Rappers and MC's

[jdeirmend]

Would you consider a rap artist like Nas to be a poet?

Certainly. Rap is a mass-culture phenomenon that draws heavily from the prior tradition of spoken word poetry. However, some rappers are better poets than others.

The most poetically gifted rapper at large today, as far as I know, is Aesop Rock. Lots of other underground guys are intellectually formidable, and even some mainstream rappers can be pretty clever with their images. But as far as I'm concerned, no one comes close to Ian Michael Bavitz. His style could be accurately called surrealist poetry, and deals with deep themes and ideas, which are generally portrayed in magnificent wordplay. Check out the music video for "None Shall Pass" and you will get a taste:



This rap, to my mind, addresses better than anyone on the scene has yet the alienation of the modern laborer. The solution the song offers is admirably devoid of ideology. A couple of the more impressive lines:

"Okay woke to a grocery list: two things on it, duty and death."
"But it's a beautiful thing, to all my people who keep an impressive wingspan, even when the cubicle shrinks."

Thematically, everyone else is rapping about how hard they party, how much they drink, how much money they have. Ace Rock shits on all of them, if for no other reason than that he addresses something "real," to put in hip-hop parlance, as in something that 90% of his audience can relate to on a heartfelt, human level. But technically, he is dazzling, too.