Dreams for Hip-Hop
A Posts entry from Tuesday, July 3, 2007Hip-hop, one of the greatest 20th century innovations in music (and probably the century’s greatest innovation in poetry), is destined to some day expand out of the American ghettos where it started. It’s simply too fresh and too big not to, and it would certainly not be the first genre to start out as an African-American innovation and end as a worldwide phenomenon. Something about this process is definitely nefarious (stealing a form of music that started as a very specific protest and turning it into something completely different), but at the same time, it’ll be nice to hear a more diverse set of ideas put forth by hip-hop. I’m interested in what Russians might want to rap about.
Dizzee Rascal might represent the internationalization of hip-hop. He may just represent a wicked rapper who pronounces everything with a delightful British-via-Ghana accent. Most things about him should be pretty familiar by now. His upbringing, in East London council housing and with a single mother, is not very different from most American rappers, and he does rap in English. Still, he is one of the first foreign rappers to make it big, and that’s gotta mean something. Dizzee, born Dylan Mills, has not yet made it into the hall of fame, and it remains to be seen whether or not he is the start of something. Will his dream come troo?
Of course, Dizzee is on his third album, and his first was the most popular (you have not seen this video on MTV). This isn’t exactly a new trend, and he doesn’t represent the epitome of it anyway. Most international hip-hop that has made it to America so far has been of the one-hit wonder variety (Lady Sovereign, Punjabi MC). Still, there has been an undeniable growth in attention paid to international hip-hop; you know that a phenomenon has made it into the collective unconscious when National Geographic is writing about it. It’s a slow and steady build-up.
Mainly I’m just writing this to post up this video, which is ill.
Mark Cullen
“probably the century’s greatest innovation in poetry”
I hope you’re talking about spoken word, and not hip-hop.
Alex Taylor
No, I’m not, although the one comes from the other. Spoken word has an implicit beat, hip-hop an explicit one.
Poetry, in the old sense, has an audience of maybe three(talking about modern poetry, not the classics that many people read). Hip-hop is world-wide. It has made poetry relevant again and saved it from total obscurity. Freestyling has resurrected methods that haven’t been used in the West since troubadours. Many rappers, such as Nas, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Pharoahe Monch have created some of the most poetic verses in history, using complicated internal rhyming, meaningful lyrics, puns, souble entendres and impressive wordplay, all the while keeping their cadence down to the syllable.
Rap has made poetry into music in a way it hasn’t been for many centuries. Whether you have a bad taste in your mouth or not, it’s only reasonable to give it up and admit that a lot of rap is highly advanced, technical and soulful poetry. And you can dance to it.
What other poetical innovations would rival the throne? Beat poetry? Free-form poetry? These are all cool, and you may like them more than rap, but it would be hard to argue that they constitute a bigger shift than the innovations of hip-hop.
Alex Taylor
Oh man, I just read your info, and it seems like you know more about poetry than I do. And you may not like it when I say that poetry has an audience of three. Nonetheless, I hold onto most of what I said in my response (although “most poetic verses in history” may be a hyperbole).
What I was trying to be coy about in the last post was that I suspect you of an anti-hip-hop bias. I suspect this because you would think it was ok if i said that spoken word was the greatest innovation, but not hip-hop, which is very similar and pretty incontestably a bigger innovation (we could argue about this, but which one is farther from TS Eliot?).A lot of people have an anti-hip-hop bias, and it can reduce arguments of where rap is going into drivel in three or four seconds. I understand where it comes from (usually a cultural disgust but it can be other things), but this kind of vitriol can only be the result of not having listened to enough different kinds of hip-hop. If this is the case, I entreat you to open your mind about it. There is something to it, and that’s why millions of people love it. It is a big change in poetry, and anyone can see in a second that rappers are farther away from traditional poetry than any other group of poets today.
Mark Cullen
I actually agree with you about poetry’s audience and impact, but strictly speaking I think hip-hop and spoken word move out of the realm of poetry since they’re not actually written down. From my super advanced studies on the subject I think the most essential element of poetry is that it’s a visual medium… then again, poetry in the colloquial sense of any clever wordplay probably has gained a large audience thanks to hip-hop, etc.
Alex Taylor
agreed.
Bryan Klausmeyer
I think the problem with “hip-hop” (aside from being a really stupid neologism) is that you have people talking about a lot of nonsense about life on the streets, etc. Now, I don’t care if it’s “authentic” (what’s the difference either way?), but that the music industry is basically exploiting the image of terrible urban life.
(Of course, it wasn’t always like this. It used to be that only independent labels would publish rap, but now that’s hardly the case.)
This is also why “folk”/”protest” music is mostly idiotic. Bob Dylan was right when he said, in response to criticism of his post-‘65 stuff (and I’m paraphrasing), “all of my songs are protest songs.”
I’d prefer the rap without the “rap.”
Mark Cullen
There are some good songs that are protest songs, like Vietnam by Jimmy Cliff, that Fugees cowboy song or Here’s To You by Joan Baez with those weird synths. I read a good quote about subversive songs by Bob Dylan recently: “I’ve always felt the first rule of writing a subversive song is not to tell anybody that it’s subversive.” http://rightwingbob.com/weblog/archives/926
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