David Caplan - Rhymes Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture

RHYMES CHALLENGE

Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture

DAVID CAPLAN

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Caplan, David, 1969
Rhymes challenge : hip hop, poetry, and contemporary rhyming culture /
David Caplan.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 9780195337129 (hardcover)ISBN 9780195337136 (pbk.)
1. English languageRhyme. 2. Hip-hopUnited States. 3. American
poetry20th centuryHistory and criticism. 4. American poetry21st
centuryHistory and criticism. I. Title.
PE1517.C36 2014
808.1dc23
2013030719

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

I owe many people many thanks for their help with this book. My students broadened my perspective, offering numerous suggestions, including recommendations of artists whose work I should consider. In particular, I would like to thank Simon Brown for sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of hip hop with me.

Stephen Burt, Adam Bradley, James Longenbach, and Adrian Matejka read the manuscript in its entirety; Heather Dubrow reviewed a chapter. No author could hope for more generous, insightful readers. Even our disagreements proved useful as they challenged me to think harder about rhyme and its many uses.

I have been extremely fortunate to work with talented editors. This project started in a meeting with Shannon McLachlan. Ably assisted by Stephen Bradley, Brendan ONeill expertly steered the book into publication, with good humor and perceptive guidance. Rick Huard copyedited and arranged permissions.

Several chapters have been presented in various forms at conferences, including the Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association, Arts of the Present Conference, and the Annual Convention of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and invited lectures at Bonn University, University of Ghent, and Trinity College, Dublin. I want to thank Ian Kinane, Gillian Groszewski, Stephen Matterson, Frank J. Kearful, Sabine Sielke, Christian Klckner, and Sarah Posman for arranging these visits and treating me so well during them.

Several fellowships helped me immensely. The Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University and University of Lige, where I served as a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature, offered welcoming, stimulating environments. Martine Brownley, Director of the Fox Center, and Michel Delville showed me remarkable hospitality during my time at their respective universities. A Thomas E. Wenzlau Presidential Fellowship from my home institution, Ohio Wesleyan University, gave me time to write. Provosts William Louthan and Charles Stinemetz also deserve thanks for their support.

Finally, this book is dedicated to Ana and Andy.

RHYMES CHALLENGE

The Gutenberg era, the era of rhyme, is over.

DONALD DAVIE

that fuddy-duddy device of end-rhyme

PAUL COLLINS

Most intellectuals will only half-listen.

NAS

WE LIVE IN A RHYME-DRENCHED era. Rhyme flourishes in advertisements, tabloid headlines, and aphorisms. Nearly all forms of popular music, including country-and-western, rock, pop, punk, soul, and, most notably, hip hop, rhyme. Rhymes fill our lives, crowded with idiosyncratic echoes and associations, both intimate and shared, as rhymes find each other in playgrounds, bedrooms, and on the Internet. The era of rhyme seems over to those who only half-listen. I propose we open our ears and rediscover an amazing rhyming culture.

Consider the following list:

ta-da Tears for Fears tea tree teeny peeny teeny-weeny teepee

teeter-totter telltale Temporary Contemporary tent event

Texas Exes Tex-Mex thigh high think pink thinktank thins in, but fats where its at

Harryette Mullens abecedarian Jinglejangle documents rhymes; it does not invent new ones. It consists of ten pages, all organized according to alphabetical sequence and rhyme. The list gives the impression it could continue forever. This stanza, for instance, ranges widely. It includes erotic arousal and sexual humiliation, innuendo and insult, fleshly comeliness (fats where its at), and emasculating put-down (teeny-weeny). It rhymes the thin and the fat, as well as the adult and juvenile, food and music, the bodily and the intellectual (thinktank). Its musical geography encompasses England, home of the 1980s pop band whose name reportedly truncated the psychologist Arthur Janovs description of his primal scream method, tears as a replacement for fears, When Mullen read drafts of the poem, she asked the audience for suggestions, some of which she incorporated into later versions. The poem continues this project; it documents our cultures propulsive desire to rhyme.

In this respect, I hope my work might clarify opportunities for future scholarship to pursue.

The most daring, inventive, and conspicuous contemporary rhymers, though, necessarily demand the bulk of my attention. Hip-hop artists dominate the contemporary art of rhyme; they remain most alert to the resources that the culture and the language provide. The effects they achieve are nothing short of astonishing, showing how thrilling rhyme can be, how sexy and appalling. For this reason, most of this book concentrates on their workmore specifically, the kinds of rhymes that hip-hop artists favor: doggerel, insult, and seduction. This attention to particular kinds of rhymes acknowledges both individual and collective achievement, as artists draw from and revise shared techniques. To clarify this accomplishment, I also will review the rhymes history and current uses. The last chapter will return to the question of hip hops relation to the most prestigious forms of

Hip hop has accomplished so much in rhyme partly because its practitioners hold a particularly useful attitude toward it, one at odds with that of most contemporary print-based poets. This difference extends beyond the striking fact that virtually all hip hop rhymes, even in languages that lack strong traditions of rhyming poetry, whereas the vast majority of contemporary poetry in English does not, even though the language enjoys a strong history of rhyming verse.