Rhyme Time

First of all, my apologies for posting a little after 9 – I just got home from a weekend trip to Kansas City.

That being said, it should come as no surprise that I want to address the reading from Book of Rhymes; as far as hip-hop goes, it is an English major’s paradise. Adam Bradley’s name-dropping reads like a Who’s Who of British/American poetry and reminds me of studying flash cards for my G.R.E. lit test. The fact that he linked rap lyrics all the way from Grandmaster Flash to Lil Wayne with the great works of Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Keats, Donne, and others shows that he is a scholar not only of hip-hop but of the entire English language. He picks apart rap lyrics with the eye of a poetry critic, using a poetry critic’s toolbox of terminology and strategy to understand what makes these rhymes work.

Bradley opens the reading by making the argument (badly paraphrased here) that rap is the greatest, richest embodiment and defender of rhyme. He points out that in many linguistic and literary art forms, rhyme has fallen out of fashion, so he makes a case for hip-hop as the last great rhyme frontier. I think he is exactly right, and I love how he describes rhyme as a kind of “coercion and reconciliation.” It’s all about manipulating the audience’s auditory expectations; as he explains, we would not want to listen to random words being read over a beat. But we love listening to rap, because it engages us both mentally and through our senses.

I have made the point several times in this blog that I think rap deserves to be treated more seriously and accorded the respect given to other art forms, and Bradley has certainly done this. He dissects rap with extensive, technical explanations, proving that these MCs are actually skilled lyricists who utilize poetic strategies that have been around since the ancient Greeks. Some might argue that certain rappers might not know what “anaphora” or “epistrophe” means; but the original poets who perfected these forms didn’t know that, either. They were subconsciously working with words in a way that pleased both the ear in the mind, the same way that rappers do today.

I absolutely loved the reading from the Book of Rhymes. My only question would be, what do we make of rappers who don’t write their own lyrics? Certainly they are just performers, and don’t deserve the same amount of respect as MCs who slave over their own verses, right? I’m sure Bradley took care to analyze only those artists whose originality has been verified. But I do wonder, when I hear clever rap lyrics on the radio, whether they were actually written by the people speaking them.

Great reading. One last thing… we really DO need to get this snack situation figured out!