Rap Lyrics I Flex on You Boys I Do It Again
The Artists Dismantling the Barriers Between Rap and Poetry
Though the two forms remain distinct, today'southward rising stars in both genres are creating a shared literary ideal that gives vocalisation to the Black and brownish experience.
THE ATLANTA-BASED RAPPER Mulatto collects scraps of language on her iPhone, words and phrases that come to her suddenly, or that she's picked up while performing online during the pandemic. Non surprisingly, 1 of the words that has come to heed during the past year is "pandemic"; the 22-year-former M.C. has used it twice on record so far: once final summer during a aught — a competitive and collaborative freestyle session with other rappers — when the hip-hop magazine XXL named Latto (as she's known) to its 2020 "freshman class" of breakout stars; and again on the opening track from her major-label debut, "Queen of Da Souf," released final yr.
"I just dropped a hundred on jewelry during a pandemic," she raps, give or take a discussion. Information technology's standard-result braggadocio, in praise of her newfound wealth. Merely boasting near spending $100,000 on a diamond-encrusted chain and watch amid a global wellness crunch likewise rates as peculiarly brazen, fifty-fifty in a musical genre that ofttimes centers the cocky and celebrates conspicuous consumption. Latto is aware of this. A few bars later, in her zippo poetry, she adds: "I donated, too, so don't mock me!"
Listen to Latto perform and you understand what she heard in that word. On the XXL freestyle, she raps "pandemic" fluidly over a lazy instrumental, so the word sounds similar urgent spoken language. On "Youngest North Richest," she raps it more deliberately atop a frenetic track fretted with a tense violin sample. "Pandemic" becomes "PAN-demic," the stress displaced from its natural position. In reaccenting the word, Latto charges information technology with her Southern drawl. She puts Atlanta on it. She likewise does the very affair that makes rappers poets: She works the language. "Rap is definitely poetry," Latto tells me. "We but practice it on top of a shell."
Many poets would agree with her. Nonetheless, a line of demarcation persists betwixt rap and poetry, born of outmoded assumptions almost both forms: that poetry just exists on the page and rap but lives in the music, that poesy is refined and rap is raw, that poetry is art and rap is entertainment. These opinions are rife with bias — against the immature, the poor, the Black and brownish, the self-educated, the outspoken and sometimes impolite voices that, beyond v decades, have carried a local tradition from the South Bronx to most every office of the world.
Withal today, a new generation of artists, both rappers and poets, are consciously forging closer kinship between the genres. They draw from a common toolbox of language, use the aforementioned social media platforms to achieve their audiences and reply to the same economic and political provocations to create public fine art. In doing so, rappers and the poets who merits affinity with them are resuscitating a trunk of literary practices mostly neglected in verse during the 20th century. These ghost appendages of form — repetition, patterned rhythm and, in a higher place all, rhyme — thrive in song, peculiarly in rap.
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But the story of rap and poetry'south reunion is as much almost people equally it is about language. Many of the artists in both realms who have come up to prominence betwixt 2010 and 2020 were raised during hip-hop'due south golden age, from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. The poets Reginald Dwayne Betts and Kyle Dargan were built-in in 1980, the same twelvemonth equally T.I. and Gucci Mane. The poet Saeed Jones and the rapper J. Cole were both born in 1985. The acknowledged poet alive, Rupi Kaur, built-in in 1992, is the same age as Cardi B. By the time they all reached simple school, and well before they published a single line, hip-hop had gifted them a rich cultural inheritance. Before generations of rappers had won major battles for artistic legitimacy, established — though certainly not maximized — rap's profitability and produced a catalog of music and lyrics that a new generation could revere and revile, remix and reject.
Through its first four decades, rap was defined by bravura performances that embraced the qualities print-based poesy neglected, whether it was Gift of Gab's aesthetic practice in ingemination on Blackalicious's "Alphabet Aerobics" (1999) or Nicki Minaj'south shape-shifting voice in her breakout poetry on Kanye West's "Monster" (2010). The final decade, all the same, has challenged and changed rap'south aesthetics: Flows — the rhythmic patterns of vocal operation — have grown more melodic and more repetitive. Rap, at least in the mainstream, has become less narrative and less complex in its rhyme structures and metaphors than it was in the time of Eric B. & Rakim'southward "Paid in Full" (1987), Lauryn Hill'due south "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" (1998) or Jay-Z's "The Blackness Album" (2003).
A facile estimation would be to error rap'due south recent turn every bit a decline in craft; really, though, it demonstrates an inclination on the part of artists — and their audiences — to rethink what poetic and musical qualities nearly resonate in tumultuous times. Pop Smoke, the 20-year-old Brooklyn rapper who was killed during a Los Angeles dwelling invasion early last year, had a baritone that charged fifty-fifty unremarkable words with haunting power. On his 2019 hit "Dior," he seeks out open up-concluded vowel sounds, like the long "o" in the title give-and-take, stressing the syllable to showcase the low rumble of his vocalization. When the 25-year-old North Philadelphia rapper Tierra Whack uses the same word on her 2020 song "Dora," she playfully clusters around it a verse'south worth of end rhymes: "door," "more," "Porsche," "of course," "horse," "floor," "adore." Then there's the 28-year-old New York rapper Young M.A, who in 2019'due south "PettyWap" plays on the percussive possibilities of the discussion in a line that hits similar a drum make full, the pounding bass drum of strong-stress syllables and the hissing loftier-lid of alliteration on the "s" sounds: "DI-or my col-OGNE, she said my Smell is her Obsess-ion." What draws these artists to Dior is not just the luxury associated with the brand but the texture of the word on the natural language. In contemporary rap, audio often leads sense, defining rhythm, rhyme and vocalization all at once.
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MEANWHILE, A PARALLEL evolution is underway in verse, spurring a renaissance of sorts. In 2012, co-ordinate to the National Endowment for the Arts' Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, just vi.7 percent of adults reported having read poetry in the final year. By 2017, the number had nearly doubled, with the largest increment (from viii.2 to 17.5 percent) occurring amidst 18- to 24-twelvemonth-olds.
Several factors have contributed to verse's resurgence: the influence of Twitter, Instagram and TikTok every bit performance and promotion platforms; the proliferation of pocket-size presses and online journals publishing increasingly varied piece of work; the pull of poetic language, equally both balm and bludgeon, during periods of national struggle. Poetry's growing readership is no doubt likewise tied to its expanding authorship, as a various assortment of voices are now choosing to express themselves in patterned words. "Admission is all yous need," the poet Morgan Parker says. "People just don't know that they similar poesy."
Parker'south revelation came when she discovered that verse didn't just take to sound like Robert Frost; it could speak in words and tones familiar to her, a Black woman born in Southern California in 1987. Writing in 1944, ane of Frost's contemporaries, William Carlos Williams, divers a verse form as "a pocket-sized (or large) machine made of words," by which he meant to emphasize the precision of form over the profundity of meaning. "Prose may deport a load of sick-defined thing like a send," he continues. "But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy." Economy of linguistic communication remains one of poetry'due south hallmarks. By contrast, language in rap is usually abundant, performance on the rhetorical principle of copia, which Erasmus defined in 1512 as a practice of amplifying expression through variation, beautification and play. It'due south no wonder that rap inspires writers like Parker to call up more than expansively virtually what their own piece of work could be. A poem is "no longer just a nice affair to say at a hymeneals," she says. "Nosotros've reached cultural acceptance of a broader definition."
Still, at their about basic levels, poesy and rap are both structured on repetition and departure. Repetition functions past accretion — edifice up a sound or an thought until it reaches critical mass — and transformation, keeping some parts and irresolute others. Repetition has an indelible place in Blackness expressive culture: in the syncopated rhythms of jazz, the phrasal repetitions of the dejection and the guttural moans of soul made meaningful by dint of remarkable vocal performances. "Repetition shapes Black in a lot of ways," Parker says. "For me information technology becomes, 'What am I going to repeat? What is not being heard the first fourth dimension or the second time or the tertiary time?'" Her most recent poetry collection, "Magical Negro" (2019), includes a poem called "'Now More Than Always'" that opens with a 44-line most-clinical account of white guilt and the brunt it imposes on Blackness people. In the middle of the 44th line, the language catches, like a record stuck in the groove, and the remaining 31 lines echo "and ever" across the folio, uninterrupted save for 2 bracketed ellipses and a closing parenthetical, "(cont.)" — an innocuous abbreviation made metaphor for unrelenting Black suffering.
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Another 1987 baby, Compton'southward Kendrick Lamar, is similarly drawn to repetition. On "Fright.," from Lamar'south fourth studio album, "DAMN." (2017), he upends assumptions about what rap virtuosity should sound like. Rather than displaying his vaunted vocabulary, he constricts his language, repeating words and shading them with new meanings through a technique called incremental repetition, a term first used to draw the exercise in medieval ballads of incorporating the same phrase through shifting contexts. "Repetition foregrounds emotion without having to become out and express that emotion explicitly," says Dargan, a Washington, D.C.-based poet. Lamar puts that principle into action: On the second verse of "Fear.," "I'll probably die" — or some slight variation of those words — starts all but 2 lines. With all that repetition at the outset of lines, it'due south piece of cake to overlook what's missing from the terminate: rhyme. In an art form in which finish rhyme is the rule, finding a way to evangelize your verse without your listeners' missing the rhyme might exist the greatest poetic flex of all.
IN FINDING THEIR own words, many poets have besides turned to hip-hop. The 31-year-former poet Nate Marshall, a prodigy of the youth slam scene of early 2000s Chicago, vicious in beloved with linguistic communication through performance, spitting rap verses in ciphers with friends and reciting spoken-discussion poetry onstage at competitions. Though slams emerged in the 1980s in Chicago and spread across the world through the 1990s and early 2000s, spoken word has existed in different forms for millenniums beyond all continents; simply put, it's poetry that even when written is intended to be performed. In his younger years, Marshall thought of his writing as little more than than a script. Now the author of multiple books, he carries that declamatory arroyo to impress: "As a poet, you want to remember of your page equally a place to perform. ... I try to do something on the page so that if yous tin't meet me, you'll still know how to approach my verse."
The key strategy that Marshall borrows from hip-hop is the sample. Sampling, the practice of taking an existing recording and repurposing information technology, is foundational to rap'southward soundscape. You can hear it on Megan Thee Stallion'southward "Go Crazy," a track from her debut studio anthology, "Expert News" (2020), that samples Naughty past Nature's "O.P.P." (1991), which itself samples the Jackson 5'south "ABC" (1970). Sampling also informs her lyrics, as when she channels Due north.W.A's Eazy-E on "Girls in the Hood," borrowing elements of his delivery. In literary terms, sampling is alike to innuendo — a brief, indirect reference. Sampling, however, is likewise born of the Black colloquial tradition that gave us chitterlings, jazz and, yes, hip-hop. The writer Ralph Ellison once described the colloquial not simply as a spoken dialect but as a "dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the past are continually merged with the play-it-past-centre-and-past-ear improvisations which we invent in our efforts to control our environs and entertain ourselves." Hip-hop has historically taken that which is given, discarded or even foisted upon it and turned it into something entertaining, even liberating.
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For both poets and rappers, sampling can become a political act. Betts, who is 40 and lives in New Oasis, Conn., used sampling every bit the organizing principle of his drove "Bastards of the Reagan Era" (2015). Independent inside his measured lines are allusions to Homer and Public Enemy, Nas and Paul Laurence Dunbar. "I got all of these influences that are in here," he says. "'Cause hip-hop, information technology'southward like, 'Permit me flex and show you lot how I can do this affair.'" The book received enough of praise, merely many critics missed the indicate, describing Betts's work every bit raw and gritty, when the title poem is entirely in blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter. "That'southward Shakespeare! If you didn't hear that, and so I know all that you lot were able to run across," Betts says. Hip-hop gives him license to engage in audacious amalgamations of poetic forms and traditions. "Information technology's vigorous in that way," he says. "I become that from hip-hop."
Hip-hop is often subject to this same mismeasure: that it is artless, unmediated expression; that its offset-person vocalisation speaks for rappers solitary, never other personas; that anyone can practice it. Just merely try rapping to a beat. Information technology requires the orchestration of lungs and vocal folds, teeth and tongue — not to mention rhythm and invention. Neuroscientific fMRIs tell us what hip-hop artists already know: "Spontaneous improvisation is a complex cognitive procedure that shares features with what has been characterized equally a 'flow' state," researchers reported in the open-access journal Scientific Reports in 2012, offer a provisional understanding of the zone rappers enter when performing. Perhaps that's what it really means to menstruation.
"You mind to the flow get-go, and and so you catch the lyrics," Latto says. She oft starts writing by mumbling sounds, which she'll tape on her phone, capturing the cadence in nonsense syllables. Afterwards, she'll go dorsum and fit words to the beats, but she starts with rhythm because she knows that her audience will, too. "Subsequently they get over the period and actually listen to what I'm saying, they're like, 'Oh, wow!'" That kind of flow comes through in poets' pages as well. In "slave grammer," from Marshall'southward most recent collection, "Finna" (2020), he approximates the rhythms of rap, voicing in print the swagger that makes certain verses memorable: "whole time i'1000 bending the language / similar a bow every arrow is spinning itself / a new sharp tip. whole fourth dimension / i'thou writing this downwards its obsoleting / itself. whole time we talking we ain't got / no dictionary we guessing the spelling / we deciphering the phrases through / our slurs we slurring like we ain't sure until / we murmur a certain vow." With simile and sonic devices like assonance (the nonrhyming echo of a vowel audio), Marshall compels united states to flow, whether nosotros want to or not.
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Rappers have an obvious advantage over page-born poets when information technology comes to rhythm. But poets can shape rhythm, too, through patterns of stress, every bit well every bit through their lines on the page. Poets differ from writers of prose in that they, not the typographer, choose where their lines should end, thus giving them the ability to play with a reader's sense of fourth dimension. Enjambment, when a syntactic unit overflows from one line to the next, is a bedrock poetic do, one that endows poets with the capacity to make and remake meaning. In "Highest," from his forthcoming collection "Somebody Else Sold the Globe," the 49-year-old Indianapolis-based poet Adrian Matejka riffs on Travis Scott's 2019 hit "Highest in the Room," but where Scott's lines are nigh entirely end-stopped — that is, resolving in a completed phrase — Matejka's are mostly enjambed. Sometimes the event is syncopation: "That'south / Machu Picchu high." Other times, it suspends then reanimates an prototype with simile: "I raise up / like the highest Black hand in history form." Nonetheless other times, it allows Matejka to unfurl a complex idea across several lines: "I am risen like the claret pressure of anybody / Blackness mimeographed in the textbook / of this monochromatic year." In begetting witness to a year of pandemic and racist violence, Matejka'southward line breaks deny any endeavor to skim past the pain.
Moments like these reveal the reciprocity between rap and poetry, small matters of form with large impacts on meaning. "For me, it's sound," the 45-twelvemonth-old Los Angeles poet Khadijah Queen says of her work'southward connectedness to hip-hop, though her poesy also makes use of silence. In her most recent drove, "Anodyne" (2020), she uses the entire page, writing not simply with words but with the blank space around them. Her lines trip the light fantastic, yep, but they also stumble, choice themselves back up, stop and beginning in ways that call to mind an inventive M.C. riding a dozen dissimilar beats in succession.
Queen also understands her office and that of her beau poets and rappers as necessarily engaged in borough work. She looks to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, perhaps the near prominent Black woman writer of the 19th century, who used her platform to advocate for the abolition of slavery and the rights of women and children. "Our office is to capture what folks are feeling in this time of contradiction: the difficulty and the beauty together. We are called to admit what is happening with clarity," Queen says. In the aftermath of the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and many others, rappers were likewise moved to speak out in song. Atlanta'southward Lil Babe, 26 and 1 of the virtually successful rising artists, released "The Bigger Picture" in June, in which he earnestly grapples with police brutality: "It own't makin' sense; I'm just hither to vent." Over the last year, several other songs gave phonation to Americans' anger and pain: Terrace Martin'south "Pig Feet," featuring Denzel Curry, Daylyt, K Perico and Kamasi Washington; Noname's "Song 33"; Meek Mill'south "Otherside of America"; H.Due east.R.'due south "I Can't Exhale"; Anderson .Paak's "Lockdown." For Queen and other Black poets, hip-hop is not only beats and rhymes but something more needful. Hearing Black voices speaking on their ain terms creates a refuge, particularly at a time when Black and Black people are under siege. "I love hip-hop because it foregrounds the use of Blackness spoken communication equally the default," she says. "Information technology'southward a space to exist who you lot are, unapologetically."
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THE CITY GIRLS don't repent to anybody. Babyhood friends from different areas of Miami-Dade County — Yung Miami, 27, is from Opa-locka and JT, 28, is from Liberty Metropolis — they grew up with defiant hometown pride. "The Miami audio is our slang. The mode I talk is the fashion I rap," JT says. One of their biggest hits, "Pussy Talk" (2020), featuring the swain newcomer Doja True cat, 25, is about just what y'all'd look from its championship. They use the term with joyous abandon, uttering it 73 times in but over three-and-a-half minutes. The song might sound like an act of reclamation — taking back a word weaponized past men. Merely mostly it's a mood, JT says: "The sounds, the fast beats, the movement, the raunchy lyrics, beingness real outspoken, just saying whatever we feel."
When the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape leaked just weeks before the 2016 presidential ballot, Donald Trump and his supporters rushed to characterize his words as "locker room banter." Claiming that slang for a part of the female person anatomy belonged to an all-male space was baffling. Still, his offhand utterance projected the give-and-take into common parlance. "Donald Trump really did blow up 'pussy' in the public consciousness of the Usa," says Anne H. Charity Hudley, a leading scholar of Black linguistic traditions at the Academy of California, Santa Barbara. Though the word has been around for generations, it had resided primarily in the intimate vocabulary of private life. Newly public, is it any wonder we now notice the discussion topping the Billboard charts?
Charity Hudley sees shifting attitudes when information technology comes to profanity — not and so much a coarsening of the culture as a liberalization of language. "Bad words are not going to be seen as that bad anymore. We're not in that time culturally," she says. That doesn't mean that anything goes or that words will no longer carry within them the capacity to practice impairment; rather, information technology will come down to context.
Context, in fact, explains how profanity can play such an of import role in the output of both rappers and the poets whom they inspire. In the poem "my mom'due south favorite rapper was As well Short," (2020), Marshall explores the role that explicit language served for his own emerging literary sensibility: "how / can i unlearn some of the curses / that were the first / spells i saw conjured?" In his mother'due south rapturous recitation of Too Brusk's "CussWords" (1988), Marshall learned the expressive and emotive range that profane speech can accept when put to poetic work. Parker is also attuned to the impact explicit linguistic communication can make, both on the folio and in a song. "I love Black female person sexuality beingness in people'southward faces in a lot of different means," she says. "I get frustrated when it's just 1 mode." She recalls equally a young girl hearing the rapper Shawnna chanting the sexually explicit hook to Ludacris'southward 2000 breakthrough single "What's Your Fantasy": "There'southward something powerful about hearing a female voice being ratchet on the radio."
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Ratchet and refined, puerile and profound, it'due south no coincidence that women'southward voices are the ones largely redefining rap and poetry these days. "It'southward deeper than just rapping explicit lyrics," Latto says. "It's empowering women. A adult female doesn't take to exist submissive or exist polite." Terminal summer, she appeared in the video for the well-nigh controversial song of the yr, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion'due south "WAP," whose acronym belies the lyrics' exuberant raunchiness. When Billboard magazine interviewed Cardi for its December 2020 Woman of the Yr issue, she was characteristically candid. "I similar justice. I similar to work and be creative," she explained. "But I also like popping my pussy."
This choice to exist explicit is especially meaning for Black women, who are regularly silenced in both private and public spaces. "Black women are taught to be quiet all the time," Parker adds. "If we're loud, nosotros're playing ourselves and don't take to be listened to. [These artists are] undercutting so many unlike mores."
A Commitment TO speaking authentically connects the City Girls with Rapsody, ane of the nearly technically sophisticated lyricists and most politically minded artists in hip-hop today. "Authenticity" is a vexed term, inviting questions about who defines it and dictates its use. In spite of this, it has long played an important role in hip-hop civilisation. Jericho Dark-brown, 44, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his drove "The Tradition," wrote a 2017 profile in Flaunt on the rapper Future and promoted it by tweeting: "Words aren't the only thing the rapper Hereafter & I accept in mutual. Both of united states, every bit poets, sell actuality." Selling authenticity might seem contemptuous. But Dark-brown is also teasing out a more than nuanced idea, namely that the just mode for poets and rappers to projection authenticity to an audition is through the bamboozlement of their craft. They must construct themselves through word and vocalism, through the indirection of figurative language and the contrivances of patterned rhythms and rhymes. Paradoxically, their actuality rests on selling their readers and listeners on an intimacy of appointment beyond the unavoidable altitude that art imposes.
For Rapsody, 38, authenticity takes her home to Snowfall Loma, N.C. Growing upwards six hours from Atlanta and seven hours from New York meant that she was as influenced by the bass-heavy sonics of the South as by the lyrical density of New York rappers. Equally a teen, she wrote in her periodical, her malaise turning to poetry. By the time she entered college, she had begun to practice spoken give-and-take. It wasn't until a few years later on, when she recorded her first two songs with the legendary producer 9th Wonder, that she apprenticed herself to hip-hop's stern bailiwick. "To rap, you have to learn how to take what you similar doing with words and put information technology in a flow, put inflection on certain words and learn when to breathe, letting your voice be an instrument," she explains. "Rap'southward almost similar math to me. ... I write something and whether I desire information technology to rhyme or I'm trying to connect a certain metaphor, I'k similar, 'This is my end piece. This is my beginning. How do I connect them in the heart?'"
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You can hear Rapsody's precision on her most recent release, 2019's "Eve," a concept album where each vocal is named afterward and thematically inspired past an influential Blackness woman. On 1 of the standout tracks, "Serena," Rapsody unleashes a run of syllables that challenges your heed fifty-fifty as you bob your head:
That's Shakur life, Giovanni wrote it. Nikki, that'due south a existent poet
Blackness life, we still going. They mad, nosotros even so flowing
Black joy, euphoria. We wanna smile like Gloria
That'south Hov mama, word to my mama, that's a motherlode, mothership
Motherland, this some other shit. Nineties picture show, Ninety-Vi
Fix it off, boy, I'one thousand Jada P with the box braids. If I aim, squeeze
That'southward R.I.P. — please kill the noise. If information technology'south God given, it tin can't be destroyed
Rapsody uses internal rhymes ("euphoria"/"Gloria") in the place of end rhyme. This creates a medial caesura, splitting the line into two more than or less equal halves, a technique famously employed a thousand years agone by the unknown poet who ready "Beowulf" to the page. For Rapsody'south poetry, medial caesura fashions a rhythmic dorsum and forth — a left-foot, correct-foot two-step. More practically, it creates a space for the intake of breath necessary to perform the song live. Near the verse'southward end, Rapsody fashions a series of echoes, building on a sound that catches her ear: "motherlode," "mothership," "Motherland," "other shit." Bars like these have earned Rapsody the reputation among her peers — and among poets — as one of the nearly innovative lyricists in the game. Matejka says that listening to her made him rethink his own approach to writing: "Rapsody is less like an influence and more similar a poetic challenge. The way she uses puns and figurative linguistic communication connected to allusions is so tight, it sent me back into the lab."
Despite these accolades, Rapsody understands her next evolution every bit an artist is to strip things away — to pull back on rhymes and punch lines and focus instead on emotion. "People know I can rap. Now they wanna know who I am," she says. "The challenge for me is being OK with not trying to kill everything, and now just be human and be vulnerable. And that may not come with a lot of similes. And it may not come with a lot of metaphors. It may just be direct truth. That's OK because that'south beauty, likewise."
The dazzler of rap, like that of poetry, is in its invitation to expression. Rap's proximity to speech has e'er been its most democratizing element. Forth with the fact that making it didn't require access to expensive instruments or conservatory training, it meant that rap could travel to places that other music could never achieve — a favela in Brazil, an encampment in the West Banking company, a rec room in the South Bronx. Someone in one case said that hip-hop requires nothing more than than ii turntables and a microphone, but it needs far less than that: a listen to rhyme and rhythm of any kind, from knuckles knocking on a lunchroom tabletop to the inaudible kick and snare playing inside the caput of an artist as she performs a cappella.
On "Nina," the opening track of "Eve," Rapsody stops rapping nearly halfway through the vocal. As her final word, "survival," echoes into silence, a new voice rises, that of the 26-year-old Los Angeles-based spoken-word poet Reyna Biddy. "Hither's to the honey in yous / To the bittersweet in me," Biddy begins, embracing duality and difference — of individuals and perhaps also of art forms. Her poem underscores the theme of survival and transcendence expressed in Rapsody's verse while, in Biddy's words, "trying and dying to breathe poetry to rise in the light of solar day." Their shared performance on "Nina" harmonizes lyric forms, recognizing similarities without asking them to be the aforementioned. The world needs them both. Taken together, rap and poesy provide the ways to practise exactly what the events of this past twelvemonth accept proven we need most: to amplify the voices of people who've gone unheard — and perhaps, one day, to bring us together under a common groove.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/t-magazine/rap-hip-hop-poetry.html
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