>>24489217When people start comparing rap, a pseudo-improvisational attempt to keep up with a simple 4/4 beat and impress the audience by bragging about their lives, to poetry, like capital P Poetry, I have to question whether they've actually read poetry on a serious level.
Like, could Coates read Yeats's "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" and pick up on how Yeats deliberately contrasts his first quatrain's dactylic beat with the second quatrain's anapestic metre to emphasise his narrator's bitter humility and better contradict his fantasies? Does he understand the sheer amount of effort, skill, and intelligence it takes to consciously manipulate the rhythm not of a sentence or a phrase, but of the very way each and every syllable itself is pronounced and arranged in order to represent a complex and emotional idea? To do this while maintaining a coherent grammatical and original rhyming structure AND while delivering a series of stunning images that range from religious ecstasy to poverty and psychological turmoil? To then subtly contradict this established structure in order to draw attention to yet another complex idea?
This isn't just a spread of internal rhymes, puns, and catchy slang; this is a man loading no more than eight lines with as much content as the English language allows.
Illmatic is a good album. Nas is a talented rapper. But to say that a 16 year-old kid from the projects operates at the level of a Nobel Prize-winning poet is absolute horseshit. No he fucking does not; he wrote his lyrics according to some DJ Premier beat and his own public image. You want to judge his writing as poetry? You want to look at his words when they're neutered from the music and live audience they were written to accompany? Okay, let's look. There is no coherent metre, let alone any conscious metrical technique. His rhyme scheme is all over the fucking place, and a lot of phrases were awkwardly forced in just to hit those incredibly simple end rhymes. The narrative is sloppy and its images are repetitive; he abandons ideas halfway through simply to survive until the next line. He brags about himself constantly and fills his story with non sequiturs that serve no purpose other than to highlight his knowledge of street slang and demonstrate how violent his life is.
As poetry, it's kind of trash. It's not very creative. It's definitely not skillful. It should be performed over music and never ever separated from it.
