The poetics of hip hop occupy my thoughts, if not as much as
they used to, quite often still. Hip hop
as a genre has saturated popular culture, moving from a musical subculture to
an effective subset of pop music with its own indie movements, entrenched
"classics" and bubblegum sweet iterations on genre themes aimed at
providing commercials, movies, and pabulum television with evocative soundtracks. The genre now reaches from Drake and Chris
Brown to RZA and Snoop Dogg all the way out to the old school indies, like Aesop
Rock and Blockhead. The last two hold a special
place in my heart; Aesop Rock remains one of my favorite rappers, and his
approach to the genre of hip hop actually helped me see the poetic quality that
it inherently possesses.
Because hip hop is poetry.
It's a particular idiomatic form of poetry with its own ill-defined
rules and traditions and constantly shifting boundaries, oft confused or
conflated with existent subsets of poetics like spoken word and performance
poetry. But hip hop isn't either of
those things. Hip hop is its own genre
of word play conflated with musicality into an intellectual slurry of
extraordinary potential. You can break
down the lyrics of a particular piece of music and examine them the same way
you'd examine the lineation and measure of a particular piece of poetry. You can pick through the imagery of Aesop
Rock's Labor and come out richer for
the experience. You can look at how
cadence, measure, and meter all function in a given rapper's work, and, for
your effort, understand how things as fundamental as enjambment and stanza
structure function in other, more conventional works of poetry. In fact, I owe much of how I understand
cadence and flow in my own work, as well as how I conceive of line and
structure, to the poetics of hip hop - Marianne Moore and Ian Bavitz both
taught me how a line should work, in very different ways, at around the same
time in my life.
But there's a problem with that comparison I just made, a
problem buried in the connection that I just elucidated: cadence, measure, and
meter aren't terms native to the discourse of hip hop. And their equivalents, things like tone,
flow, and beat, aren't things that poets are particularly game on
discussing. Hip hop exists outside of
the discourse of contemporary poetics, at least in part, because the people who
normally sit down and "talk poetry" don't have a language to actually
engage in a discourse about it. They
often don't even have the language to acknowledge the foreignness of certain
concepts. A contemporary academic poet
knows slightly less about flow than a particularly active teenager who spends
all of his allowance trying to hit up all-ages shows and building up enough
clout with the people who run the venues he frequents to sneak into 18-plus
shows. In fact, I'd bet on the teenager
being able to talk intelligently about how structure influences poetic flow
over the academic poet, who'd probably talk your ear off about Mandelstam's
bleak imagery. They're both valid
conversations to be had, and they're actually both pretty important to having a
fully realized discussion about poetry in contemporary culture. The issue isn't these two interests exist;
it's that they have trouble co-existing.
There have been a handful of attempts to rectify this. Yale released the Anthology of Hip Hop a
while back, a well intentioned and deeply problematic book written by two academics,
with limited input from Henry Louis Gates Jr., a wonderful academic in his own
regard whose conflation with the fields of both poetry and hip hop is somewhat
baffling to me, and commentary from Chuck D of Public Enemy and Common, two
artists firmly rooted in the popular hip hop movement, with Chuck D moving
closer to that sort of "old school" or "classic" hip hop
that many cultural commentators focus on when they discuss the evolution of the
genre. The scope of their discussion was
predictably limited, in part because of the necessity of determining an
effective scope when anthologizing a particular body of work (you can't fit
everything into one book, to paraphrase Basel King) and in part because the
book itself seemed to be largely influenced by the interests of the writers,
rather than any sort of exhaustive study of the field. Much of their discourse focused on
interrelated artists from similar schools of thought and movements, and their
effort to include an exhaustive list of artists seemed to look forward, rather
than backwards, anthologizing contemporary artists whose impact was still
largely unknown in favor of older, more established obscure artists whose
important work at the fringes of the community has had a tremendous impact on the genre as a
whole. Even without that issue, the book
is riddled with transcription errors: there's
a great Slate piece that details many of them.
The existence of the book, again, isn't the problem: the
problem is the slapdash way much of the subject material is dealt with. It's part of a borderline disrespectful
pattern of behavior that academics often engage in, wherein they insert
themselves into a subculture or subgenre and attempt to define it in their own
terms, projecting their own hierarchies on to fields where those hierarchies
are both unnecessary, and ill-fitting.
Here, academics did so to the extent that they limited the scope of
their discussion while focusing heavily on artists they believe will appeal to
a mainstream audience, undermining the impact an anthology can have on public
awareness. It's great to have MIA and
Slick Rick in an anthology of hip hop, but if the artists can bring awareness
to other lesser known and still important artists, like M.O.P. for example, the
anthology has actually done what anthologies are meant to do: it has expanded
the notion of what we should consider art, and allowed us to establish a
broader context for a genre beyond the "first thought-best thought" response
we usually bring to bear on discussing popular culture. There's also the issue of just developing a
shared language for the discussion of hip hop and poetics.
This is a deeper problem, and it's something that occurs
whenever you're attempting to avidly discuss a subculture or subcultural
institution: without a shared language, it's impossible to have a real dialogue
about something. Hip hop doesn't even
have this shared language internally, and some of the terms inherent in hip
hop, like beat and rhythm, mean completely different things in poetic terms. The end result is that two people entrenched
in their own communities could have a very long, very thorough dialogue about
the subject at hand while thoroughly mis-communicating with one another.
So how do we address that issue? One way is to organically develop terminologies
as they're needed, but that just patches the issue; it doesn't help us fix the
problem long term. The real answer is to
have academics sit down and seriously examine hip hop as a subgenre of poetry,
and to have a real effort to engage with hip hop as an appropriate academic
topic in higher education. A freshman
class taught by an enthusiastic professor who knows and loves the two or three
dozens artists he wants students to listen to over the course of a semester
could build a terminology that we could use for years to come. A full cirriculum oriented around writing
papers about the social real-politik of The Diggable Planets buried in dope,
structurally simple lyrics metered out hypnotically would be a god damn dream
to teach, but the first steps need to be taken before we can get there, and at
present, it's difficult to find a professor who even knows Blackalicious from
Berryman. Perhaps this paradigm will
shift in time, but for now I'll keep dropping Aesop Rock references into my own
work, and keep breaking down how hip-hop isn't performance poetry for my
students whenever they ask, because it's important that we acknowledge that hip
hop is simultaneously poetry, and its own wonderful genre with its own rich
history and cultural background.
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