Rap is AMAZING English 226
1) Like black spirituals and the blues, rap grew from an entirely grassroots movement, out of need and desire, with no commercial assistance or help, in its inception, from the dominant culture.
2) It found poetry again on the streets not the academy and contributed to a resurgence of oral and performed poetry, such as slams and coffeehouse open-mikes. I.e., it helped to spark the spoken-word movement.
3) It mixes the very oldest traditions of poetry (oral performance, accentual line) with the newest technology (synthesizers, CDs, etc.)
4) It’s people finding a way to have real conversations across great distances, and through channels that aren’t necessarily controlled by the usual forces. Note the Roxanne Roxanne phenomenon.
5) It is full of real variety, though this has been overlooked. It is not all misogyny and “f word.” A lot of rap is pro-peace and pro-community.
Additionally, while no one denies that rap (especially gangsta rap) is often violent and misogynous, rap lyrics have also prompted open discussion, including the phenomenon of women rappers speaking back to and educating men.
And, finally, much of the violence in rap is actually a form of clowning and hyperbole (intentional exaggeration); that is, it’s a way of baiting white culture and basically playing with our heads.
6) Many rap artists and advocates say: white culture is always harping on the violence in rap; why isn’t that culture equally concerned about the terrible social conditions in the inner city the real poverty and despair out of which rap music emerged in the first place? Why isn’t white culture concerned about underfunded schools, the high incidence of black men in prison, the lack of opportunity, and all of the other social ills in the inner city? (Consider also that the federal government actually contributed to those ills by initiating the crack epidemic—i.e., the C.I.A’s secret funding of the Contras in the 80s through drug smuggling and sales as a secret way to move arms.)
7) Rap is a complex postmodern musical form which derives from and includes elements of funk, reggae, soul, disco, and rhythm & blues. It employs sophisticated uses of irony, word-play, rhyme, and hyperbole, and draws deeply on such African-American traditions as the toast. It raises real questions about music ownership and ingeniously co-opts elements of white culture in the creation of its own sound and voice. The phenomenon of sampling is brilliant raises real questions about the right of anyone to own music.
8) Rap refutes recent claims that we’ve become an almost entirely visual culture. Rap totally luxuriates in the word. It loves the word. It is the High Priest and Clown of the word. Rap is full of word play, surprise, humor, and rhyme of every sort. Its prosody is both traditional and completely new. (See Rap Lyrics and Form below. )
9) Some of the objectionable stuff in rap lyrics actually has precedents in white literary traditions at least as far back as the British poet Alexander Pope.
10) It is a living rock genre which continues to stir and spark debate about issues of gender, race, class, and culture.
Rap Lyrics and Form
Form in rap lyrics is very interesting. Just like other forms of folk or popular poetry such as the ballad, nursery rhyme, or earliest oral poetry in English, rap lyrics often use a four-beat or four-stress accentual line which counts just stresses.
Sometimes the rap line is extremely long and includes many unstressed syllables, but there will still be four heavy stresses in each line. The fun of hearing rap is in how the artist gets those stresses in, how he or she slows down or speeds up to allow for those beats. The net effect can sometimes be very witty, acrobatic, varied, and syncopated.
The other distinguishing feature of rap, of course, is rhyme especially end rhyme. It might be said, in fact, that rap lyrics are end-rhyme-centered, and part of the fun, again, is in hearing the clever ways the artist finds his or her rhymes, building suspense and then upsetting our expectations, often surprising us with very witty, sometimes exaggerated and even clownish sound patterns. Rap artists also use the whole spectrum of rhyme types, including exact rhyme, near or slant rhyme, feminine and masculine rhyme, assonance, consonance, etc.
An important fact about rap, too, is that it is a type of poetry which is performed. That is, it simply doesn’t work very well on the page. To be fully heard and understood, for the stresses to make sense, we have to hear a particular song performed. Often rap cannot even be scanned on the page, as the prosody is exclusively audible and can’t be determined by reading.
Like much oral poetry, the personality of the artist is important in rap. In performed poetry, the artist is often quite theatrical and in-your-face. Also, the way a piece is performed how the artist dances, how loud or soft the voice becomes, and so on is absolutely crucial to the full success of the piece.
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