what type of essay is rap is poetry

Is Rap Poetry? Essay

Is rap a form of poetry: introduction, why rap is poetry, rap is not poetry, is rap poetry: conclusion, works cited.

Is rap a form of poetry? This question has been causing heated debates ever since the emergence of hip-hop music. If you want to know about similarities and differences between song lyrics and literature, you’re in the right place! Here, you will learn why rap is poetry and why it isn’t.

Poetry can be defined as a unique Art that is created and designed using sounds. Poetry as an Art uses sounds to create an expression of what is intended (Ntozake 1). Poetry has unique features that make it stand out as a form of Art. For example poems are popular for their application of rhyme, stress and meter (Ron 150). These features play a big role in enhancing sound patterns. The expression is thus brought out clearly when the poem is recited aloud (Randall 60). The question that arises is therefore whether the rap music is poetry.

Just like poetry, rap music uses sound to drive the intended message home. Rap artists play with their words to produce sounds that carry the intended message (Alan56). It is therefore evident that rap uses the same process as poetry to achieve its ultimate goal.

Stanzas and verses are other features that make rap to be classified as poetry. Rap music produces its sounds in beats in a line. These lines create a verse (Jace 2). This is the same case as in poetry. The physical appearances of both genres do not bring out any difference and this leads to conclusion that rap is poetry.

Poetry is associated with lyrics as in ‘lyric poetry’ of American poets (Timpane and Watts 20). Rap just like this poetry derive song lyrics from a renowned instrument called lyre that was used by poets of ancient times (Nelson 130). Rap as music has lyrics. This usually creates rhyme.

Rap is poetry as it is composed from happenings of day to day activities (McIver 219).This resembles poetry which depicts the literature and culture of people at a given period (Jimmy 478). Poetry is a language used to express a certain idea, this is similar to rap. It tells a lot about the age and culture of the people using the message it delivers (Bertice 12).

From linguistic point of view rap music is not poetry. This is because even though it looks like poetry, it takes the ill formed nature of poetry. That is, rappers usually manipulate their wordings to form a metrical pattern (Mel 43). In addition, if you take the other way round and read a poem containing blank verse will result to blank verse poetry and not a rap (Alonzo 602).

In order to create rhyme, the rap music keeps on repeating the same phrase (Perkins 1).This is especially in the mediocre rap music. Even in the so called good rap music the complex lyrics provides a single rhyme pattern which in most cases is intended to create emphasis (Language Arts Higher Standards 6).

Linguists also argue that rap does not use Standard language in terms of wording and sentence structure (Toni 3). For example they argue that Fifty Cent a rap artist pronounces ‘fifty’ as ‘fitty’. According to them ‘f’ cannot be substituted with a‘t’.

Rap music is poetry. This is because even the points argued against it such as the non- standard use of language in rap music do not hold water. Traditional poetry employed poetic devices which is non standard form of language. In summary, rap music is poetry and the opposition given lack viable support.

Ash, Mel. Beat Spirit: The Way of the Beat Writers as a Living Experience . Penguin, 1997.

Berry, Bertice. The Haunting of Hip Hop . Broadway Books, 2002.

Blackman, Toni. “The Influence of Rap on Spoken Word.” 2001. Web.

Clayton, Jace. “ Hip-Hop’s Radical Roots .” 1999. Web.

George, Nelson. Hip Hop America . Penguin, 1998.

James, Jimmy. “The History of Rap.” 2005. Web.

McIver, Denise L. Droppin’ Science: Straight-up Talk from Hip Hop’s Greatest Voices . Crown, 2002.

Language Arts Higher Standards . New Haven Public Schools, 2002.

Light, Alan, ed. The Vibe History of Hip Hop . Three Rivers Press, 1999.

Padgett, Ron. Handbook of Poetic Forms . Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1987.

Perkins, William Eric, ed. Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture . Temple University Press, 1995.

Randall, Dudley, ed. The Black Poets. Bantam, 1971.

Shange, Ntozake. Nappy Edges . St. Martin’s, 1978. 50-51.

John Timpane and Maureen Watts. Poetry for Dummies . Hungry Minds, 2001.

Westbrook, Alonzo T. Hip Hoptionary: The Dictionary of Hip Hop Terminology .Broadway Books, 2002.

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John McWhorter

How hip-hop became america’s poetry.

By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

This month, America celebrates the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. Most of the country first encountered this musical revolution with the release of the national hit “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. But it all started six years earlier, on Aug. 11, 1973: An energy crisis was looming, Lucille Ball was about to enter her final season of “Here’s Lucy,” and DJ Kool Herc pioneered rapping over turntable beats in a rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx.

But America is celebrating more than just a musical form. It’s celebrating the moment when rap gave America back its poetry.

In 1991, Dana Gioia’s renowned essay “Can Poetry Matter?” made a powerful case that poetry had entered an eclipse, from a staple of our national culture to a boutique concern cherished by a rarefied few. “The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past 30 years,” Gioia wrote, “has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation.” I recall reading the article eagerly in my graduate student days and feeling almost validated: “So that’s why I don’t really like poetry — I was born too late!”

Gioia was on to something. For most of our national history, schoolchildren memorized poetry and eventually became grandparents able to recite long passages of verse. Even Bugs Bunny pitched in, lolling alongside a river reading a parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” in one of his first cartoon appearances in 1941. There were celebrity poets who were real celebrities. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems, even with their elevated vocabulary, were cherished by young women the way the lyrics of Alanis Morissette would later be; Millay even had a national radio show for a spell. As late as the 1960s, Marianne Moore appeared on the “Tonight” Show. (Amanda Gorman’s star status as a poet since reading at the inauguration of President Biden is the exception that proves the rule.)

You could barely escape poetry back in the day. Newspapers commissioned bits of doggerel to print between columns. The N.A.A.C.P.’s doughty house organ and beacon to Black America, “The Crisis,” edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, included poetry of varying degrees of quality between its articles. A cultivated person often at least pretended to like poetry and had a volume or two on her bookshelf. (My mother did like it, and retained a copy of one of Louis Untermeyer ’s grand old anthologies from her early adulthood.)

But fast-forward to what Gioia was referring to. As a kid in the 1970s, even one attending private schools, I was directed to drive by poetry slowly now and then, but rarely to actually stop and take it in deeply. Many Russians can recite some Pushkin by heart; I have never known a single poem by heart. As I put it in a book once, poetry is the marjoram on my spice rack: It’s nice to know it’s there, but I use it for only one dish, lamb chops. And I am hardly alone in this among educated Americans of Generation X and beyond.

A decade after his 1991 essay, Gioia saw signs of a poetry revival. But I suspect it only felt that way to poets. He wrote that he was hearing more poetry on the radio and seeing more of it online. Apparently, there were more poetry festivals than before. But as a literate person who had always wished poetry might grab him somehow, someday, I felt no new incursion, no sense that to skip it would be like missing the films “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” this summer. I submit that in 2002, poetry was still literary marjoram for most people.

But that depended on what you called poetry.

Gioia’s essay was justly a classic of its era. But it was also based on a white perspective that would be less likely to pass muster now. Today, while vanishingly few people are up for reciting poems such as Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” or Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” vast numbers can eagerly and effortlessly recite hip-hop lyrics. They stock their brains with reams of language set carefully to rhyme and rhythm with an aim to summon essence, limn themes and delve into the real.

Of course, all songs’ lyrics are a form of poetry, and at no point did Americans lack affection for them. But true verse of the kind featured in hip-hop — poetry that does not rely on melody or harmony — centers the word alone. Melody tends to go by more slowly than speech, and thus verse tends to pack in more words. It can be difficult to process a line of pitches mated to a long, dense sequence of words; the words alone, however, present no problem. In contrast to the synergy of song and word, verse is an especially heightened form of language alone. Rap is verse poetry, in all of its verbal richness and rhythmic variety, a deft stylization of speech into art. (I am referring to rap — i.e., rapping — as a subset of the broader cultural phenomenon of hip-hop, encompassing M.C.ing style, graffiti and dance, as well as the rapping itself.)

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, this new verse poetry was widely perceived as a niche interest: Black music that white kids (mostly boys) might choose to enjoy as game outsiders. But by the mid-1990s rap went mainstream, most of its listeners were white, and it had become for many younger Americans what poetry had been in the old days.

Today, not only can legions of people recite rap lyrics more prolifically than most could recite poetry back then, but it also decorates conversation and public statements. An audience member at a forum on race issues might, as I once heard, insert into her comments Grandmaster Flash’s “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the men responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, tweeted out, while he was still on the loose, “Ain’t no love in the heart of the city,” knowing that his audience would immediately recognize it as a Jay-Z lyric. And Tsarnaev is not Black.

Rap is America’s music in many ways, now prominent at even very white weddings. A Martian observer charting how our society savors artful language might make no differentiation between the work of Robert Frost or Elizabeth Bishop in the past and Nas or Drake now, in terms of their penetration of society. If anything, Nas and Drake would seem more important, because of the way modern technology can pump today’s poetry into the ear in a fashion impossible when prose poetry reigned solely on the page. The book collecting Jay-Z’s lyrics is a volume of serious artistic weight, and I’d be on unsure footing to propose that the work of Langston Hughes outweighs Jay-Z’s in terms of craft or breadth of subject matter.

There are those who might argue that rap is too specific, too rooted in a particular cultural idiom to qualify as America’s current version of poetry in the general sense. This, however, misses that modern America has become , in essence, much of what rap is.

Rap, for example, has never had much time for the King’s English. But then, especially since the 1960s, neither has most of America, as casual speech has taken over ever more of the space once maintained for old-fashioned, antimacassar -style expression. We no longer much enjoy lengthy orations in which speakers relish words like “shall” and “henceforth.” When is the last time you heard someone “make a speech” as opposed to “give a talk”? In both 2000 and 2016, America elected as president men whose interest in elegance of speech was approximate at best, in a way that would have all but barred them from high public office before the 1980s.

Of course, rap language is not Trump-speak. But just as in formal language one can be articulate (Robert Frost) and inarticulate (George W. Bush), in informal language one can be inarticulate (we all likely know someone; I need not tar anyone here) or articulate — a category that includes almost any prominent rapper. A true American poetry today must be articulate and vernacular.

Moreover, it is very likely to be Black. Poetry in the old days, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks notwithstanding, was considered a white thing. Rap, by contrast — and despite some excellent white practitioners — is a Black thing in origin and flavor. While racism obviously persists across America, in the cultural sense, Blackness is hot and pervasive.

The enlightened white person viscerally dismisses certain things as “so white,” the idea being that Blackness is more authentic, less uptight. In “Barbie,” the president is a Black woman. America’s most famous birder — a stereotypically white avocation — is Christian Cooper, a Black man. The two highest-profile versions of the musical “Annie” in recent years have featured Black actresses in the title role, as did Disney’s recent live-action version of “The Little Mermaid.” In this context, the last thing we would expect is that poetry of national significance would stem from the world — with apologies to Wallace Stevens — of white people sitting on porches in Connecticut.

But rap takes Blackness further than just the skin color of its pre-eminent practitioners. It is defined in part by a confrontational cadence. It isn’t an accident that rapping is referred to as “spitting.” We think of poetry as a form of reflection, but rapping is so often more specific: aggressive testimonies from down below, self-exoneration on the basis of prior circumstances, preaching about the best way to go, pushing against boundaries, all couched in a tone that grabs you by the lapels and discourages disagreement. Is this what Emily Dickinson and Paul Laurence Dunbar were doing?

Those two, not usually. But the oppositional fundament in rap is all about America today. Rap’s casting of disadvantage as heroism is simply one brand of a larger culture of therapy. What Philip Rieff described as our therapeutic culture as far back as 1966 and Christopher Lasch limned as our culture of narcissism in 1979 is now an American ideal: no longer to knuckle under and get past trauma, but to define ourselves as having undergone it and never entirely past it. Tupac Shakur laid it out as a spoken statement, on the track “Pac’s Theme (Interlude)” from his signature 1993 album: “I was raised in this society so there’s no way you can expect me to be a perfect person ’cause I’ma do what I’ma do. That’s how I feel. I’ma do whatever I like. I’m not a role model.” This is less hip-hop culture than American modernity.

When the choice of first-time book authors is more often than ever before the memoir, when one can curate and chart one’s life so vividly on social media, when we expect aspiring politicians to tell us about themselves as well as their policy positions, it is wholly predictable that our music will embrace the celebration and interrogation of self.

So when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, we don’t merely celebrate the invention of a new musical form. We celebrate the one that made America — regardless of whether we recognize it — mad for poetry all over again.

John McWhorter ( @JohnHMcWhorter ) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “ Nine Nasty Words : English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “ Woke Racism : How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

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'the anthology of rap': lyrics as poetry.

Hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash Scott Gries/Getty Images hide caption

Hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash

Now almost 40 years old, rap burst out of the Bronx to become one of the dominant musical and cultural forces in this country.  A new book, The Anthology of Rap , tracks the development of the genre -- from New York house parties to Eminem and Jay-Z -- by presenting lyrics from some of America’s greatest rappers as poetry. Adam Bradley, co-editor of the book, tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz that rap's origins had no words at all.

Read An Excerpt

"Before there was rapping, there was DJing," Bradley says. "A DJ would be at a party playing songs and focusing on the breaks, those most exciting, energizing drum sequences, and running those back and forth to get the dancers excited. Then they had to do something on the microphone to keep people's attention ... so what developed out of DJing was the very concept of MCing: putting words in rhyme to the music."

Some of the earliest rappers began as DJs, Bradley says.

"Eddie Cheeba, DJ Hollywood, even Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers ... these are people who started often as DJs and then made the transition into the lyrical art."

Listening To Rap For The First Time, With A Book Critic

In the book, Bradley traces many of the classic rhymes to DJ Eddie Cheeba.

"The great Chuck D of Public Enemy once said about Eddie Cheeba that he was as important to hip-hop as Ike Turner was to rock 'n' roll. You go into the lyrics and you can see just that," Bradley says. "Think about a phrase that's become really a part of the popular idiom, something like, 'Wave your hands in the air.' This is Eddie Cheeba in 1979. This is part of an oral tradition that stretches much further back than the actual history of recorded hip-hop."

The first mainstream hip-hop hit was "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang. The lyrics to that song, Bradley says, are about the art form itself.

"When he gets to the verse, he says, 'Now what you hear is not a test, I'm rapping to the beat' ... it's written about its stanza!"

A little while later, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released a song that would change the direction of hip-hop forever.

"'The Message' really was a kind of turn in hip-hop -- it was a turn towards social consciousness," Bradley says. "It looked at the world around these folks and talked about their realities. ...

"Rap has always been about these tensions, the tension between the party and the profit, between the sense of social responsibility, but also the need to rock the crowd ... to make people think and move their feet. Rap is all of these things at once, and it's still that way today."

Excerpt: The Anthology Of Rap

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Rap Poetry 101

• Published: December 2011
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In his Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop , Adam Bradley states that “rap is poetry, but its popularity relies in part on people not recognizing it as such.” In the book’s introduction, Bradley focuses on line, rhythm, and transcription within rap, providing readers and listeners with the skills needed to appreciate the genre, while also highlighting the connection between rap and poetry. He furthermore discusses rap lyrics, which he says are divorced from most considerations of melody and harmony, as pure expressions of poetic and musical rhythm.

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