The titular question of this blog post is one that I’d subconsciously filed away under “yes” quite some time ago, a question I’m now realizing I’d never considered with much rigor. The answer still remains a yes after further looking into the subject—albeit with some minor caveats. I will go over those caveats, but before examining whether or not rap is poetry, it seems worthwhile to explore how comparisons between rap and poetry are framed—and I can’t think of a framing device with more power over public knowledge than the algorithms of Google Search, so I’m going to start there.
Pictured above are Google Trends’ statistics for the searches “rap poetry” and “is rap poetry,” charting data from January 1st 2004 (the earliest date available) to the night of April 28th 2021. Google doesn’t provide actual numerical values for how many people searched at any given moment. Instead, these graphs provide relative percentages; so, where the line peaks at “100” on either chart marks when the search terms were most popular, and all the other values are scaled relative to that moment. It’s noteworthy that simply adding the word “is” before “rap poetry”—utilizing sentence form—reveals durations along the 0% bottom portion of the chart, where virtually nobody searched the phrase. “Rap poetry” by itself, however, is more consistent. The graph remains jagged, but rarely reaches 0%. The stability of the simpler search term “rap poetry” reveals a key element of how opinions on the matter are transmitted online: promptness overrules context. As I’m going to show, Google Search itself abides by that rule—but these graphs depict only the search terms that users enter. Over the last seventeen years that people have looked up whether or not rap is considered poetry, they’ve often refrained typing the two-letter query “is.”
I don’t begrudge this, however—my Google searches are usually just as lazy. It’s the nature of the search engine as a medium. “Asking” Google questions in full sentence form will likely yield less useful search results than concentrating on key terms, as the search engine itself (though always getting better at its job via machine learning) is not truly intelligent or capable of meaningfully interpreting the nuances of grammar. With that said, Google Search is then certainly not intelligent enough to facilitate nuanced debates about art. Although, it can point to where those debates are publicly taking place. Before I detail where the searches lead, I want to note that I searched “rap poetry” and “is rap poetry” in a private browser window where I wasn’t logged into any accounts and had no search history. Private browsing instances are effectively disconnected from users’ online identities, so the search results I’m commenting on should not be swayed by any kind of algorithmic personalization.
The top result for “rap poetry” is a one and a half minute long YouTube video from 2011, featuring a Jay-Z interview wherein he advocates for rap’s poetic potential.[1] “Is rap poetry,” however, yields the top result of a 2014 American Conservative article[2] that begins “The short answer is ‘no,’ of course,” before taking issue with an Oxford University publication for too loosely defining poetry, also stating that “rap is often profane and can seem less serious [than poetry].” While that evaluation is obviously frustrating, the American Conservative article eventually argues that rap isn’t poetry because poetry is an art reliant on “the words themselves alone.” While I disagree, this statement is at least worth unpacking.
The OED defines “Poems” rather broadly, taking into account their being textual or oral: “A piece of writing or an oral composition, often characterized by a metrical structure, in which the expression of feelings, ideas, etc., is typically given intensity or flavour by distinctive diction, rhythm, imagery, etc.” Furthermore, poetry’s historic roots in literary cultures like that of Homeric epics unveils the importance of vocal performance as an auditory medium for transmitting poetry. Though such practices have been considerably less popular in recent centuries, poets reading their work aloud to audiences never simply went away. Rap cannot be wholly excluded from poetry on the grounds that it is listened to—that the words are contextualized by a speaker’s performance. Audiences relationships with poetic mediums are more complicated than that. Marshall McLuhan’s seminal book Understanding Media puts forth the fundamental idea that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.[3]” The medium of poetry contains and is constructed of other media in the form of words, which are constructed of letters, which are constructed of many small typographical components[4]. Similarly, the medium of rap music contains and is constructed of other media in the form of instrumentation, samples, and (particularly) vocal recordings which most often were originally written (lyrics constructed of words, constructed of letters, etc.). Even though I’ve already acknowledged that performance does not invalidate rap as poetry, the question of whether or not rap’s words can stand on their own remains an interesting one. Where the American Conservative article definitively says rap is “not” poetry, I’ll instead suggest that rap is often poetry, enough so to where the statement that “rap is poetry” is normally true. Jay-Z’s commentary in the aforementioned YouTube video accounts for this contextual understanding, acknowledging that poetry is generally defined by text, but still affording the poetic medium an appropriate degree of flexibility: “You never hear rappers being compared for, like, the greatest writers of all time, you know, you hear Bob Dylan . . . Rakim! I mean, listen to some of the things he wrote. I mean, if you take those lyrics and take them away from the music and you put them up on a wall somewhere and someone had to look at them, they would say: this is genius.”
To exemplify the dynamic way poetry inhabits rap, I’ll point to Kendrick Lamar’s “FEAR.,” a song that confronts the pervasive reminders of mortality present throughout American cities. First, here’s an example of when rap, as music, may not fit so well into the realm of poetry. The bridge before the first verse of “FEAR.” contains lines which are spoken and then later played in reverse:
Why God, why God do I gotta suffer?
Pain in my heart carry burdens full of struggle
. . .
elggurts fo lluf snedrub yrrac traeh ym ni niaP
reffus attog I od doG yhw ,doG yhW
Particularly when viewing these lyrics in type, as if a written poem, the unsettling effect of hearing backwards speech is lost; these words turn rather incomprehensible. I think it’s safe to say most wouldn’t refer to this as poetry. One could potentially relate words typed in reverse to avant-garde poetry, such as that of e e cummings, but this blog post unfortunately doesn’t have the runway left to explore such a notion with depth. So then, let’s look at the poetic latter half of “FEAR.’s” second verse:
I’ll prolly die from one of these bats and blue badges
Body-slammed on black and white paint, my bones snappin’
Or maybe die from panic or die from bein’ too lax
Or die from waitin’ on it, die ’cause I’m movin’ too fast
I’ll prolly die tryna buy weed at the apartments
I’ll prolly die tryna defuse two homies arguin’
I’ll prolly die ’cause that’s what you do when you’re seventeen
All worries in a hurry, I wish I controlled things
This verse of rap is plenty capable of being read as poetic verse. Even divested of its musical accompaniment, the lines read rhythmically, concluding with imperfect rhymes. Alliteration of ‘b’ in the first two lines illustrates the brutal and blunt violence of the imagined police encounter. The lines are consistently in the realm of thirteen syllables in length, with words mostly being two syllables or less, building a harrowing sense of momentum. Repetition of “I’ll” generates a claustrophobia as the lyrics navigate tense situations, building upon the momentum of the short words, emphasizing the speaker’s sense of self-responsibility but ultimate lack of control over their surroundings—the stress of which boils over in the final line. The New York Times recently reported[5], in fact, that Chicago artist Dread Scott circulated posters featuring the line “I’ll prolly die ‘cause that’s what you do when you’re seventeen,” quite literally fulfilling Jay-Z’s suggestion to put lyrics up on walls so folks can appreciate their genius.
So, as per McLuhan’s notion of mediums containing other mediums, the above example demonstrates that rap definitely contains poetry, and makes evident that the question of whether or not rap is poetry isn’t technically a fair one. Still, whether one listens to or reads rap lyrics, rap and poetry often go hand in hand—enough so to where I think “yes” is fair as the short answer to whether or not rap is poetry, as answering in the negative would pointlessly exclude the two mediums, their many cultures and subcultures, and their intertwined historic legacies from one another. It’s important to acknowledge that searching either “rap poetry” or “is rap poetry” yields over twenty-five million results. Scrolling down from Google’s top suggestions leads to many lengthy and nuanced discussions on the matter from journalists, academic publications, and debates in online forums such as Reddit and Quora. But how often do you view the bottom half of a Google Search page?—how often do you click onto a second page, let alone any of the tens of thousands that follow it? It’s no revelation that algorithms steer many of our day-to-day actions, if not dictate them, but Google Search in particular is disproportionately taken for granted as a public utility. Google does not care whether rap is considered poetry, but it certainly wields significant power over the public’s access to conversations on the matter.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXR-ohNo3Ao
[2] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/prufrock/is-rap-poetry/
[3] McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964. Critical ed., edited by Terrence Gordon, Gingko Press, 2017, p. 19.
[4] https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type-anatomy/anatomy
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/t-magazine/rap-hip-hop-poetry.html