Hip hop as a written craft, and what poetry took from it
Hip hop and poetry
Hip hop poetry is a fair description of what a rap verse is, because rap is composed on the page out of rhyme, rhythm, metaphor and persona and then performed, which is a definition of poetry with one addition: the beat.
The interesting question is not whether the label fits, since technically it does, but what the label hides, and both sides of that argument are worth a young writer's time.
This page reproduces no lyrics, here or anywhere on this site, for the same reason it reproduces no poem written by a young writer: the words belong to whoever wrote them. Naming a record is naming. Printing a line of it is something else.
What the two forms share
Rap and poetry written for performance share five things, and the overlap is technical rather than sentimental.
- Rhyme used structurally, including internal rhyme inside the line and multisyllabic rhyme across several words at once, which is more elaborate in most rap than in most contemporary page poetry.
- Metre, in the sense of stressed and unstressed syllables arranged deliberately, which is exactly what a rapper means by flow.
- Figurative language, with metaphor, simile, personification and extended conceits doing the same work in both.
- Persona, meaning a constructed speaker who is related to but not identical with the writer, which both forms rely on and both are regularly misread for.
- A written draft, revised before it is performed, which is the part outsiders to rap most often assume does not exist.
Both are also spoken to an audience in real time, which means both solve the same problem: how to be understood at speaking speed without becoming simple.
Where they part: the beat, the bar and the a cappella test
They part at the grid. A rap verse is written against a fixed rhythmic structure, normally 16 bars in four four time, at tempos that commonly run from about 80 to 100 beats per minute, with much contemporary work written over a 140 beat grid felt at half that speed. The bar is a container that exists before the words do. A spoken word poem has no such container: its timing comes from the breath and the punctuation, and the performer can hold a silence for as long as the room will take.
The practical test is what happens without the music. A rap performed a cappella loses the half of it that the production was carrying, and it usually sounds strange rather than bad, because the ear supplies the missing grid. A poem performed with a beat behind it gains atmosphere and loses timing control, which is why most spoken word poets who work with musicians rehearse the joins rather than improvise them.
One further difference is commercial rather than formal. Rap sits inside a music industry with recording, publishing and touring structures around it. Performance poetry does not, and what that changes about the writing is dealt with on What performance poetry is.
The written page behind the performance
The written page behind a rap verse is the part that settles the poetry argument on the technical side. Rhyme books are an ordinary tool of the trade, and rhyme schemes are planned rather than stumbled into: a rapper working out where three syllables will chime across two bars is doing prosody, whatever it is called. Some well known writers compose without writing anything down, which is a memory technique rather than an absence of composition, and freestyling is a separate discipline that most recorded rap is not.
This matters for a school or workshop room because it reverses the usual assumption. The teenager who arrives saying they do not write poetry but they do write bars is describing a poetry practice with a different vocabulary, and often a more technically demanding one.
How hip hop came to be called America's poetry
Hip hop began at a party in the Bronx on 11 August 1973, where Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, extended the instrumental break of a record for the dancers at an event his sister Cindy had organised, and the MC's job of talking over that break became rap. The Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight in 1979 was the first rap record to sell widely, and the form went from a New York borough to a global industry inside two decades.
The reclassification as literature followed in stages. Adam Bradley's Book of Rhymes, published in 2009, read rap with the tools of prosody. The Anthology of Rap, edited by Bradley and Andrew DuBois, was published by Yale University Press in 2010 and put lyrics in the format of a literary anthology, which was contested at the time over transcription accuracy as well as principle. Harvard's Hiphop Archive and Research Institute established a fellowship named for the rapper Nas in 2013. In 2018 Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for the album DAMN., the first winner from outside classical music and jazz.
In Britain the same argument has been made from inside the form. Akala founded The Hip-hop Shakespeare Company in 2009, which works with young people on the shared technical ground between rap and verse drama, and Kae Tempest, who has been shortlisted for the Mercury Prize twice and has won the Ted Hughes Award, moves between recorded music and poetry publication without treating them as separate careers.
The case against the compliment
The case against calling hip hop poetry is not a dismissal of hip hop, and it is usually made by people who take rap more seriously than the people making the compliment. Three objections carry weight.
- Consider what is removed. Printing a verse as text deletes the beat, the delivery, the ad libs and the production, which is most of the artwork.
- Notice who benefits. Calling rap poetry is often a way of granting respectability to Black art by measuring it against a European literary form it never asked to be measured against.
- Watch the classroom use. A lesson that uses rap only as a route into a set text treats it as a teaching aid rather than as work, which students detect immediately.
The honest position is that rap and poetry are overlapping crafts with different equipment, and that neither needs the other's name to be worth studying.
What a young writer can take into a poem
Take the techniques rather than the form, and the transfer works in one direction better than the other.
- Steal the internal rhyme, which keeps a fast passage tight without the singsong that end rhyme produces at speed.
- Count the syllables in a line that felt good out loud, then build the next line to the same count and break it deliberately.
- Write a persona and stay in it for the whole piece, which is standard practice in rap and underused in workshop poetry.
- Plan the turn, since a rap verse usually places its strongest line at a structural point rather than wherever it arrived.
The inheritance runs both ways and it is older than either form. What a griot is describes a tradition of rhythmic spoken performance carrying a community's record centuries before either, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe put poets and rappers on the same stage in the same decade that hip hop was forming, and The lineage of the form sets out where all of this sits in order.