THE ANTHOLOGY OF
RAP
Edited by
ADAM BRADLEY
ANDREW DUBOIS
Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Afterwords by Chuck D and Common
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Haven and London
Copyright © 2010 by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The anthology of rap / edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois; foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; afterwords by Chuck
D and Common.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
978-0-300-14190-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
2. Rap (Music)—Texts.
ML3531.A57
2010
I. Bradley, Adam.
1. Rap (Music)—History and criticism.
II. DuBois, Andrew (Andrew Lee)
782.42164909—dc22
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2010023316
CONTENTS
Advisory Board
Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Introduction
PART I: 1978-1984–THE OLD SCHOOL
Afrika Bambaataa
Zulu Nation Throwdown
Planet Rock
Kurtis Blow
Rappin Blow (Part 2)
The Breaks
If I Ruled the World
Brother D with Collective Effort
How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?
Eddie Cheba
Live at the Armory 1979 (1)
Cold Crush Brothers
Live at Harlem World 1981
Live at the Dixie 1982
Weekend
Fresh Wild Fly and Bold
DJ Hollywood
Live at the Armory 1979 (2)
Funky Four + 1
from Rappin and Rockin the House
from That’s the Joint
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
from Live at the Audubon Ballroom (12/23/78)
from Superrappin
The Message
White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)
Lady B
To the Beat, Y’all
Sequence
from Funk You Up
from And You Know That
from Simon Says
Spoonie Gee
from Spoonin Rap
Love Rap
(See also “The New Rap Language” [Treacherous Three])
Sugarhill Gang
from Rapper’s Delight
Treacherous Three
The New Rap Language
from Kool Moe Dee’s Battle with Busy Bee (1981)
Tanya (“Sweet Tee”) Winley
Rhymin and Rappin
Vicious Rap
PART II: 1985-1992–THE GOLDEN AGE
Beastie Boys
Paul Revere
Sure Shot
Shadrach
Big Daddy Kane
Raw
Wrath of Kane
Ain’t No Half Steppin’
(See also “ ’95 Freestyle” [The Notorious B.I.G.])
Boogie Down Productions
Poetry
Criminal Minded
My Philosophy
South Bronx
Blackman in Effect
De La Soul
My Brother’s a Basehead
Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa
Stakes Is High
Eric B. & Rakim
Eric B. Is President
Paid in Full
My Melody
I Ain’t No Joke
Microphone Fiend
Lyrics of Fury
Gang Starr
Step in the Arena
Just to Get a Rep
Words I Manifest (Remix)
Ice-T
6 ’N the Mornin’
Colors
Kool G Rap
Road to the Riches
Streets of New York
Rikers Island
Kool Moe Dee
Go See the Doctor
How Ya Like Me Now
I Go to Work
(See also Treacherous Three)
LL Cool J
Rock the Bells
I Can’t Live Without My Radio
I’m Bad
I Need Love
I’m That Type of Guy
Mama Said Knock You Out
MC Lyte
NWA
10% Dis
I Cram to Understand U
Cappuccino
Dopeman (Remix)
Fuck tha Police
Gangsta Gangsta
Straight Outta Compton
Public Enemy
Miuzi Weighs a Ton
Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos
Rebel Without a Pause
Fight the Power
Welcome to the Terrordome
Queen Latifah
Evil That Men Do
Elements I’m Among
Run-DMC
Sucker MC’s
It’s Like That
Peter Piper
Proud to Be Black
Salt-N-Pepa
Tramp
Let’s Talk About Sex
Schoolly D
P.S.K. What Does It Mean
Saturday Night
Roxanne Shanté
Roxanne’s Revenge
Independent Woman
Slick Rick
La Di Da Di
Children’s Story
I Shouldn’t Have Done It
(See also “Auditorium” [Mos Def])
Too $hort
Cusswords
The Ghetto
A Tribe Called Quest
I Left My Wallet in El Segundo
Check the Rhime
Award Tour
Ultramagnetic MCs
Ego Trippin
Critical Beatdown
X-Clan
Grand Verbalizer
A.D.A.M.
PART III: 1993-1999—RAP GOES MAINSTREAM
Arrested Development
Tennessee
Bahamadia
Spontaneity
Big L
Ebonics (Criminal Slang)
Big Punisher
from Capital Punishment
’95 Freestyle (feat. Fat Joe)
Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
Tha Crossroads
Busta Rhymes
from Scenario (A Tribe Called Quest)
Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See
Canibus
Poet Laureate Infinity 3
Chino XL
What Am I?
Wordsmith
Common
I Used to Love H.E.R.
The 6th Sense
The Light
A Song for Assata (feat. Cee-Lo)
(See also “Act Too … The Love of My Life” [The Roots])
Digable Planets
Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)
DMX
E-40
Damien
Who We Be
Sprinkle Me (feat. Suga T)
Foxy Brown
My Life
BK Anthem
Freestyle Fellowship
Can You Find the Level of Difficulty in This?
The Guidelines (Aceyalone)
The Fugees
Vocab
Fu-Gee-La
Ready or Not
Goodie Mob
Cell Therapy
Hieroglyphics
Cab Fare
Classic
Virus (Del)
Lauryn Hill
Doo Wop (That Thing)
Lost Ones
Final Hour
(See also The Fugees)
Ice Cube
The Nigga Ya Love to Hate
Jay-Z
It’s a Man’s World (feat. Yo-Yo)
A Bird in the Hand
It Was a Good Day
(See also NWA)
Dead Presidents II
Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)
Renegade (feat. Eminem)
December 4th
99 Problems
My President Is Black (D.C. Mix)
KRS-One
Sound of Da Police
MCs Act Like They Don’t Know
(See also Boogie Down Productions)
The Lady of Rage
Afro Puffs
Unfucwitable
Lil’ Kim
Queen Bitch (feat. The Notorious B.I.G.)
(See also “Quiet Storm” [Remix] [Mobb Deep])
Mia X
Hoodlum Poetry
Mobb Deep
Shook Ones, Pt. II
Quiet Storm (Remix) (feat. Lil’ Kim)
Nas
from Live at the BBQ (Main Source)
N.Y. State of Mind
Life’s a Bitch (feat. AZ)
from The World Is Yours
Ether
Black President
(See also “My President” [Young Jeezy])
The Notorious B.I.G.
’95 Freestyle (feat. Scoob, 2Pac, Shyheim, and Big Daddy Kane)
One More Chance (Remix)
Ten Crack Commandments
I Got a Story to Tell
Outkast
Ras Kass
Ordo Ab Chao (Order Out of Chaos)
Interview with a Vampire
The Roots
The Next Movement
from Act Too … The Love of My Life (feat. Common)
You Got Me (feat. Eve and Erykah Badu)
Web
Scarface
Mind Playing Tricks on Me (Geto Boys)
I Seen a Man Die
Snoop Dogg
Nuthin but a G Thang (feat. Dr. Dre)
Gin and Juice
from Freestyle Conversation
2Pac
Brenda’s Got a Baby
Dear Mama
So Many Tears
from All Eyez on Me
Changes
How Long Will They Mourn Me (feat. Nate Dogg, Big Syke, Rated R, and Macadoshis)
(See also “’95 Freestyle” [The Notorious B.I.G.])
Twista
Emotions
UGK
Murder
Dirty Money
The Wu-Tang Clan
Protect Ya Neck
C.R.E.A.M.
from Bring the Pain (Method Man)
Duel of the Iron Mic (GZA)
Incarcerated Scarfaces (Raekwon)
Brooklyn Zoo (Ol’ Dirty Bastard)
Daytona 500 (Ghostface Killah)
The M.G.M. (Ghostface Killah and Raekwon)
Triumph
Shakey Dog (Ghostface Killah)
PART IV: 2000-2010-NEW MILLENNIUM RAP
Aesop Rock
9–5ers Anthem
No Regrets
Atmosphere
Fuck You Lucy
Sunshine
Beanie Sigel
The Truth
Blackalicious
Alphabet Aerobics
My Pen & Pad
Brother Ali
Room with a View
Picket Fence
Cam’ron
Get It in Ohio
Cee-Lo
Childz Play (feat. Ludacris)
(See also “Cell Therapy” [Goodie Mob])
(See also “Benzi Box” [DOOM])
The Clipse
Grindin
Zen (feat. Roscoe P. Coldchain and Ab Liva)
dead prez
Police State
Hip-Hop
Devin the Dude
Briarpatch
DOOM
Benzi Box (feat. Cee-Lo)
Saliva (as Viktor Vaughn)
Figaro
Eminem
Eve
Just Don’t Give a Fuck
The Way I Am
Stan
Lose Yourself
Mockingbird
When I’m Gone
(See also “Renegade” [Jay-Z])
Love Is Blind
(See also “You Got Me” [The Roots])
Eyedea & Abilities
Bottle Dreams (as Oliver Hart)
Now
Lupe Fiasco
Dumb It Down
Hip-Hop Saved My Life
50 Cent
50 Shot Ya
Ghetto Qua’ran
(See also “Hate It or Love It” [The Game])
Jean Grae
Lovesong
Hater’s Anthem
Don’t Rush Me
Immortal Technique
Dance with the Devil
Industrial Revolution
K’Naan
What’s Hardcore?
My Old Home
Talib Kweli
RE:DEFinition (Black Star w/Mos Def)
For Women
Give ’Em Hell
Lil Wayne
from Tha Block Is Hot
I Feel Like Dying
Live from the 504
Dr. Carter
Little Brother
All for You
Ludacris
Southern Hospitality
Hip Hop Quotables
(See also “Childz Play” [Cee-Lo])
M.I.A.
Sunshowers
Paper Planes
Pharoahe Monch
Releasing Hypnotical Gases (Organized Konfusion w/Prince Poetry)
Simon Says
Desire
Mos Def
Hip Hop
Mathematics
Dollar Day for New Orleans (Katrina Klap)
Auditorium (feat. Slick Rick)
(See also “RE:DEFinition” [Black Star w/Talib Kweli])
T.I.
T.I. vs. T.I.P.
U Don’t Know Me
Kanye West
All Falls Down
Jesus Walks
Homecoming
Can’t Tell Me Nothing
Young Jeezy
from Put On
My President (feat. Nas)
LYRICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
David Banner/Cadillac on 22’s [2003]
Binary Star/Reality Check [2000]
Biz Markie/Vapors [1988]
Black Sheep/The Choice Is Yours (Revisited) [1991]
Camp Lo/Luchini [1997]
Crooked I/Grindin (Freestyle) [2003]
Das EFX/They Want EFX [1992]
Deep Dickollective/For Colored Boys [2007]
DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince/Summertime [1991]
Drake/Say What’s Real [2009]
Edan/Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme [2005]
Missy Elliott/The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) [1997]
EPMD/Strictly Business [1988]
The Fatback Band (feat. King Tim III)/King Tim III (Personality Jock) [1979]
The Game (feat. 50 Cent)/Hate It or Love It [2005]
Jadakiss/Why [2004]
Jay Electronica/Exhibit C [2009]
Jedi Mind Tricks (feat. R.A. the Rugged Man)/Uncommon Valor: A Vietnam Story [2006]
Jeru the Damaja/Come Clean [1993]
Joell Ortiz/Letter to Obama [2008]
Juvenile/Ha [1998]
Kardinal Offishall/BaKardi Slang [2000]
Medusa/from This Pussy’s a Gangsta [2007]
Naughty By Nature/Everything’s Gonna Be Alright (Ghetto Bastard) [1991]
Nelly/Country Grammar (Hot Shit) [2000]
Nice & Smooth/Sometimes I Rhyme Slow [1991]
O.C./Time’s Up [1994]
Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth/They Reminisce over You (T.R.O.Y.) [1992]
The Pharcyde/Passin Me By [1993]
Poor Righteous Teachers/Rock Dis Funky Joint [1990]
Sage Francis/Makeshift Patriot [2003]
Smoothe da Hustler & Trigga da Gambler/Broken Language [1995]
Special Ed/I Got It Made [1989]
Stetsasonic/Talkin All That Jazz [1998]
Afterword by Chuck D
Afterword by Common
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index of Songs, Albums, Movies, and Books
Index of Artists, Authors, and Labels
Credits
ADVISORY BOARD
Jeff Chang
Brian Coleman
David “Davey D” Cook
Kevin Coval
Kyle Dargan
Annette Debo
Dawn-Elissa Fischer
R. Scott Heath
Major Jackson
Shani Jamila
Angelica LeMinh
Adam Mansbach
Joan Morgan
Imani Perry
James Braxton Peterson
Marcus Reeves
Ivan Rott
Susan B. A. Somers-Willett
James G. Spady
Ebony Utley
Oliver Wang
FOREWORD
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
The rst person I ever heard “rap” was a man born in 1913, my father, Henry Louis Gates,
Sr. Daddy’s generation didn’t call the rhetorical games they played “rapping;” they signi ed,
they played the Dozens. But this was rapping just the same, rapping by another name.
Signifying is the grandparent of Rap; and Rap is signifying in a postmodern way. The
narratives that my father recited in rhyme told the tale of de ant heroes named Shine or
Stagolee or, my absolute favorite, the Signifying Monkey. They were linguistically intricate,
they were funny and spirited, and they were astonishingly profane.
Soon the stories became familiar to me and I started memorizing parts of them, especially
striking couplets and sometimes an entire resonant stanza. But every time my dad recited a
version of one of these tales, he somehow made it new again, reminding me of all that a
virtuosic performer possessed: an excellent memory, a mastery of pace and timing, the
capacity to in ect and gesture, the ability to summon the identities of di erent characters
simply through the nuances of their voices.
My father and his friends called their raps “signifying” or “playing the Dozens,” a younger
generation named them Toasts, and an even younger generation called it “rapping.” But
regardless of the name, much about the genre remained the same. Since anthropologists tend
to call them “Toasts,” we will employ that term here. Toasts are long oral poems that had
emerged by World War I, shortly after the sinking of the Titanic, judging by the fact that one
of the earliest surviving examples of the genre was called “Shine and the Titanic.” And the
fact that the French words for “monkey” and “sign” are a bit of a visual pun (singe and signe,
respectively) also points to a World War I origin of the genre as it would have been revised
by returning black veterans from the European theater of war. (My father recalls meeting
southern black soldiers at the beginning of World War II at Camp Lee, Virginia, who were
barely literate but who could recite “acres of verses” of “The Signifying Monkey,”
underscoring the role of the military and war as a cross-pollinating mechanism for black
cultural practices. And of these various forms, none would be more compelling, more
popular, more shared than signifying.)
All of these subgenres emerged out of the African American rhetorical practice of
signifying. Signifying is the de ning rhetorical principle of all African American discourse, the
language game of black language games, both sacred and secular, from the preacher’s calland-response to the irony and indirection of playing the Dozens. These oral poets practiced
their arts in ritual settings such as the street corner or the barbershop, sometimes engaging in
verbal duels with contenders like a linguistic boxing match. These recitations were a form of
artistic practice and honing, but they were also the source of great entertainment displayed
before an audience with a most sophisticated ear. And though certain poems, such as “Shine
and the Titanic” and “The Signifying Monkey,” had a familiar, repeated narrative content,
poets improvised through and around this received content, with improvised stanzas and
lyrics that might address a range of concerns from social and political issues to love,
loneliness, heartbreak, and even death. The Dozens and the Toasts were, rst and foremost,
forms of art, and everyone on the street or sitting around the barbershop knew this. Rapping
was a performance, rappers were to be judged, and the judges were the people on the corner
or in the shop. Everyone, it seemed to me as I watched these performances unfolding even as
a child, was literate in the fine arts of signification.
As I listened to my father delighting us in the late fties with tales of the Monkey and old
Shine, I knew at once that there was something sublime, something marvelous and forbidden
and dangerous about them. And it was easy to recognize variations on rapping that started
emerging in rhythm and blues and soul music in the sixties. I am thinking of James Brown’s
nine-minute rendition of “Lost Someone” on his Live at the Apollo album in 1963, or Isaac
Hayes’s paradigm-shifting version of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” from his Hot Buttered
Soul album of 1969. And H. Rap Brown’s emergence as one of the leaders of the younger
black militants of the Black Power movement brought the word “Rap” and the lyrics of the
Dozens to a generation of black students because he included his most original raps, as a
point of pride in his own artistry, in his autobiography, Die, Nigger, Die. (Unfortunately, Mr.
Brown did not write as well as he rapped!)
A few years later, I would hear echoes of all of these formal antecedents in the early Rap
songs hitting the airwaves in the late seventies and early eighties. Melle Mel’s verse on “The
Message”:
A child is born with no state of mind
Blind to the ways of mankind
God is smiling on you but he’s frowning too
Because only God knows what you’ll go through
echoes across the decades back to these lines from the toast called “Life’s a Funny Old
Proposition”:
A man comes to birth on this funny old earth
With not a chance in a million to win
To find that he’s through and his funeral is due
Before he can even begin
Despite all that is di erent about them, these two verses are bound together by both sound
and sense. They each insist upon an unstinting and un inching confrontation with reality,
while somehow staving o despair. Great art so often does this, o ering expiation and
transcendence all at once. As an art form, Rap is de ned, like the Toasts before it, by a set of
formal qualities, an iconoclastic spirit, and a virtuosic sense of wordplay. It extends the longstanding practice in the African American oral tradition of language games. Simply put, Rap is
a contemporary form of signifying.
By the time I began my rst job teaching at Yale while still a graduate student in the mid1970s, I began to hear about a new music coming out of the Bronx. It was simply called Rap
—an old word for those familiar with black slang, but a new form that combined rhythm and
rhyme in a style all its own. Like all art—vernacular or high art—it took the familiar and
made it unfamiliar again. Rap’s signature characteristic is the parody and pastiche of its
lyrics, including “sampling,” which is just another word for intertextuality. Rap is the art
form par excellence of synthesis and recombination. No one could say that Afrika Bambaataa
or Grandmaster Flash was not creating something new, but each would be quick to
acknowledge his formal debts to other artists, especially to old school musicians from the
past.
As we have seen, Rap is the postmodern version of an African American vernacular
tradition that stretches back to chants, Toasts, and trickster tales. It connects through its
percussive sensibility, its ri s, and its penchant for rhyme, with a range of forms including
scat singing, radio DJ patter, and Black Arts movement poets like Amiri Baraka, Nikki
Giovanni, and Jayne Cortez. Its sense of musicality, both in voice and beat, owes a great deal
to performers like Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, as well as to funk and soul artists like
James Brown, Isaac Hayes, George Clinton, and Sly Stone. Rap is, in other words, a
multifarious, multifaceted tradition imbedded within an African American oral culture that
itself shares in the rich history of human expression across the ages.
At its best, Rap, though a most serious genre, doesn’t take itself too self-consciously or try
to overburden its lines with rehearsed wisdom, or the cant of ideology. It complicates or even
rejects literal interpretation. It demands uency in the recondite codes of African American
speech. Just like the Dozens before it, Rap draws strength by shattering taboos, sending up
stereotype, and relishing risqué language and subject matter.
I learned this last lesson rsthand more than two decades ago. In the spring of 1990, after I
had published an editorial on the case in the New York Times, I was called to testify as an
expert witness before a Florida court in the obscenity trial of the 2 Live Crew. The group’s
1989 album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, with its provocative single “Me So Horny,” had
inspired such heated response from civic leaders that copies were burned in the streets. At
stake was not simply the songs of one group of young black men, but the very freedom of
expression at the core of all artistic creation. In my testimony, I stated that in the very lyrics
that some found simply crass and pornographic, “what you hear is great humor, great joy,
and great boisterousness. It’s a joke. It’s a parody and parody is one of the most venerated
forms of art.”
Rap has always been animated by this complexity of meaning and intention. This is by no
means to absolve artists of the ethics of form, particularly in the artist’s capacity as a role
model for young people, but rather to point out that there’s an underlying value worth
ghting for in defending Rap—or any other form of art for that matter—against those who
would silence its voice. One of the hallmarks of a democratic society should be ensuring the
space for all citizens to express themselves in art, whether we like what they have to say or
not. After all, censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
As we have seen, it is not di cult to trace a straight line between the marvelously
formulaic oral tales like “Shine and the Titanic” and “The Signifying Monkey” and Rap, and,
in terms of literary history, it is a short line, too. Rappers often make direct allusions to
vernacular culture, as we see on songs like Schoolly D’s “Signifying Rapper” and Devin the
Dude’s “Briarpatch.” Even when the connection is less explicit, it is no less apparent. It’s
impossible not to hear echoes of H. Rap Brown’s signifying virtuosity when reading the lyrics
to Smoothe da Hustler and Trigga da Gambler’s “Broken Language.” And there is undoubtedly
something of that swaggering folk hero Stagolee in someone like 2Pac, or of that trickster the
Signifying Monkey in someone like Ol’ Dirty Bastard.
Given Rap’s close connection to the African American oral tradition, it should come as no
surprise that it also carries with it much of the same baggage. Misogyny and homophobia,
which we must critique, often mar the e ectiveness of the music. But as with practices like
the Toasts and the Dozens, these in uences are by no means absolute. Perhaps one of the
most bracing things about reading this anthology is the way that it complicates our
assumptions about what Rap is and what Rap does, who makes it and who consumes it. In
this anthology, we see Yo-Yo going head to head against Ice Cube in a battle of the sexes, or
female MCs like Eve and Jean Grae calling attention to issues like domestic violence and
abortion that often get left out of Hip-Hop discourse, and artists often associated with gangsta
personas or “conscious” perspectives revealing the full range and complexity of their
subjectivity.
The Anthology of Rap is an essential contribution to our living literary tradition. It calls
attention to the artistry, sense of craft, and striking originality of an art form born of young
black and brown men and women who found their voices in rhyme, and chanted a poetic
discourse to the rhythm of the beat. This groundbreaking anthology masterfully assembles
part of a new vanguard of American poetry. One of its greatest virtues is that it focuses
attention, often for the rst time, upon Rap’s lyrics alone. This is not a rejection of the music,
but rather a reminder that the words are finally the best reason for the beat.
One nds in this anthology many lyrics that complicate common assumptions about Rap
music. And as we might expect, the reader encounters the brutal diction of Gangsta Rap, but
also its leavening humor and parody. One nds instances of sexism and homophobia, but also
resistance to them. One nds words seemingly intended to o end, but also, sometimes, the
deeper meanings of and motives for this sort of conscious provocation. Rap’s tradition is as
broad and as deep as any other form of poetry, but like any other literary tradition, it
contains its shallows, its whirlpools, and its muddy waters. Our task as active, informed
readers is to navigate through the tributaries of Rap’s canon, both for the pleasure that comes
from the journey as readers, but also for the wisdom born of traveling to any uncharted
destinations of the mind. Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois’s superbly edited, pioneering
anthology makes such a journey possible.
THE ANTHOLOGY OF RAP
is the rst anthology of lyrics representing rap’s
recorded history from the late 1970s to the present. It tells the story of rap as lyric poetry.
The lyrics included stretch from a transcription of a 1978 live performance by Grandmaster
Flash and (the then) Furious Four to the latest poetic innovations of Jay-Z, Mos Def, Jean
Grae, and Lupe Fiasco. The anthology’s purpose is threefold: (1) to distill, convey, and
preserve rap’s poetic tradition within the context of African American oral culture and the
Western poetic heritage; (2) to establish a wide and inclusive cultural history of rap on the
grounds of its fundamental literary and artistic nature; and (3) to provide tools with which to
read rap lyrics with close attention.
Rap and hip-hop are not synonymous, though they are so closely associated that some use
the terms interchangeably. Others invest them with distinct values—either rap describes
commercialized music and hip-hop the sounds of the underground; or rap suggests a gritty
style (as in gangsta rap) and hip-hop a more politically and socially conscious approach (as in
backpack hip-hop). At the end of his song “HipHop Knowledge,” legendary rap artist and
producer KRS-One succinctly explains the distinction: “Rap music is something we do, but hip
hop is something we live.” Hip-hop, in other words, is an umbrella term to describe the
multifaceted culture of which rap is but a part. MCs, hip-hop’s masters of ceremonies, are its
literary artists. They are the poets and rap is the poetry of hip-hop culture.
Hip-hop emerged out of the impoverished South Bronx in the mid-1970s. In de ance of
circumstance, a generation of young people—mostly black and brown—crafted a rich culture
of words and song, of art and movement. Rap was the voice of this culture, the linguistic
analog of hyperkinetic dance moves, vividly painted subway cars, and skillfully mixed break
beats. “Rap was the nal conclusion of a generation of creative people oppressed with the
reality of lack,” KRS-One explains. 1 Hip-hop’s pioneers fashioned in rap an art form that
draws not only from the folk idioms of the African diaspora but from the legacy of Western
verse and the musical traditions of jazz, blues, funk, gospel, and reggae. These young artists
commandeered the English language, bending it to their own expressive purposes. Over time,
the poetry they set to beats would command the ears of their block, their borough, their
nation, and eventually the world.
Rap today bears the legacy of this inaugural generation and, as a consequence, is rightly
associated with African American culture. Equally, it is a form of expression governed by a
set of conventions available to all and vivi ed by the creativity of anyone who learns rap’s
history and masters rap’s craft. This helps explain how rap—and hip-hop culture in general—
has come to be embraced by people of all races and nations. It is now the lingua franca of
global youth culture, varied in its expressions but rooted in a common past.
At the same time, rap has inspired heated debate concerning its explicit speech and
subjects. For some, rap constitutes a chorus of welcome voices, previously suppressed; for
others, it presents a troubling sign of cultural disarray. Beyond its controversy, however, a
hip-hop lyrical tradition has taken shape through poetic gestures and forms that rappers
developed over time. The substantial body of literature that has emerged is both related to
and distinct from the poetry of the past. In the past thirty years rap has led a renaissance of
the word, driving a return to poetry in public life.
Though rap is now widely disseminated in American culture, it has yet to attain adequate
recognition as poetry even as universities incorporate it into English, African American
studies, and music curricula. Only a few poetry anthologies contain rap lyrics. Those that do,
like the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and Ishmael Reed’s From Totems to Hip
Hop, do so in a representative fashion. Books like Flocabulary’s Shakespeare Is Hip Hop and
Alan Sitomer and Michael Cirelli’s Hip Hop Poetry and the Classics o er e ective and
entertaining tools for using rap to teach canonical poetry to middle school and high school
students, but don’t illuminate rap’s distinct poetic tradition.
This volume treats rap as a body of lyrics that responds to transcription, explication, and
analysis as poetry. The lyrics included o er a kind of laboratory of language for those
interested in the principles of poetics. Indeed, the study of rap is an e ective means of
introducing the key forms and concepts that de ne the poetic tradition: rappers embrace the
clear sonic qualities of rhythm and rhyme, make ample use of gures and forms such as
simile and metaphor, make storytelling a key component of their art, and emphasize the
spirit of competition once central to poetry.
Just as any body of poetry can be studied from many angles, so too can rap. Viable
approaches to the aesthetics of rap abound. From a formal perspective, one might look at a
song’s rhetorical gures, at its local sonic qualities, or at its revisions of conventions of genre.
An interest in cultural studies will likely lead one to situate rap in relation to its sociological,
geographical, or racial contexts. A range of historical approaches seems relevant in
considering rap as an art, whether that means focusing on a song’s relationship to African
American oral poetry of the distant or recent past, or to English-language lyric poetry from
Beowulf until now, or to the vast range of commercial popular song lyrics in general—all
bodies of poetry with rich and various histories, of which rap is also a part. As the lyrics in
this book attest, rap has been and remains many things for many people; perhaps the wisest
approach is one as capacious as the art form itself.
Rap’s Poetic Form
Raps are lyric poems organized into verses, the standard length of which is sixteen lines.
They are performed most often in rhythm to a beat with a vocal delivery that ranges from
sing-song to conversational. Their most distinguishing poetic feature is rhyme, which rappers
employ in full and slant, monosyllabic and multisyllabic forms at the end of and in the midst
of the line. Rap verses make ample use of gurative language, most especially the simile,
though other less common rhetorical gures and forms are also used. The dominant poetic
voice is the rst-person singular, the “I” not only of the MC, but of a range of invented
identities that the MC takes on. As poetic practice, rap verses are often confrontational,
composed either in competition with an actual rhyme adversary or in mock battle with an
imagined one. A dominant theme, therefore, is the elevation of the self and the denigration of
the opponent. That said, rap has also developed a complex expressive range, driven by
narratives of everything from the street life to the good life and by treatments of themes
ranging from love to heartache to speculative projections of alternative realities.
Rap is sometimes con ated with spoken word or slam poetry. In fact, each is a distinct
form with a disparate history. Rap grew out of African American oral expressions and took