Cyberpunk’s penchant for representing wealth and poverty as a matter of “up versus down” generally results in the depiction of lofty spaces such as high-rises as bastions of security, while lower spaces like city streets carry countless dangers. However, while cyberpunk media almost always foregrounds the societal violences of extreme inequality, those violences are not always neatly contained to the streets. An early scene in RoboCop (1987) presents a example wherein cyberpunk’s thematic concerns of corporate greed and government privatization give rise to violence within a supposedly secure space of an upper-class corporate high-rise. As I’ll unpack below, RoboCop’s depiction of the violent killing of a wealthy bureaucrat during a boardroom meeting can add nuance to our understanding of the spatial arguments in cyberpunk’s representations of urban design: namely that cyberpunk does not relegate the violence of its necroscapes to the lowly realm of the streets—in fact, this scene from RoboCop insists that necroscapes envelop society as a whole, including the socioeconomic elite.

In the RoboCop scene, a scaled down model of the utopian urban revitalization project known as Delta City occupies the foreground of the frame (fig. 1) before the scene shifts toward what would now be referred to as a “big tech takeover” of Detroit’s local police force. Executives and business partners of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) listen while the company’s unnamed CEO remarks that “Although shifts in tax structure have created an economy ideal for corporate growth, community services, in this case law enforcement, have suffered.” Infused with irony and foreshadowing the upcoming moment of gory satire, the CEO states “I think it’s time we gave something back” before another businessman, Dick Jones, introduces a bipedal tank-like robot called ED-209, a “24-hour-a-day police officer” that needs neither sleep nor meals. A handgun disarming demonstration with the robot goes awry and the hesitant volunteer who held the gun to ED-209, Mr. Kinney, gets shot repeatedly as the boardroom watches in horror and technicians fail to disable the robot (fig. 2). Excessive spurts of blood and chunks of flesh fly about the room in the film’s unrated director’s cut, but even in the toned-down theatrical release, the thoroughly bloodied Mr. Kinney gets thrown back by the gunfire, landing upon the table displaying the model of Delta City, literally shattering OCP’s corporate-utopian visions of future Detroit, staining its white plastics with his viscera. During his presentation before this incident, Dick Jones had noted that while policing generally functions as a public service, OCP often successfully “gambled in markets traditionally regarded as nonprofit. Hospitals, prisons, space exploration.” He continues, “I say good business is where you find it.”

Within cyberpunk’s necroscapes, everyone and everything is good business, or at least a resource for good business. After some initial gasps, several businessmen present in the boardroom resume discussions as usual, one making a successful pitch to the CEO to forego the now-embarrassed ED-209 project to instead fund the film’s eponymous RoboCop program. The ED-209 crisis makes RoboCop appear ever more the opportunity. The fatal malfunctions just witnessed signify to OCP executives only that they need to innovate policing with a new product, rather than prompting consideration of their involvement in and militarization of policing to begin with. The terrible irony that permeates this scene stems from its satirical reinforcement of corporate hubris in the face of a shocking event that should cause dispute; the CEO’s remarks about “an economy ideal for corporate growth” echo the deregulatory policies of the Reagan administration contemporary to the film. With public services in disrepair both in RoboCop’s fiction and the realities it reflects, corporations posture as saviors to communities facing crises of crime and poverty, but pose solutions through profit-driven systems, as opposed to the nonprofit systems of social benefit that OCP declares it has successfully dominated.

While Mr. Kinney’s bloody crash upon the Delta City model shatters the allure of technologized business solutions for socioeconomic problems only momentarily for the characters in the scene, this incident confronts audiences with a striking representation of the “infrastructural brutalism” that Truscello discusses in his book of the same name. He says the term describes “the historical context in which industrial capitalism has met the limits of its expansion and domination, and yet continues to press for unprecedented commitments to build more” (Truscello 4). The bloodied, shattered Delta City model illustrates that even when such violent tragedies transpire on the human level, the broader systems undergirding corporatism keep ticking along, keep pressing for those “unprecedented commitments” by constructing naïve aspirations such as utopian future cities rather than attempts to resolve the issues already at hand. Infrastructural brutalism—in other words, capitalism’s overextensions—actualizes frequently in the form of “exciting” new products (such as Delta City, ED-209, or RoboCop himself) that corporations successfully market as solutions regardless of their actual viability when deployed within the communities that they will affect.

Just before the shooting, in an over-the-shoulder shot that aligns the robot’s gun barrels, Mr. Kinney, Delta City, and Detroit itself through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the high-rise boardroom, the many businesspeople scatter about in fear and surprise (fig. 3). However, opposite to Mr. Kinney’s rightward presence on the screen, the OCP CEO appears calm in the background of the upper left, sitting at the head of the conference table whereas the others have all sprung up in fear, resting his chin upon his hands with haunting indifference. Unnamed, referred to by others simply as “the Old Man,” the CEO functions less as a character and more as a figurative representation of the institutional drive and will of OCP as a corporation. Though an employee of OCP, Mr. Kinney remained expendable. As Carlen Lavigne explains, cyberpunk is “closely associated with North American economic and labor concerns of the 1980s; its citizens, devalued as interchangeable and easily replaceable assets within corporate society” (12). Illustrated by the abundance of his suited coworkers in the scene, within a necroscape even those who have climbed the corporate ladder often function as surplus populations, described by Marx as “a relatively redundant working population . . . superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization” (782). Alphin attests that present day neoliberal capitalist governments “eliminate surplus bodies that fail to function in the production of value” (1). With Mr. Kinney, it becomes apparent that even those ostensibly contributing to the production of value remain expendable within the full systemic scope of a corporation like OCP.

Alongside this scene’s visual foregrounding of the Delta City model, the prominently featured floor-to-ceiling windows maintain the presence of actual Detroit[1] in the background as members of the boardroom rather nonchalantly make investment and technological development decisions in a corporate space vertically removed from the populace of the city itself. Furthermore, the exaggerated verticality pictured by the central towers of Delta City declare an intent for an even further distancing between this controlling class of corporate executives and the Detroit citizenry. ED-209 targeting Mr. Kinney depicts not only malfunction, but disregard for collateral damage—satirical in the self-destructive crushing of Delta City, and symbolic in its taking aim upon Detroit in the distance.

In addressing cyberpunk’s imaginary worlds, I suggest that the capitalist overextensions that Truscello terms as “infrastructural brutalism” drive the elimination of the surplus bodies that this kind of societal organization kills “in subtle and overt ways” (Alphin 93). Tendencies toward deregulatory policy, alongside incentives for continuous corporate growth that disincentivize sustainable planning, establish conditions that devalue lives—not only the lives of the lower classes who in the RoboCop example would be policed by the violent machines onscreen, but even the lives of those integrated into corporate hegemony, like Mr. Kinney. Thus, infrastructural brutalism permits indiscriminate brutality.

Notes

[1] The “actual Detroit” of the fiction, at least. In reality, the window featured in figs. 8 and 9 overlooks Dallas, Texas, the film’s boardroom set located on the 54th floor of the city’s Rennaisance Tower (Maschino and Gallagher).

Works Cited

AKIRA. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Toho, 1988.

Alphin, Caroline. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout. Routledge, 2021.

Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner Brothers, 1982. The Final Cut, 2007.

Maschino, Brian, and Danny Gallagher. “RoboCop Versus Reality: Looking at Dallas Locations of the Film’s Scenes.” Dallas Observer, 11 July 2017, https://www.dallasobserver.com/slideshow/robocop-versus-reality-looking-at-dallas-locations-of-the-films-scenes-9647490/9647497. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

RoboCop. Directed by Peter Weller, Orion Pictures, 1987. Director’s Cut, 1995.

Truscello, Michael. Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure. MIT P, 2020.

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The boxed-in effect of The Ascent’s top-down third-person perspective produces a visual overabundance of information that makes the game’s world claustrophobic, whereas Cyberpunk 2077’s first-person perspective—despite giving players a lesser degree of visual omnipotence— grants them a greater sense of freedom. As an example: in The Ascent, players can often see behind walls and around corners due to the top-down POV, often spotting enemies and/or loot from positions that would not be visible to their avatar. On the other hand, Cyberpunk 2077 players’ inability to see behind walls or around corners constantly generates visual suggestions of opportunity.

The overabundant visuals common to cyberpunk urbanity thus become less claustrophobic, and more inviting—what’s behind a given wall is unknown, potentially (and often) a reward or something exciting for the player to do. The divergent ways these two games illustrate players’ affordances of geographic exploration within cyberpunk cities draw attention to the “possessive individualism that motivates the main characters in cyberpunk [fiction]” (Alphin 2). Caroline Alphin’s book on neoliberalism in cyberpunk complicates the anticapitalist cultural critiques cyberpunk media is often assumed to possess; Alphin identifies the genre, when framed as a mass-market product, as a “force behind the perpetuation of neoliberal governmentalities” (2). The Ascent and Cyberpunk 2077 situate their players within similar narrative frames: players start as ‘nobodies’ within an oppressive society, ultimately embarking upon an action adventure, battling the powers that be of the socioeconomic elite, and becoming powerful individuals themselves. Both games exude the duplicity Alphin observes of the genre: thematic anxieties of capitalist dystopia, explored by audiences through main characters who embody neoliberal individualism. Though from the same genre and featuring similar gameplay centered around action and shootouts, the two games’ different camera POVs produce virtual worlds of divergent meaning, angling players’ experience of the cyberpunk generic POV toward different ideological ends.

Regarding cyberpunk virtuality in particular, Alphin points out that “…the values and discourses that permeate the informationalized reality of cyberpunk understand ‘jacking-in,’ ‘plugging-in,’ or ‘being-in’ a digital reality as a choice, and therefore, as acting through a subject’s agency and freedom” (35). Cyberpunk 2077 and The Ascent’s narratives framing their avatars as a mercenaries for hire presents players with gameplay loops of exploration, shooting, and looting as their job; both games provide fantasies where labor is entertaining, and where players choose to confront challenges repeatedly just by choosing to continue playing. Arguing that “the forces of armored neoliberalism have already broken into this ludic refuge [of video games]” Games of Empire asserts that “Virtual games simulate [player] identities as citizen-soldiers, free-agent workers, cyborg adventurers . . . [gameplay] shapes subjects for militarized markets, and makes becoming a neoliberal subject fun” (Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter xxviii; xxix–xxx). Cyberpunk 2077 and The Ascent’s mercenary avatars exemplify the “citizen-soldier” quite pointedly, illustrating not only players’ immersion in the cyberpunk genre as an act of donning a generic POV that prioritizes neoliberal individualism in order to facilitate achieving what the game considers success or victory through acts of violent gameplay.

Importantly, camera POV always mediates the generic POV in visual media, situating the genre’s narrative and aesthetic conventions within the literal framing boundaries of moving images upon a screen. Perhaps the most telling example of camera function’s relationship to neoliberalism within Cyberpunk 2077 and The Ascent arises through players’ ability, or lack thereof, to look upward. Within reference to the decades of preceding top-down twin-stick-shooters and dungeon-crawlers, the fact that players of The Ascent cannot look up seems an insignificant byproduct of camera perspective. However, alongside the claustrophobic effect the top-down third-person POV lends the game, there takes hold with the avatar a sense of disempowerment in that they are always looked down upon. For The Ascent, in particular, this carries a touch of irony due to that progressing through the game, as the title suggests, entails players’ moving ever upward throughout a technologized and neon-saturated megacity. The avatar, however, always remains spatially below; and players themselves remain unable to see what they are headed to next (through their ascension) until they’re looking down upon that next space, having already arrived. In effect, players’ ascent in the game is a backwards walk up a long flight of stairs, where they control their avatar from afar on the floor below. The visual omnipotence of the top-down view of The Ascent’s world undercuts the sense of individually determined freedom that neoliberal impulses arise from. Players’ ability to see not only the direction that their avatar looks, but all around them, lends the top-down third-person POV a pervasive sense of restriction rather than encouraging sense of mobility. Players see all their surrounding possibilities simultaneously, and thus the limitations of possibility altogether.

Cyberpunk 2077’s first-person POV, however, exaggerates players’ sense of possibility to the extreme. The player/avatar’s ability to look upward, especially, lends a sense of exploratory possibility and aspiration to the game, the exact emotional potential that The Ascent’s top-down third-person POV impedes. Walking the streets of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City suggests possibility to the player from all directions. Exploring alleyways and building interiors often rewards the player with opportunities, currency, or loot, and the game geographically and architecturally emphasizes verticality. The spiraled ramps of parking garages, elevators of high-rise buildings, and multi-layered highways are but a few examples of Night City’s structures that prompt players to look upward toward and subsequently desire to explore. Notably, a sense of forwardness, in Cyberpunk 2077, arises simply from movement in the direction the player/avatar is looking. While a top-down third-person POV such as The Ascent’s defines players’ motion within the confines of the world, a first-person POV provides an intuitive sense of mobility through that world, facilitating players’ exploratory impulses rather than imposing limits upon them.

The fulfillment of exploratory impulses gives rise to ludic experiences of freedom. Given that an area in Cyberpunk 2077 is gated off and/or guarded, players can safely assume themselves able to devise a method of stealthy trespassing or forced entry via combat. Virtual renditions of such spatial restriction do not inherently invite invasion, but the suggestions of the first-person POV encourage players to disregard restriction. In an open world game, like Cyberpunk 2077, players do expect to be challenged, but ultimately for their choices to be facilitated by the game’s systems for the sake of their entertainment. While The Ascent remains an entertaining game, its top-down third-person POV frames the avatar as stuck within the center of players’ screens, minimizing their perceived agency. Though both games exude the neoliberal trappings of the cyberpunk genre and gaming medium overall, attention to highly specific features such as POV unveil the consequential ramifications that divergent forms of presentation have upon generic fictions with similar thematic and ideological roots.

Works Cited

Alphin, Caroline. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout. New York, Routledge, 2021.

Ascent, The. Windows PC version, Neon Giant, 2021.

Cyberpunk 2077. Windows PC version, CD Projekt Red. 2020.

Dyer-Witherford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2009.

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While navigating Tsushima island, players occasionally come across serene vistas and are given the option to sit before them and compose a haiku. When players choose to do so, Jin sets his swords down before himself and kneels, observing the landscape. The screen then displays an idea for players to “reflect on”; this will serve as the guiding theme for the haiku. Players’ normal freedom of movement is restricted—in these moments of haiku composition, they control only the camera, observing elements of nature to glean inspiration. Adhering to the 5-7-5 syllable structure, the game presents players with three options for each of the poem’s three lines. So, players aren’t themselves writing the haiku as much as structuring it from predetermined phrases.

In the above example video, of the many possible combinations, I constructed this haiku based around the theme of “strength:”

The final defense
Death’s call is sharp and biting
I yearn for guidance

‘Jogaku Haiku,’ found in northern Kamiagata

At this point, I must address that Tsushima’s haiku aren’t great—but that doesn’t mean that they’re not meaningful. I recommend Ian Walker’s excellent interview^[3] with haiku expert Jim Kacian regarding Tsushima’s poetic shortcomings. Kacian points out that because Tsushima offers players variation, its haiku often come out discordant and unfocused, fulfilling the 5-7-5 structure and adhering to a given theme, but rarely if ever presenting haiku that are artful beyond “the most superficial and populist sense.” I think the haiku I put together above exemplifies this well enough: while there’s a sense of foreboding, the ties between the three lines seem tenuous. The blanks can more or less be filled in by the context of their being themed around strength, but none of these lines meaningfully or directly engage with one another—at least not with the degree of nuance and poetic prowess that a critic like Kacian would expect. But the meaning that I as a player (taking on the role of Jin Sakai) draw from the poem is contextualized by other elements of the game and its narrative.

The opportunity to craft this particular haiku does not appear until later in the game, when things are most dire: terrible betrayals and tragic murders have transpired. The player finds themselves geographically isolated as the war effort has driven them to the wintry north into territory overrun by Mongol forces, and Jin as a character has become psychologically distant from an uncle who, throughout much of the game, served as a mentor. While, in isolation, the above haiku isn’t much to speak of, each line reflects experiences that the player has through Jin as their avatar. From here on, I’ll be referencing my personal interpretations of the game’s story. While all players of Tsushima meet the same characters and fight the same battles, the ambiguity of the haiku will undoubtedly evoke different meanings for different players. So, the haiku’s first line, “The final defense” most obviously reminds me of the ongoing war, as in the moment I composed the haiku the game’s plot was building toward a final confrontation with its antagonist. The line “Death’s call is sharp and biting” evoked the wintry climate featured throughout this portion of the game, as well as the game’s heightened difficulty at this point, as the Mongol forces confront the player with greater numbers, more heavily armored and armed than ever before. And finally, “I yearn for guidance” refers to Jin’s sense of directionlessness after ideologically conflicting with his uncle about tactics and the defense of Tsushima island’s people—at this point in the game Jin and the player alike are unsure of if Tsushima island can, in fact, be successfully defended.

The video linked earlier shows the different choices that I could have made while constructing this haiku. For example, the first line could have read “Falling forever,” connoting a greater sense of hopelessness than my eventual choice of “The final defense” which, while still dire, makes successfully resisting the invasion sound more like a serious possibility. Likewise, the middle line could have been “The mind recalls the teachings.” That line may have better fit into the idea of Jin being distant from his familial mentor, flowing more effectively into the final line of “I yearn for guidance.” However, I preferred the middle line as “Death’s call is sharp and biting” because the roughness of the transition into “I yearn for guidance” reflects a greater sense of desperation. This way, instead of the haiku illustrating Jin’s conflict with his uncle, it focuses on the dangers of the war with the Mongols itself, concluding with an admission that Jin needs guidance in some form to navigate the war.

With all of that said, there remains one other essential contextualization of Tsushima’s haiku: spatiality. As a video game, Tsushima’s audience has an interesting relationship with space. Players aren’t reading descriptions of Japanese forests, or viewing carefully orchestrated cinematography that utilizes tree trunks to create a sense of depth—players are walking through the forest themselves, circling trees and seeing the grass rustle underfoot as they choose to steer off of the beaten path.

In their 2009 book The Spatial Turn, Barney Warf and Santa Arias compiled essays which explores a recent cross disciplinary shift within the humanities, a turning of attention to “a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs, a view in which geography is not relegated to an afterthought of social relations, but is intimately involved in their construction.”^[4] The game mechanics behind Tsushima’s haiku participate in this reframing of human presence within the landscape. As I’ve described, players come across opportunities to compose haiku while roaming the island. In that alone, there resides an interesting association between the composition of poetry and moments of discovery. But, more important, during the process of choosing the poem’s three lines, the options are anchored to points of the landscape; the player chooses each line by turning the camera toward it, and by extension the object that backgrounds it. In the earlier video example, “The final defense” was situated upon a rock standing sturdily among ocean waves; “Death’s call is sharp and biting” was situated upon Jin’s swords; “I yearn for guidance was situated” upon a mountaintop temple. Alternative lines, such as “Falling forever” and “The mind recalls the teachings” were respectively situated among the stormy sky and Jin’s head. The example video’s fixation on Jin’s swords and body is actually an exception—most of the game’s haiku focus exclusively on natural environments. These moments where Jin, as a character, reflects upon his situation within the war, double as opportunities for the player to reflect upon their overall experience with the game. The primary way that this occurs is by foregrounding visual elements of the game that players often take for granted.

Ambushing Mongol forces in forests and riding on horseback from fortress to fortress across the land, players of Tsushima see thousands of trees. During the action, players’ eyes are constantly drawn to Jin’s body, his blades, and the Mongol bodies they battle against through Jin as their avatar. While the backdrops of Tsushima are consistently beautiful, they’re seldom the focus. During instances of haiku composition, however, the camera is displaced from Jin, focusing often on trees and waterfalls, spotlighting the exquisite visual detail modern video games are capable of. The game’s haiku not only reflect Jin and the players’ personal journey through the game’s spaces and narratives, but also draw close attention to elements of the landscape that generally go overlooked. Although Ghost of Tsushima’s poetry is not particularly artful in the conventional sense, it provides noteworthy moments of meditation to break up the action. Given the game’s popularity, it has surely introduced a new generation of players to the haiku as a poetic form.

For those interested, here’s a compilation of many other haiku found throughout the game:

^[1] https://gamerant.com/ghost-tsushima-6-5-million-sales-march-2021/

^[2] https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/03/05/ghost-of-tsushima-developers-named-official-tourism-ambassadors

^[3] https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/07/i-asked-an-expert-to-read-my-ghost-of-tsushima-haiku-he-wasnt-impressed/amp/

^[4] Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge, 2009, p. 1.

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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

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Rorschach—an angsty, unstable, doesn’t-play-by-the-rules, detective type of character (complete with trench coat)—narrates portions of the comic through journal entries. While Rorschach, of course, isn’t writing in verse, the flow of his sentences and his vivid (though macabre) descriptions lend themselves well to a poetic reading. One such journal entry initiates Watchmen’s story, with Rorschach detailing his disdain for New York City and its people:

The fragmented structure of the first portion of this journal entry is especially fit for consideration in poetic terms; while these lines lack meter, they certainly have a distinct rhythm that embodies Rorschach’s emotionality—providing some quick images of the dead dog as representative of the city before Rorschach reveals his egocentrism and self-image as not only an anti-hero, but a kind of anti-savior who sees himself fit to judge the city for its perceived sins. Confined to a text bubble within narrow panel art, the first blurb of the above quotation even mimics the shape of an enjambed blank verse stanza. One can write this mimicry off as coincidence, but the shape of these sentences nevertheless influences the pace at which they’re read. If we are willing to entertain this text bubble as a tidbit of poetry, the enjambment of “this / city” wields particular significance in reference to Rorschach’s psyche. In the next line, he states that the city “is afraid of” him. The sentence arrives at a full stop without spilling down into the next line, imparting Rorschach’s confidence. “This / city” however, and the gruesome imagery Rorschach introduces it with, lacks the stability he assigns to his own character, fragmenting this fictionalized New York not only through the pacing of its descriptive images, but also the consistent breaking up of those descriptions via enjambment.

Conversely, the two sentences making up the middle portion of the above citation flow quickly. Although they’re typographically structured similarly to the first text bubble, their minimal punctuation facilitates a greater emphasis on the words themselves.

Though, once again, Rorschach’s words are unmetered, repetition and (especially) his immediately identifiable hate for New York result in a dialogue with semi-regularly stressed syllables. For example: “The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood.” Apart from the rough feeling resulting from the repeated ‘guh’ sounds, this phrase parallels two seven syllable clauses (divided after the first “gutters”). The second half of this text bubble pair runs more freely as Rorschach builds anticipation toward his anti-hero/savior stance where he refuses to “save” the city. The stresses, as I read them, are bolded here: “The accumulated filth of all their sex and murderwill foam up about their waists…” There’s a continuous action to Rorschach’s phrasing in this moment, generating emphasis every few words, collectively forming emphases centered upon his judgements of Watchmen’s fictionalized New York City society, not only textualizing his resentment and rejection of the place and its people, but truly verbalizing that resentment and rejection, as the cadence of his speech can so clearly be read by the structure of his sentences.

But what do we draw from this kind of linguistic character work in Watchmen?—what politics arise from Rorschach’s edgy, abrasive poetry? In terms of iconographic legacy, Rorschach is lauded within comic fandoms—which makes sense; he’s got a lot of archetypal ‘coolness’ going for him as an even grittier, more mentally troubled play on batman.^[1] But a celebratory visage of his gritty ‘coolness’ as an anti-hero sidesteps his extremism as an anti-savior—his belief in moral absolutism through which he justifies many prejudices.^[2] This is where Dylan’s “Desolation Row” is of utmost relevance. Watchmen’s first chapter being titled “At Midnight, All the Agents…” evokes Dylan’s song as a foil. Rorschach’s social concerns and judgements thematically align with “Desolation Row” (addressing many of the same subjects), but they do not align politically. Dylan’s lyric about “agents” and “superhumans” rounding people up is an illustration of evil, making for a verse that’s decidedly critical of authority—the verse ends with the people who were rounded up being strapped to a “heart attack machine,” making clear the ill intent of said “agents” and “superhumans.” Rorschach, however, fueled by disdain for society, feels justified in becoming such an agent, a judge who determines the meaning of “good” and then has the authority to work toward that definition even if it entails harming others.

This contrast between Rorschach’s philosophy and Dylan’s lyrics is furthered by Rorschach’s fixation on ugliness. To him, there is no redeeming feature of the city. As he says, “…all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “save us!” … and I’ll look down and whisper ‘no.’” Although Dylan’s lyrics also paint a bleak portrait of urban Americana, the song ultimately manages to provoke beauty from its subject matter of sorrow and chaos. It details the people of Desolation Row with minimal judgement, dedicating almost eleven and a half minutes of song to immersing listeners within this fictional neighborhood, allowing them to become acquainted with its many characters. Perhaps the clearest factor of difference between “Desolation Row” and Rorschach’s first journal entry is their inaugural lines. While Rorschach compares New York City to a dead animal and then positions himself as a moral judge, “Desolation Row’s” first verse begins as such: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” and then the song’s first chorus begins, “…the riot squad, they’re restless / They need somewhere to go.” Commoditized racism and imminent police brutality frame the song within its first lines, illustrating and suggesting a critique of external and institutional reasons which contribute to the plight of places such as Desolation Row. The socioeconomic underclass to which Rorschach would simply whisper “no” is instead, by Dylan’s ballad, rendered with heartbreaking and beautiful honesty, confronting the troubles of the city without condemning it.

Further reading, for those interested:

• This Escapist article briefly goes over the ambiguities of Rorschach’s character and how they relate to modern political reactions, especially since the release of Watchmen 2019 on HBO.
• Andrew Hoberek’s book Considering Watchmen (2014, Rutgers University Press) contains an entire chapter on the comic’s poetics, addressing Rorschach as well providing substantial analysis of poetic dialogue from Dr. Manhattan, among other things.
• “Desolation Row” itself does not appear in the 2008 film adaptation of Watchmen, but the film does feature an opening montage set to Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” which, while perhaps less subtle than Dylan’s usage in the comics, still makes for an interesting watch and listen

^[1] HBO’s Watchmen (2019) connected Rorschach’s moral absolutism with white supremacy, generating vicious backlash from certain audience demographics.

^[2] On ch. 1, p. 1 he describes his ideal American working man, juxtaposing “a day’s work, a day’s pay” with communism. On ch. 1, p. 14 he shows disgust for the welfare system, specifically mentioning a mother with five children that he presumes are from different fathers. On ch.1, p. 19 he negatively remarks upon another characters “liberal affiliations,” then stating “Possibly homosexual? Must remember to investigate further.” There are many other such examples throughout.

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