and ring. I wait. In time
passing glued the harmless double crime.
Who was writing Puff's stuff back then if not Big? Mase?
It's deja vu all over again. Mr. Coates is reprising efforts that were made in the 60's to equate (elevate) rock music and pop culture with high art, in an effort to give credibility to the new music. Something similar has also happened with Madonna, as a few misguided academics have tried to repackage a formula pop star vixen as a feminist folk hero.
With the sixties generation, I suppose that the agenda was ultimately political. It was intended to bridge the generation gap by empowering the kids with confidence in their radio heroes while simultaneously trying to raise their credibility in the eyes of their elders.
Mr. Coates appears to be repeating their exercise, using this as a means of allowing black culture to have a bit of price while healing the racial divide. But it didn't work then, and it doesn't work now.
It's not that rap music is all bad, because it isn't. It's just that there's no need to bother with the fight, and the overreaching hurts the cause.
To indulge this argument is to fall into the trap of the status quo assumption that the quality of art comes from its format or time period, rather than the substance of the work itself. An insightful critic will not presume that iambic pentameter lends credibility to prose, or that the use of polyphony or a string section makes a poor work better. Likewise, one should not presume that an electric guitar is incompatible with good music or that contemporary verse is inherently inferior.
The instruments and arrangements are just tools, that a skilled artist can make shine and a hack can abuse. Good and bad work can be created within the framework both traditional and contemporary forms, the form itself does not assure success or failure.
A lot of rap music is banal, with its hackneyed repetition of a few themes, delivered with the same recycled cadences and ubiquitous profanity time and time again. But that is not a flaw of the form, but of the pop artists who chase commercial success by giving the audience the work that they want.
Most people want their music the way that they want their Big Macs -- a predictable, easily packaged commodity that poses no challenge to the consumer. Ever since recorded music became widely accessible, we have had a pop music industry that has churned out mass quantities of a lot of forgettable stuff.
Most rap music should be added to that forgotten pile. Some of it shouldn't be. The goal should be to identify the good stuff and to preserve it, rather than reaching back centuries for unnecessary alibis that ultimately fail.
"It seems that out of battle I escaped
Down some dull tunnel long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleeper groaned
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred."
That was from Wilfred Owen's poem Strange Meeting, for those who are unfamiliar with it. Owen was a virtuoso. Had he not been killed at age 25 during WWI, he would probably have gone on to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, maybe up there with W.H. Auden.
I'll admit I'm not familiar with a lot of rap lyrics, but I highly doubt anyone with the skill of an Auden or Owen is writing rap lyrics today.
I can't believe I read this. Rubbish
Read Adam Krims's "Eminem and the Measurement of a Master MC" in Contemporary Literary Criticism 226: there are strict standards for rapping, and they can be formalized. Of course, it's difficult to do well. Like hip-hop production or turntabalism, it's underestimated because most people don't listen closely enough to 'get' it.
"Of course, it's difficult to do well."
I don't think this is true. There is some skill in the production behind the rap, and the image creation of the rapper (status, wealth, virility, etc.). That's what makes it a tough genre to break into, because there's nothing cool about a poor, anonymous rapper. That's also why whenever an aspiring rapper performs on the amateur night on "Show Time at the Apollo" he invariably gets booed. He has no image or production values behind him, and rap isn't a strong enough art form to stand on its own, even if the kid is good.