A Blog Post By Larayb Abrar
Editor’s Note: Starting today, we’ll feature a weekly blog post by one of our college interns on their experiences with poetry. Enjoy! — Reuben Gelley Newman, Intern and Blog Editor
When mining for poetic inspiration, I often turn to rap artists like Cardi B, Jay-Z or Kendrick Lamar. On the surface, their music might seem just like something to fuel a night of partying or to blast out your car on a midnight drive. We don’t think of Cardi B, with her flamboyant bright yellow fur coat and flaunting of her “red bottom” shoes, as belonging on the pedestal of “Great Literature.”
And maybe she shouldn’t be on said pedestal. Often, the best art comes from breaking the rules of tradition. If Cardi B were to publish her lyrics in a small chapbook, I can guarantee that she wouldn’t fully realize her persona of a woman who doesn’t take shit from anyone and isn’t afraid to push aside those who get in her way. Being a rap artist, like being a spoken word poet, allows the artist to create a persona and find new and unconventional methods of performance while busting some amazing rhymes. How often do we witness performances of strong no-nonsense women on TV, media, or even in real life? While Jessica Jones is a strong contender, characters like her are few. What about strong, no-nonsense women of color? Hardly ever. Similarly, Jay-Z and Kendrick take on the personas of hustlers who came from modest beginnings. Performances like theirs, which challenge the ways we understand femininity, poverty and power, are essential to creating new “normals” and thereby making great art.
This isn’t to suggest that rap music is all about the performance. While performance is a big chunk of it, the elements that give me poetic inspiration also include the musicality, the flow, and the aggressive, active subversion woven into rap music. To take two lines from the chorus of Cardi B’s 2017 single, “Bodak Yellow”: “I don’t dance now/I make money moves/Say I don’t gotta dance/I make money move.”These lines allude to her past as an exotic dancer at a strip club in order to make ends meet while she got a college education and paid the bills at home. In just these two lines she critiques the prevalence of sexual commodification in society, subverting the idea of a strip club as a place of male prowess and re-appropriating it as a place where she, the active agent, made “money move.” She cleverly structures the song to fold over itself with the repeating words, and these lines’ succinctness rival the lines of any traditional poet.
Kendrick Lamar accomplishes a similar feat in many of his songs, such as “How Much a Dollar Cost?” from his 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly.” In this song, he tells the story of his run-in with a homeless man at a gas station in South Africa who asks him for a dollar. The speaker refuses to give it to him because he thinks this man is a crack addict. After establishing the context of this narrative, Kendrick continues his monologue, in perfect rhythm and slant rhyme: “If I could throw a bat at him, it’d be aimin’ at his neck/I never understood someone beggin’ for goods/Askin’ for handouts, takin’ it if they could/And this particular person just had it down pat/Starin’ at me for the longest until he finally asked/”Have you ever opened up Exodus 14?/A humble man is all that we ever need/Tell me how much a dollar cost.” Tell me all this—including the biblical allusion at the end—isn’t enough to challenge the place of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues on most high school English syllabi.
Rap music and its musicians have created a subversive and creative culture of their own by penetrating the mainstream without becoming part of the “establishment.” Of course, Kendrick’s recent Pulitzer Prize win in April could change the way rap is currently perceived. While it is too soon to say, I can imagine rap music becoming a literary tradition similar to that of the sonnet.
Prior to informal poems becoming a serious subject of study, epics by the likes of Dante and Virgil dominated much of academic discourse. One of the first departures from this long-form style was by Francis Petrarch in the Middle Ages. Petrarch was a contemporary of Dante and Boccaccio. He was also heavily influenced by Virgil. Much of Petrarch’s work was based on that of ancient scholars and their poetry. However, Petrarch’s most famous work, the Rime Sparse, is a collection of 366 songs and sonnets, written in the vernacular. Through this fragmented piece, Petrarch attempted to tackle deep, introspective questions of identity, spirituality, and worldliness. This shift in form, in turn, allowed for poets all across Europe to explore humanist and confessional narratives previously untapped in the traditional epics.
Today, the sonnet is considered foundational to our understanding of modern poetry. But poetic traditions evolve, and the next step in the evolution may very well be rap or hip-hop. Both those genres retain the importance of rhyme and rhythm seen in the sonnet and many rap artists use the platform not only for textual expression of the personal or confessional but also for the physical performance of these narratives. Rap music could very well be considered new-age lyric poetry.
Larayb Abrar is a junior at NYU Abu Dhabi majoring in literature and creative writing. She contributes often to her independent college newspaper, The Gazelle. Her academic interests lie in post-colonial and gender studies. She has performed spoken word poetry at several venues in Abu Dhabi and occasionally dabbles in stand-up comedy.