Has Rap replaced Poetry?

Transcription

1 Has Rap replaced Poetry? Before we start the paper, I d like to clarify the title, my intention behind it and provide some perspective. At a first glance this may seem like quite an obscure title for an academic heretics paper. And almost all of the feedback I got thus far has been prefaced with a raised eyebrow and a question of why on earth are you doing a heretics paper on rap? Well, let me explain According to Forbes Magazine and a Nielsen Music report as of July 2017, R&B and Hip-Hop is the biggest music genre in the United States with 25.1% of all music consumption. In fact, R&B/hip-hop is almost as popular on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music as the next two genres (rock and pop) combined. Although these are the statistics for the U.S. a very similar trend can be observed in the U.K and also worldwide. Therefore there is no doubt that it has a profound influence on our society as well as being an insightful reflection of it. If I were to present a paper on Renaissance art versus Baroque art and how the two reflect the society from which they came, that would be a perfectly valid heretics talk. Therefore I d like to draw a parallel between the art forms of poetry and Hip-Hop. Poetry is seen by most as a high art. An art primarily for the educated and civilised. Although the exception can be made with the example of Shakespeare s audience, which was primarily made up of uneducated peasants. Hip-Hop, on the other hand, is more analogous to folk music. The music of the common people. Historically, Hip-Hop is a DIY art form where anyone that s passionate enough and has the ability to back it up, can get involved. This can takes us back Yernur s previous heretics paper where if put on our post-modernist glasses, these societal concepts can and should be challenged. Of course there is a feeling that Hip-Hop doesn t quite fit in into such an academic discussion and maybe that is partially true given its explicit unapologetic vulgarity etc. However, given its apparent relevance and influence, I felt like that would make for an interesting discussion. Now onto the talk If I were to ask you who s the current Poet laureate, the people s poet, I don t presume many of you would know. I for certain didn t until pretty much yesterday. However, if I were to ask you who won last Sundays Grammy award for the best hip-hop album, I presume many more would know. The MP Emma Dent Coad has pointed this out in the houses of parliament after the Grenfell tower disaster. She says: At times of national disaster, poet laureates are often called upon to commemorate and reflect upon events. In North Kensington we have our own Ben Johnsons and Alfred Lord Tennysons. Our poet laureates are Akala, AJ Tracey, Lowkey, Peaky.. we have Stromzy and Potent Whisper calling out what he calls Grenfell Britain in gut-wrenching prose.

2 We have poets and artists aplenty. Although the two art forms share the same fundamental medium that of rhyme and rhythm, there is a great discrepancy between how the two are perceived within society. If you were to take the average GCSE student, chances are that they wouldn t have the greatest opinion on poetry. It s boring, the language is too confusing, I can t relate to it they might say, views that they wouldn t necessarily hold of rap music. So, has rap music replaced poetry for (at least) our generation? Or is poetry the eternal art of humanity that is here to stay for millennia to come as it has done in the past. Does one deal with the depths of the human condition, that of: love, eternal truths, and our relation to the world. And does the other cover the superficial and primitive aspects of humanity that of: greed, intoxication and sexual obsession. 1 Or maybe the two aren t entirely antithetical, as many parallels and influences can be drawn between them. Before we delve deeper into the analysis of both, let s try a mini game. I m going to read out some sentences either from Shakespeare or from popular hip-hop, and with a quick show of hands let s guess which one the line comes from. So let s try a few: To destroy the beauty from which one came Jay z, You Must Love Me Maybe it s hatred I spew, maybe it s food for the spirit Eminem, Renegade o Later in the song Eminem says: See, I'm a poet to some, a regular modern-day Shakespeare Men would rather use their broken records than their bare hands Orthello I was not born under a rhyming planet - Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing The most benevolent king communicates through your dreams - Wu-Tang Clan, Impossible Socrates, philosophy and hypotheses can t define me Wu-Tang Clan, Triumph The reason to play this mini-game, isn t to cherry pick some obscure, unknown tracks just to be able to say look, hip-hop has clever lines as well. But more so to show that the boundary between the two, once the context has been removed, can be very blurred. The hip-hop bars were chosen from very well-known artists who are or were at the forefront of hip hop. Wu- Tang-Clan for example, had the first hip hop album to reach no.1 in the UK charts. Perhaps the appeal that the British audience found in the album was the resemblance to the more traditional aspect of English literature. 1 Money, drugs and women is a recurrent theme for subject matter in a lot of hip hop, which is often seen as very superficial

3 One of the best tools to judge something s place within society is to look at its history, as that would provide us with the context necessary to put things into perspective. To start off with, let s look at poetry. It is very hard to trace back to the first poem ever written. However, the Epic of Gilgamesh is often cited as the one of the earliest works of epic poetry, dating back to the 18 th Century B.C. Or perhaps the ancient Indian epic poems Mahabarata and the Ramayana. However, the greatest influence of on western philosophy and poetry were the ancient Greek poems: Iliad and Odyssey both attributed to the poet Homer. Written in dactylic hexameter, the Iliad describes the classic Trojan War, namely the battle between Achilles and King Agamemnon. The odyssey on the other hand depicts the story of Odysseus. Although both were written thousands of years ago, they have survived and are still widely available within our modern day society. Another influential moment within the history of poetry was the invention of the sonnet form. In the 13 th century the Italian poet Petrarch has invented the first sonnet form, later named the Petrarchan sonnet. However it wasn t until the 16 th century that William Shakespeare popularised the sonnet form as an English poetic form. About a century after, between 1660 and 1700, poetry has entered the Restoration poetic period. During this period the poet John Dryden rose to fame with his mocking style of poetry. He became the first poet laureate, and also the only one to be fired from that position. Whilst holding that post, he has written his most famous work Mac Flecknoe. In which he mocked his poetic contemporaries namely the poet Thomas Shadwell. Essentially a Shadwell disstrack. Writing: The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, But Shadwell never deviates into sense. Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval; But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray, His rising fogs prevail upon the day. Poets like Dryden and Pope would attack through poetry political figures with whom they disagreed and these debates often became very public and very heated there were a lot of magazines being published at this time, which combined poetry and politics. A direct parallel can be drawn with rap s politically controversial nature. For example, Eminem s latest freestyle against Trump just a few months ago. (Of course, one simply can t present a heretics talk with Trump not being metioned)

4 The next major poetic highlight was the birth of the romantic era of poetry and the 19 th century poetry. To keep this paper brief, it would be hard to provide an account of the whole period as it was a vast explosion in poetry. During this period Walt Whiteman revolutionised the 19 th century American spirit with his work: Leaves of Grass. During the 20 th century the modernist style of poetry dominated the scene. With poets such as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Claude McKay. The latter a Jamaican born American, who wrote of war, racism and Jamaica with his notable poems like If We Must Die, The Lynching, and The Tropics in New York. At the turn of the 20 th century, the noble NOBEL prize was introduced with notable winners such as Seamus Heaney, whose poetry you may have studied during GCSEs. Such poems are recognised as high-art which is backed up by the number of years that they ve survived. However, do we still value things based on their tradition and longevity? Or on the other hand, do we prefer Hip-Hop s versatility as a genre which changes very frequently and perhaps more accurately reflects our rapid changes in society? Whilst poetry has this long history, hip-hop itself is just over 40 years old. Starting in the mid- 70s as a rebellion against the disco dominated musical landscape of inner-city New York. The first hip-hop party can be traced back to DJ Kool Herc in the New York City borough of South Bronx. A typical disco song would be structured with an alternating verse and chorus with a potential breakdown section and maybe a bridge and a pre-chorus thrown in. Kool Herc would take this breakdown section, which was mainly a rhythmic drum with minimal accompaniment and experiment with it. Hence we get the term, break-dancing. These parties quickly became very popular and other DJs also started hosting their own parties. The only equipment that the DJ required was a turntable and a microphone to host it. As these parties were growing in popularity and developing, some friends of the DJ or the DJ himself would start to vocalize over the beats with witty punchlines. It is widely accepted that first such person to do so would be a man called DJ Hollywood. And here lies the birth of the Hip-Hop Emcee (MC), a Master of Ceremonies, i.e. the Rapper. Although this rhythmic style of performance is often attributed to originate from these events in New York, one can trace rapping much further back. A decade before, jazz groups such as The Lost Poets, The Watts Prophets or artists and poets such as Gil Scott Heron have essentially been rapping. For reference, you may recall Gil Scott Heron from the Black Panther movie trailer which samples his famous poetic jazz song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Going back even further to Ella Fitzgerald, the queen of Jazz, one can say that her scattin, wordless syllables improvised over a rhythm often found in Jazz, is equivalent to an early form of rapping. If we dig even further into western music, the earliest recorded rap can be found in the songs of a Gospel group called The Golden Gate Quartet which formed in Yet if we persist to dig into the history even further, we land in Medieval Western Africa

5 with a character called the Griot. Many West African societies at the time, such as Mali, Songhai, Gao and ancient Ghana. This was a figure in society who is the storyteller, singer, poet, musician and custodian of the history and spiritual traditions of those empires and of those cultures. And given the transatlantic slave trade, this underlying tradition and culture has been exported to the Americas and preserved to the best ability of the slaves. This is the cultural basis which has greatly influenced the genres such as Jazz, Blues, Funk, Rock Roll up to Hip- Hop. Let s go back to New York in the 70s and 80s. One of the fathers of Hip-Hop was a man named Afrika Bambaataa. He saw the potential of the movement and has helped shape it into its current form. He has based the Hip-Hop culture on fundamental 5 pillars 2. Namely: Rapping DJing Breakdancing Graffity Art Knowledge (mainly focused on historical and philosophical knowledge) Bambaataa saw Hip-Hop as a way of life alternative to the gang violence and drug dealing that was wide spread in deprived communities such as the South Bronx. He has transformed the Black Spades gang (with the later addition of gangs such as: Savage Nomads, Seven Immortals and Savage Skulls) into a group called the Universal Zulu Nation, which organised community events for the youth and helped refocus their lives on the positive impacts that they can have on society. Their motto was to provide 'peace, love, unity and having fun in the ghetto. One of the main focuses was the spread of knowledge and education. And up until the mid-90s it was very normal for the most commercially successful rappers to boast about kicking science, dropping knowledge and spreading mathematics whilst simultaneously talking about the harsh reality of what it was like in the projects of New York City. There was no contradiction between the two, and this goes back to the 5 th pillar and who was the custodian of knowledge within the community. With the 90s came the inception of Gangster Rap. The first song to mark this change was the song 6 in the morning by Ice T. Which graphically depicted the brutal life within Compton. This song was one of the key inspirations for the West Coast rap sub-genre to form. The wave of gangster rap swept over America and took it by storm. Whilst the youths fell in love with it, it deeply terrified their parents and the media. Often accused with the promotion of violence drugs and misogyny. One could also make the argument that is has desensitized as a culture, 2 Probably taking inspiration from the 5 pillars of Islam.

6 especially to words like the n-word, which is very commonly used or possibly overused word in rap. Or on the other hand, one could say that rap, which originates from predominantly black communities, has taken the word which carries a lot of horrific historical baggage and has redefined it? The prominent rappers of the time such as Tupac Shakur have maintained a balance between the hard-core thug music and the socially aware caring music. 2Pac himself started off as a poet and an actor, falling in love with the works of Shakespeare. This influence is most evident in diss song called Hit em Up directed at Biggie. Although the song s focus is making very explicit violent threats against him, the rhyming scheme mostly used is the iambicpentameter with the occasional reverse dactylic. A clear influence drawn from the literary traditions of the English language. Hip-Hop has become the mouthpiece by which they expressed all their concerns ranging from the problems within society and the beef between the gangs. The most notable song of the era was N.W.A s F**k the Police which was a response to the police brutality that the rappers have seen in their community. This was the last song that was explicitly banned by the FBI on the radio. This has caused much uproar within Compton resulting in many riots for the freedom of speech and against police brutality especially after a case of a police officer killing a man in the city. The 90s is often cited as the golden era of hip-hop, and is when the genre exploded into the global phenomenon that we know it as. I will spare you the details of the development during the 00s and 10s as much of it we experienced ourselves. However I would like to bring up the current wave of Hip-Hop music that of mumble rap. Now, I ve used this term before and almost nobody understood me. So let me explain. The term refers to the sub-genre of trap that we re all very familiar with. It places the minimal importance on the lyrics, subject matter or even comprehensibility whilst emphasising the beat of the song. Over the past couple years it has dominated the charts. This sub-genre is led by artists such as Future, Young Thug, Desiigner, Lil Yachty and most recently Lil Pump to name a few. Let s focus Lil Pump s hit Gucci Gang as an example. The artist being about our age released the song only 3 months ago, and has amassed 485,984,420 views on Youtube. Over the span of just over 2 minutes, the phrase Gucci Gang is repeated 53 times and there are 331 non-unique words. Now I don t think I need to mention the rest of the lyrics. The society s mockery of such music can be most evident in the rise of the comedic character Big Shaq played by Michael Dapaah with his song Mans not hot. However, it would be foolish of me to completely discredit such songs even if I personally do not enjoy them. The numbers and the charts speak for themselves and clearly there is a great interest in them. Although, I should mention that there is also a great appeal for more lyrical and meaningful songs from rap. This can be evidenced with the rise of rappers such as Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole.

7 I hope I have provided an informative historical context for the two art forms. That of rap and that of poetry. Despite their many parallels, they do differ significantly. Is the rise of hip-hop replacing the appreciation and possibly the need for poetry or is it helping to engage the youths? Given Hip-Hop s historical context and modern day influences, how does it reflect our society and the young generation?