Rappers and MC's

[Truerenigma]

I have poems posted here that on stage, I perform as raps. Are they no longer poems then? Or were they never poems, just raps in disguise?

That's easy. They are both. You can be a rapper and a poet. Being a rapper doesn't mean you're poet though, nor vice versa. a rap's not a poem. the success depends more on the performance than what is written. it doesn't even matter how the words are supposed to be pronounced, but how the rapper pronounces them. a good performer will always be more successful as a rapper than a good writer, and DOESN'T EVEN NEED TO WRITE HIS RAPS> SHIT> HE COULD HIRE A POET, and often does.

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I suppose that my point would be that while poetry does aspire towards the musical, music doesn't necessarily need to aspire to poetry. Music came before literature. A song doesn't need to stand as literature, it reaches for something more primal, less cognisant, more profound, which is why poetry reaches for music in the same way that music reaches for dance.

Let's not judge value.
The written words, the lyrics of anything, can be regarded as literature.

Poetry, if we ignore those using the synonymous that means nothing (as poems), is the use of language, born before the written text. You do not need to write anything down to use poetry - so the lyrics use poetic devices. They are not poems because poems is a written form of text, without doubt derivative of oral form, but once put in a paper they are a written work.
You can even call the lyrics alone a poem, but that is misleading. First, one musician works his words to be sung, they are mixed with the tunes, etc. They are complete as a song, just like the pictures of a movie, despite a movie being pictures in sequence, are not a movie. Another thing, music happened before the literature, if you take an art with her own power (Music) and call the work of this art (the song, which lyrics is a part) and his artist (the musician) as another literature, you are causing an inversion of value - A performer must be regarded with all his power as performer. It is status enough. Raps rely mostly on the performer's charisma, and what is called creating "hype" (basically self-promotion, and and following/creating popular trends) for their success, and are far more popular than poets.

They could be called poetry, since poetry is a form of language.
They are not poems, which is a form of text. If you try to transform every other art (in this kind music) to literature, you will just downgrade the value of those arts.

And rap is music. Some may say that a rapper "speaks" his lines, but I disagree. It is fit to a musical measure, and relies on things like vocal tones that cannot be conveyed without performance. If a rapper's tone is off, and he/she is offbeat, it will kill the rap.

I do not disagree that a good lyric, some of them, are exceptional and have strong literary values - I am saying they have also musical values because they are complete as songs.

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A rap could be a poem.
What that is supposed to mean, that a form of expression can be transformed to another form of expression? What is new about that?

Also the reader/writer relationship is far different from the performer/listener relationship. Writing a poem is a little more like leaving some strange object on a trail that you're not sure if anyone will go down.

[Leanne]

The Iliad and The Odyssey were passed down orally before Homer (or whoever, depending on the rumours you listen to) set them onto a page. Were they poems before, or were they only transformed into poems by the act of converting them into codified squiggles? What about the bards? Not poets if they didn't write it down? "Sonnet" means little song -- what were those sonnet writers thinking? And all those silly people at Eisteddfods, reciting things they call poems... but they're not, they're performance pieces, can't those bloody Welsh get their definitions right?

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And here I must clarify something very important: "text" does not mean that it must be something written, or at least it hasn't had this narrow definition for a good hundred years or so. A film is a text. A painting is a text. A speech is a text. The ridiculous pants of MC Hammer are a text. A face is a text. A text is anything that can be read, and reading does not just mean words on a page. Literacy means fluency with a text -- any kind of text.

[Truerenigma]

In that case anything that has words could be considered a poem. So why even bother with the discussion? Many poems are written for performance, some aren't. Who cares? I don't think a rapper is a poet, unless he's both. I consider eminem to be one of the most poetic rappers of the day, because of his use of puns, metaphors, and language and wordplay that do not rely on vernacular, but I happen to know that he has no interest in poetry, or being "called" a poet. So we have oral poems, music poems, written poems, whatever. We can regard whatever we want to as poetry, but a rapper is a rapper. He may or may not be the writer. He is more comparable to those you speak of who are doing the reciting, he is a character, a public persona, an orator, and actor, a performer, and he gets paid quite well for it.

Obama's high flying rhetoric has often been regarded as poetic, who's the poet? Him or his writers and editors?

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Post: #6RE: Twerk

No, Hip hop was founded on creating and preserving a language/vernacular for a people who felt they didn't have a voice. It short, it started as poetry.

I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out. — Oscar Wilde

[newsclippings]

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.

I'm just here because someone posted Aesop Rock.
There's also Eyedea, Felt, Cunninlynguists...

[jdeirmend]

Bah newsclippings! You tease us with the bait of underground hip-hop artists, and then refuse to post your favorite songs/videos?

I'm terribly disappointed. And half-kidding. But seriously. Show us some good stuff.

[newsclippings]

Bah newsclippings! You tease us with the bait of underground hip-hop artists, and then refuse to post your favorite songs/videos?

I'm terribly disappointed. And half-kidding. But seriously. Show us some good stuff.

Heh. I think I've posted it elsewhere, but this is my fav.

[jdeirmend]

Bah newsclippings! You tease us with the bait of underground hip-hop artists, and then refuse to post your favorite songs/videos?

I'm terribly disappointed. And half-kidding. But seriously. Show us some good stuff.

Heh. I think I've posted it elsewhere, but this is my fav.

That's whatsup.

[SirBrendan]

Of course rap is poetry; the real question is why do you think Nas is?

The saga continues, Wu Tang, Wu Tang!

[Viktor Vaughn]

Everyone needs to listen to this one, and the rest of his stuff.



here's the lyrics: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Shad:A_Story_No_One_Told

[Todd]

Everyone needs to listen to this one, and the rest of his stuff.


here's the lyrics: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Shad:A_Story_No_One_Told

Since I follow the view that if the rap is poetry it can be read without the charisma of the rapper's delivery, I read the lyrics first. I'll watch the video later.

The lyrics are very good. I would consider them poetic. Much better than some of those that get classed as poet-rappers. The guy seems to be a good writer. A couple minor bumps (but that's everyone rapper or non-rapper).

Now, I'll listen to his delivery.