newyorker: Should hip-hop lyrics be considered...

newyorker:

Should hip-hop lyrics be considered poetry?

On the heels of the publication of Jay-Z’s “Decoded,” K elefa Sanneh looks at the language of hip-hop and the recent campaign for respect for the genre:
“If you start in the recent past and work backward, the history of hip-hop spreads out in every direction: toward the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, who declaimed poems over beats and grooves in the early seventies; toward Jamaica, where U-Roy pioneered the art of chatting and toasting over reggae records; toward the fifties radio d.j.s who used rhyming patter to seal spaces between songs; toward jazz and jive and the talking blues; toward preachers and politicians and street-corner bullshitters.”

Yes. As Jay-Z has discussed in recent interviews - Daily Show , Howard Stern Show, NPR Fresh Air - for the promotion of his aforementioned book, rap music began as a musical art form and achieved relevance because the songs provided firsthand accounts of what was happening in the ghettos across the United States circa 1980. Much of the most important work provides a sociologically relevant account of the 1980’s crack epidemc in the U.S. and later serves as a kind of aspirational, poetic statement of those trying to become upwardly mobile from a place of devastating poverty. The songs are etchings of real people, handling extreme circumstances; it is an extension of the protest literature tradition. These songs are poetry and the genre an artistic movement.

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