Table of Contents
To my mother,
Jane Louise Bradley,
who introduced me
to the poetry of music.
Prologue
This is hip hop. You are in a small club, standing room only. Maybe its the Roots or Common or some underground group about to perform. Bodies press tightly against you. Blue wreaths of smoke hang just above your head. From the four-foot speakers at the front of the stage, you hear the DJ spinning hip-hop classicsA Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Rakimcharging the crowd as it waits, five minutes, ten minutes, longer, for the show to begin.
As the music fades to silence, a disembodied voice over the PA system announces the headliner. Lights grow warm, blue turns to yellow, then to red. The first beat hits hard, and the crowd roars as the MCthe rapper, hip hops lyrical master of ceremoniesglides to the front of the stage. Hands reach for the sky. Heads bob to the beat. The crowd is a living thing, animated by the rhythm. It can go on like this for hours.
Now imagine this. It happens just as the performance reaches its peak. First the melody drops out, then the bass, and finally the drums. The stage is now silent and empty save for a lone MC, kicking rhymes a cappella. His voice fades from a shout to a whisper, then finally to nothing at all. As he turns to leave, you notice something stranger still: lyrics projected in bold print against the back of the stage. Its like youre looking directly into an MCs book of rhymes. The words scroll along in clear, neat lines against the wall. People stand amazed. Some begin to boo. Some start to leave.
But you remain, transfixed by the words. You notice new things in the familiar lyrics: wordplay, metaphors and similes, rhymes upon rhymes, even within the lines. You notice structures and forms, sound and silence. You even start to hear a beat; it comes from the language itself, a rhythm the words produce in your mind. Youre bobbing your head again. People around you, those who remain, are doing it too. Theres a group of you, smaller than before but strong, rocking to an inaudible beat.
The change is subtle at first. Maybe its a stage light flickering back to life. Maybe its a snare hit punctuating that inaudible rhythm. But now the lights burn brighter, the beat hits harder than ever, the MC bounds back on stage, the crowd reaches a frenzy. Its the same song, just remixed.
Through the boom of the bass you can still somehow hear the low rhythm the words make. Lines of lyrics pass across your minds eye while the sound from the speakers vibrates your eardrums. For the first time you see how the two fit togetherthe sight and the sound. Rap hasnt changed, but you have. This is the poetry of hip hop.
Rap Poetry 101
I start to think and then I sink
into the paper like I was ink.
When Im writing Im trapped in between the lines,
I escape when I finish the rhyme...
Eric B. & Rakim, I Know You Got Soul
A BOOK OF rhymes is where MCs write lyrics. It is the basic tool of the rappers craft. Nas raps about writin in my book of rhymes, all the words pass the margin. Mos Def boasts about sketching lyrics so visual / they rent my rhyme books at your nearest home video. They both know what Rakim knew before them, that the book of rhymes is where rap becomes poetry.
Every rap song is a poem waiting to be performed. Written or freestyled, rap has a poetic structure that can be reproduced, a deliberate form an MC creates for each rhyme that differentiates it, if only in small ways, from every other rhyme ever conceived. Like all poetry, rap is defined by the art of the line. Metrical poets choose the length of their lines to correspond to particular rhythmsthey write in iambic pentameter or whatever other meter suits their desires. Free verse poets employ conscious line breaks to govern the readers pace, to emphasize particular words, or to accomplish any one of a host of other poetic objectives. In a successful poem, line breaks are never casual or accidental. Rewrite a poem in prose and youll see it deflate like a punctured lung, expelling life like so much air.
Line breaks are the skeletal system of lyric poetry. They give poems their shape and distinguish them from all other forms of literature. While prose writers usually break their lines wherever the page demandswhen they reach the margin, when the computer drops their word to the next linepoets claim that power for themselves, ending lines in ways that underscore the specific design of their verse. Rap poets are no different.
Rap is poetry, but its popularity relies in part on people not recognizing it as such. After all, rap is for good times; we play it in our cars, hear it at parties and at clubs. By contrast, most people associate poetry with hard work; it is something to be studied in school or puzzled over for hidden insights. Poetry stands at an almost unfathomable distance from our daily lives, or at least so it seems given how infrequently we seek it out.
This hasnt always been the case; poetry once had a prized place in both public and private affairs. At births and deaths, weddings and funerals, festivals and family gatherings, people would recite poetry to give shape to their feelings. Its relative absence today says something about usour cultures short attention span, perhaps, or the dominance of other forms of entertainmentbut also about poetry itself. While the last century saw an explosion of poetic productivity, it also marked a decided shift toward abstraction. As the poet Adrian Mitchell observed, Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Rap never ignores its listeners. Quite the contrary, it aggressively asserts itself, often without invitation, upon our consciousness. Whether boomed out of a passing car, played at a sports stadium, or piped into a mall while we shop, rap is all around us. Most often, it expresses its meaning quite plainly. No expertise is required to listen. You dont need to take an introductory course or read a handbook; you dont need to watch an instructional video or follow an online tutorial. But, as with most things in life, the pleasure to be gained from rap increases exponentially with just a little studied attention.
Rap is public art, and rappers are perhaps our greatest public poets, extending a tradition of lyricism that spans continents and stretches back thousands of years. Thanks to the engines of global commerce, rap is now the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world. Of course, not all rap is great poetry, but collectively it has revolutionized the way our culture relates to the spoken word. Rappers at their best make the familiar unfamiliar through rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay. They refresh the language by fashioning patterned and heightened variations of everyday speech. They expand our understanding of human experience by telling stories we might not otherwise hear. The best MCslike Rakim, Jay-Z, Tupac, and many othersdeserve consideration alongside the giants of American poetry. We ignore them at our own expense.
Hip hop emerged out of urban poverty to become one of the most vital cultural forces of the past century. The South Bronx may seem an unlikely place to have birthed a new movement in poetry. But in defiance of inferior educational opportunities and poor housing standards, a generation of young peoplemostly black and brownconceived innovations in rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay that would change the English language itself. In
