What do poetry-fags think about hip-hop lyrics? I'm mainly talking about 'the greats', that is Nas, Kendrick, Kanye...

They pray four times a day, they pray five
Who ways is strange when it's time to survive
Some will go of they own free will to die
Others take them with you when they blow sky high
What's the difference? All you get is lost children
While the bosses sit up behind the desks, it cost billions
To blast humans in half, into calves and arms
Only one side is allowed to have bombs
It's like making a soldier drop his weapon
Shooting him, and telling him to get to stepping
Obviously, they came to portion up his fortune
Sounds to me like that old robbery/extortion

Overrated.

Danny Brown has some legit shit.

If those are the first three names that come to your head when you think of greatest rappers you should listen to more rap.

And to answer ilike hip hop lyrics and poetry. Album Rosebuds revenge, and honour killed the samurai, are nice.

But to be honest i find musicians like dylan and leonard cohen and patti Smith more poetic and fun to listen to in a similar way poetry is fun to read. Probably because those artist were all poets.

>Listing Kanye as one of "The Greats"
>Not listing "Pac, Biggie, Big Pun, Big L, AZ, Treach, MF Doom, Aesop Rock, Eminem, Mos Def, Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, Redman, Andre 3000, Prodigy, or any of the members of Wu-Tang,
Are you even fucking trying mate?

DOOM is a garbage lyricist. His rhyme schemes are crazy but they're borderline word salad-tier sometimes. It's a lot easier to make up crazy rhymes when things don't have to make sense.

You sound like someone who had 75% of his songs go right over your head.

On Doomsday!, ever since the womb ‘til I'm back where my brother went, that's what my tomb will say
Right above my government; Dumile
Either unmarked or engraved, hey, who's to say?
I wrote this one in B.C. D.C. O-section
If you don't believe me, go get bagged and check then
Cell number 17, up under the top bunk
I say this not to be mean, wish bad luck or pop junk

FUCK HER FACE LIKE I WAS OBLIGATED

yeh this isnt poetry, its not even verse.

lil uzi vert - all my friends are dead, push me to the edge

>being this retarded
What is free verse? Why isn't my rap song in iambic pentameter?

Eminem once wrote an entire song in anapestic tetrameter, just to prove that he could:

I sit back with this pack of Zig-Zag's and this bag
Of this weed, it gives me the shit needed to be
The most meanest MC on this on this earth
And since birth I've been cursed with this curse to just curse
And just blurt this berserk and bizarre shit that works
And it sells and it helps in itself to relieve all this tension
Dispensing these sentences, getting this stress
That's been eating me recently off of this chest
And I rest again peacefully
But at least have the decency in you
To leave me alone, when you freaks see me out
In the streets when I'm eating or feeding my daughter
To not come and speak to me, I don't know you
And no, I don't owe you a mothafuckin' thing
I'm not Mr. N'Sync, I'm not what your friends think
I'm not Mr. Friendly, I can be a prick if you tempt me
My tank is on empty, no patience is in me
And if you offend me, I'm lifting you ten feet in the air
I don't care who was there and who saw me just jaw you
Go call you a lawyer, file you a lawsuit
I'll smile in the courtroom and buy you a wardrobe
I'm tired of all you, I don't mean to be mean
But that's all I can be, it's just me

Yeah, and Eminem would have been the first person to read and think "wow what a pretentious faggot who doesn't understand the genre".

Ooga Booga Dindu Nuffin

Disgusting thread.

You got me there.

agreed

>hurr you just don't understand
Yeah nice one dude. I've listened to his whole discography ten times over; his lyricism is still garbage. This isn't even disputed in the hip-hop community. Nobody thinks MF DOOM is the GOAT lyricist.

nigga nigg oooooga booga

>Nobody thinks MF DOOM is the GOAT lyricist.
Oh, I get it. Nice b8 man you got me.

>Eminem has better lyrics than Kanye

Let me rephrase that, only 16 year old memers that know nothing about hip-hop think MF DOOM is the GOAT. It's the most level entry music hipster opinion you could have up there with thinking Neutral Milk Hotel is the greatest band ever or whatever.

>mbdtf

>not GZA
Kendrick is probably the only modern one on that list I'd consider great and mainly only because of Sing About Me. Honestly his magnum opus youtube.com/watch?v=xtIr8k4eC7o

That's a stupid opinion.

When 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 ever seriously read poetry

Like, could /mu/ 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? Do the teenagers who listen to hip hop 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 bitter poverty and angst? To then subtly contradict this established structure in order to draw attention to yet another image?

This isn't a cheap spread of internal rhymes, puns, and trendy slang; this is a man loading no more than eight lines with as much content as the English language allows.

Illmatic is a entertaining 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 total horseshit, and I think the people pushing this can smell it. No he fucking does not; he wrote his lyrics according to some DJ Premier beat and what his friends thought would sound cool over it. 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 painfully 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 complete trash. It's not original, it's not insightful, and it's definitely not skillful. It should be performed over music and never ever EVER separated from it

In the future Shakespeare will probably be taught exclusively in rap form by biracial nu-males. They'll ask their students to make a mixtape on how that shit spoke to them for homework. After high school students will occasionally pursue hip hop studies instead of literature at their 500k/semester fourth tier state school. They'll drop out after a year and end up working at Costco while living with their parents, who in turn are still living with their parents. Kendrick Lamar will have a Nobel Prize (it turns out this was the reason they gave it to Dylan--the Swedes wanted to open the playing field to rappers, who have exclusively dominated the award every year since 2025). President Beyonce will recognize Lil Rapey for his contributions to the poetic arts in the form of the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Why?

Facts

>implying raps worth listening to

My fucking sides

The underachievers produce lit quality content.

You make some fair points.

I'm a big rap fan, but it's a strange comparison. Good rap, however, is about musicality, is about the meeting point of text and music (just like Patti Smith and Dylan and Cohen as said). And it's about performance.

For example: Clipping - story 2
youtu.be/XbU9UUwxBxA

But no, rap and """real""" poetry aren't the same. It's not that they're "not in the same league", they just play a different genre with the same instruments.

cosmoetica.com/B723-AS1.htm

>Honour killed the samurai
My favourite rap release of 2016.

GKMC>DAMN>>>TPAB

There are obviously sub-sets of quality within every genre, but I think there's this general failure to discriminate between higher and lower forms recently, the fact that a lot of contemporary poetry is quite shit adds to this, but the comparison is utterly ridiculous.

Just look at the subject matter. Its a vanishingly rare hip hop track that isn't basically just crude come ons or gabbling about violent crime in a uninspired way. When it does take on weightier topics (and inevitably gets called "iconic" after this), it usually does so in a simplistic and boring fashion, without any self awareness at all.

It is that they are "not in the same league". There's examples of both I love and hate, but at its best proper poetry aims to be transcendent, and to communicate universal expressions about life that can leave you stunned. I don't think anyones ever had that listening to Kanye West, and I say that as someone who likes him.

Thank you. I think there's this general fear of saying one work of art is better than another "because that's elitist" or even worse judging quality by the market value which is culturally like being choked

Heres a bottle opener pop open your coping mechanism
Cold turkey and poke up at your personalities
Bind them together merging spring and December
Lending an effort to your own hand reaping the benefits of your amenities
One by one binding simple brown
sky blue ice color Antarctic episode of the world spinning itself around
Tuesday turned itself to Wednesday numb sound
Of voices and dreams turning out to be trains making the rounds
I planned this Im going to where Ive seen supplements
Causing glaciered items to form and melt under my skin
I am an auction of faculty, a reaction to this pasty planets purpose
And honestly, sometimes that makes me nervous
But through wrinkles on faces, grey hairs, and slow downs
Through chords, shelters, meetings, molars, gold crowns
Ghost towns, sold out shows to no one around
The lines on my face will undoubtedly have become their own sound

Believe me it's not a fear it's a reality. While all art may be appreciated, it's not all equal. And not to be racist but the African American culture of America in particular highly regards all forms of art being released by those of their own and disregards the fact that half of it perpetuates them against their own stereotypes. So many many times I'll be working them and hear 'oh man not to play the race card but that's such a black thing to do' when me and white friends do it all the time too. While I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a lack of inherent intelligence, there's definitely a beer within the mind of a black person to separate themselves from white culture rather than naturally integrate themselves and realize there are quite a lot of correlations. The whole point of fix though is that I can not discuss half the music I listen to because they don't like the style, and though some are highly cognitive and lyrical, they claim it isn't that great or overwrought when they then in turn play kanye and tupac and biggie when on topic of greatest musicians. The mind truly does only think of what the eyes and ears see and hear.

You should make more friends like James Emmanuel.

After The Record Is Broken

My mind slips back to lesser men,
Their how, their when.
Champions then:
Big Stilley, with his bandaged hands,
Broke through the Sidney line, the stands
Hysterical, profuse the rival bands.
Poor Ackerman, his spikes undone,
His strap awry, gave way to none,
Not even pride. The mile he won.

Now higher, faster, farther. Stars crossed
Recede, and legends twinkle out, far lost,
Far discus-spun and javelin-tossed,
Nor raise again that pull and sweat,
That dig and burn, that crouch-get-set
Aglimmer in old trophies yet.
Now smoother, softer, trimmed for speed,
The champion seems a better breed,
His victory a showroom deed.

Oh, what have we to do with men
Like champions, but cry again
How high, how fast, how far? What then?
Remember men when records fall.
Unclap your hands, draw close your shawl:
The lesser men have done it all.

You misinterpreted my point.

I didn't care about your point. I just wanted to post James Emmanuel

Sonnet For A Writer

Far rather would I search my chaff for grain
And cease at last with hunger in my soul,
Than suck the polished wheat another brain
Refurbished till it shone, by art’s control.
To stray across my own mind’s half-hewn stone
And chisel in the dark, in hopes to cast
A fragment of our common self, my own,
Excels the mimicry of sages past.
Go forth, my soul, in painful, lonely flight,
Even if no higher than the earthbound tree,
And feel suffusion with more glorious light,
Nor envy eagles their proud brilliancy.
Far better to create one living line
Than learn a hundred sunk in fame’s recline.

Then you're the exact person I don't give a fuck about.

Prayer For A Bigot

Let him have peace: some clanking creed to hail,
Some pinching stools to seat his colic band;
Give him aborted, skulking notes to mail,
Some pseudonyms to libel in the sand.
Toss him some paper beauty to deface,
Plump effigies for plunge of hidden pin;
And for the banner of his hungry race
Some gaudy rag to sew his features in.
But let his anger scrub a lovely cause
Until its sides are bright with truth reclaimed,
And let his keyhole wit grow noisy jaws
As long as fair-beamed halls are uninflamed.
Once let him turn a strong man from his gate,
And turn again, and learn the cost of hate.

>Anonymous

Stank pussy smelling like cool ranch Doritos

>three 6 mafia
Patrician taste m8

Say ah, not a thermometer, bitch
It's the nine inches
Ass and titties, ass and titties
Ass and titties and big booty bitches
Ass and titties, ass and titties
Ass and titties and big booty bitches
Ass and titties, ass and titties
Ass and titties and big booty bitches
Ass and titties, ass and titties
Ass and titties and big booty bitches

Rap's

this. now pass the junt homey.

this is just sad

>Danny Brown has some legit shit.
Danny is the most creative rapper active today imo.

Don't but when I do
I'll tell you how I knew
I've always known
I've always known
I was conceived, by my disease
Up my sleeves
Anyhow, anymore, anyone, anything
Anywhere, anytime
Snatch my fetish

Odd man
Tsunami feral
Get barreled in other worlds
No hand in sea of pearls
Buried in frozen Jheri curls
Odd man
Herzog
Shootin' solitaire
No hands
Have one over
Shocker glares
Zulu somnambulic stare
Flick up my wrist
Ooh, shit
Ooh, ah-ooh shit
Phantom lips
Crude lips
I'm in eyelid exclusive
Flick up my wrist
Oooh, shit
Ooh, ah-ooh shit
Flick up my wrist
Aw, shit
Ahh
I'm not shit
She turnin' telly
Through the shriveled button quest jaundiced yellow
She's your experience with your experiment
No false symbol flied glit in oh please shock me so sorry falsetto
You're her experiment
She's your experience

Yet the goal of rap is also to "to be transcendent, and to communicate universal expressions", it just doesn't seem that way because the determining factor in a songs popularity is sonics not lyricism. Everything you accuse rap of being guilty of, poetry is guilty of. The problem is your argument hinges on comparing GOOD poetry with BAD rap. But while rap can be crude and uninspired so too can poetry. If we are to look at modern popular poets like Rupi Kaur and Mira Gonzalez, the same shallowness and surface level exploration of "complex" topics can be found. It is less that rap is simplistic but that simplicity makes it easier to attain mass popularity. And it is not complex hip hop is "vanishingly rare" but that you're knowledge of the genre is limited.

>it’s not a surprise that hip-hop changed my life
Lmao dropped the article after that, there is nothing more embarassing for a normal white person to say

I like Kanye because he's one of the most unintentionally absurd lyricists ever. Kendrick could suck a dick though, it sucks that he's going to be taught in schools for generations to come when there's nothing special about him.

> doesn't read
> dude hip hop lyrics are so deep, they like, rhyme!

>tfw this isn't that far-fetched

Nice bait, the kanye one was too obvious tho

Agree. Rap has been inflated to such an insane degree that you can't criticize it without inviting accusations of racism or some "you just don't understand" shit.
Compared to actual acclaimed poets, the best rap is nothing.

>Kendrick Lamar will have a Nobel Prize
To be honest I'm surprised there hasn't been a push for this already.
People worship Kendrick and other rappers to an absolutely insane degree, and even hold the most mindless trashy pop singers (Beyonce, Rihanna) to similar acclaim because of meaningless "yass gurl" "empowering women" messages that don't exist.

He's got some good parts, but he's inconsistent (like almost every rapper)

They fail in the fact that the wordplay is so frequently pointless and the sonics aren't as smooth as they think they are. Someone like Saul Williams or Montana of 300, with fairly straightforward rhythms that are extremely polished, tend to have fewer non-sequiturs than a Young Thug or K-Dot.

As much as I love The Grips (and think Burnett's a very talented lyricist), their more recent lyrics are truly gibberish.

I've always preferred stupid Lil Wayne style one-liner rap to overblown """conscious""" shit with forced rhymes and convoluted structure.
Rap shouldn't try to ascent into "true art" until it can move past its barbarically simple nature.

Dawg, I want to write a dissertation on notm about why you're wrong.

I'd genuinely love to know, it's my favorite album of theirs but I've never been able to get any meaning out of it (I can't believe the stupid Kanye-related conspiracy theories). Whereas TMS or NLDW were pretty abstract but you could still tell what he was talking about.

>You ol' pussy-ass, cake-ass, punk-ass, trick-ass, sucker-ass, fuck-ass, dick-in-the-booty-ass, K-Y Jelly-packing-ass nigga
>You better get your bitch ass up off the street, nigga
>Yeah, nigga, y'all know the motherfucking sco', y'all non-snorters, non-smokers, non-sippers, get the fuck up out of here, bitch
>Nigga, it's some sipping-ass, pouring up-ass, smoking-ass, getting high-ass niggas in here

"we eat so many shrimp, we got iodine poisoning"

hah! and who said rappers never think of the consequences of a high-money lifestyle?

I agree with you, but NotM was still on the good side. It's after that it fell off.

What do poetry-fags think about Parquet Courts?

I like their music but I would not call it poetry, you are adding rhythm and pace to the words, some people like using this words while describing poems, but they belong to different spaces.

Also I'm printing a book with whatever you want to write, so if you want to contribute here's the link.
docs.google.com/document/d/183Hdc0gbcVfSIk7_snYi98OCJGOdwW15fCWP96XCfQ4/edit?usp=sharing

He’s a god tier producer.
But I mediocre lyricist.

With the exception of MBDTF. Which is 10/10.

GKMC was a flash in the pan desu.
Section 80 was just okay, and everything now is just garbage.

>SIT DOWN
>BE HUMBLE
>SYURP SANDWICHES
>WE GUN BE ALRIGHT
Yassss kweeeen slayyyyyy

10/10

Post-MBDTF he's really let himself go. Yeezus was poor lyrically - "Keep it 300 like the Romans" always makes me wince - and The Life of Pablo doesn't offer much substance outside of Ultralight Beam and a few neat sample-based melodies.

Old school Kanye offered a lot of heart, self-awareness into his persona, playfulness, self-assessment and personality.

Yeah, man, Danny is great but he's dirty too. That line about giving a girl stretch marks on her jaw always makes my toes curl. Going to see him live in support of Run The Jewels, gonna be a good show, man.

Why would I listen to black men screaming nursery rhymes at me? Why would anyone want that?

Where are you seeing him?

Stupid comparison, no matter how similar they are.

Comparing rap lyrics to poetry is stupid, because rap is meant to be taken as a whole, with accompanying music.

It's like asking if a classical painting is superior to modern television. Both visual arts, but with different tools and aims.

Rap does not rely on a beat, neither does hip hop rely on rap. Both can exist independently of one another. Rap is a subcategory of poetry. It relies heavily on poetic conventions and devices. Your comparison does not hold up since TV does not rely on classical painting as much as rap depends on poetic devices.

>you just don't GET this rapper with a fairly high 2 digit IQ

Rap songs are nursery rhymes for people's wounded egos to get high on. Comes down to "I'm really awesome and you're not", and if it's some kind of 'social message' then that's even worse.

It's the musical equivalent of superhero movies. It's a nice way to know you don't have to respect someone's taste in anything though. "Oh, you like rap music? Cool, I don't have to value your opinions on anything, thanks for saving me time."

>Rap does not rely on a beat
It absolutely and completely does. The beat is much, much more important that the lyrics, so much more so that the lyrics can be literal gibberish so long as they accompany the music well

What about accapella rap and battlerap?

Mediocrities that are more of a sport than music

>Veeky Forums unironically discussing rap

So accapella rap and battlerap are not rap?

Of course they're rap, but atrociously bad rap that demonstrates how deeply rap relies on a beat

Anyone ITT equating rap with poetry should be embarassed. You're all probably teenagers who don't even read poetry. And I knew there was some /mu/ overlap with the MBDTF garbage, doesn't impress anyone able to form their own opinions on music. Shame you are all anonymous because this discredits any future opinions

Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis

Lil B is objectively the most creative rapper of the '10s. Danny Brown is great though--he was dope live.

that is cringe.

Kendrick blows, especially live. He couldn't freestyle to save his life.

idk, it's pretty reminiscent of the throwaway poetry that people like Dante sent off to the Troubadours. Rap has a relatively low ceiling, but the threshold level of artistry is probably about the same. They tend to be equally affected, and generally cover the same topics (love, intoxication).

death grips is shit music for undifferentiating white people. they have a few good songs.

the explanation for that is CCC (300 in roman numerals) = Cool, Calm, Collected. imo he was probably thinking of the movie 300 and fucked up. Yeezus is still one of his best albums. MBDTF is overrated as fuck. LR is the GOAT.

Battlerap sucks because in 2017 its 99% writtens.

Bump Chief Keef in your car. If you don't enjoy yourself, you're literally gay.

Agreed
I actually feel bad for people who won't read past his vulgarity. Atrocity exhibition is one of the best albums of this decade

what an awful post