Rap and Poetry

On paper, these two things are polar opposites.  When it comes to the stereotypes of both, one being being sweet, sensitive, and expressive, and the other being violent, disrespectful of women, and a poor influence on children, they do not relate.  However, the components of both poetry and hip hop are appallingly similar, and the two concepts themselves even intermingle sometimes.

Lets start out with the basis of both poetry and hip hop.  When someone is performing a poem, whether it’s in class or at a club, the emphasis is the rhythm and the flow of the piece, along with the lyrics of course.  There are obviously some differences, for example the main point of hip hop is to rhyme and that is most certainly not always the case when it comes to poetry.  Spoken word poetry, or prose poetry, focuses more on language and content and often doesn’t have a meter or rhyme scheme.  Meter is the beat that the poem is read in, or the style, and the rhyme scheme is the rhyming structure of the end of each line.  There are several famous poets who used these concepts such as Robert Frost and Rudyard Kipling.

In hip hop, the same exact concepts apply when it comes to a well written or well delivered rap song.  The meter, or as it is called in rap “the flow,” is highly important to a rappers patented style.  It is the way in which they deliver their rhymes, and the way that they say words and syllables to compliment the music.  Many old rappers, such as Big L, Biggie, and Eminem, as well as some newer rappers, such as Takeoff of Migos and Logic, have made their impact on hip hop because of the manner in which they deliver their raps.  To step aside from the technical similarities, there are also content similarities.  Believe or not, many of hip hop’s most influential and respected figures were also poets.  Tupac Shakur released several thought provoking songs in his time as a recording artists, with hits such as Keep Ya Head Up and Dear Mama.  Shakur also released a book of his own poems called The Rose that Grew From the Concrete.  Also, Nas’s popular album Illmatic, while embodying many of the ideals of “gangsta rap,” also supplied a multitude of positive messages in songs such as “The World is Yours.”  To quickly shift back to a more technical side of our two subjects, Illmatic also contained other poetic aspects such as the use of perspective.  In the song “One Love,” an inmate at Rikers Island is reading a letter that he just received.  The letter is from Nas, and he began to rap as if the inmate is reading the letter.

Seemingly different, poetry and hip hop are actually almost nearly the same thing, just with primarily differing content.