...I bash a rapper--and not even the rapper so much as the notion of calling his music, or any popular music, relaly, poetry--and that's RACIST?
...
Would it help if I went to the Whitey-White Side and said I'd say the same about Eminem's rap music, or, hell, to go whiter-than-Conan and into the Way Back Machine, Vanilla Ice's...
ANY RAP, really, ANY popular music =/= poetry as they are DIFFERENT MEDIUMS with DIFFERENT STANDARDS.
I said that Nas' piece MIGHT have been a good rap.
I DID say that.
But the standards for a 3-minute song and for poetry are different.
For popular music, you have background music and a performance aspect of dancing and singing and cinematography and the like built in.
THUS, the lyrics are GENERALLY not as dense as they might be in, say, something like "The Waste Land" or a Sylvia Plath poem.
THOSE pieces ONLY have the words to convey images, sounds, and other sensations and feelings, so the metaphors and similies and all the rest are denser, the whole piece is denser and more word-centric, whereas in a popular music piece, it's a blend of different aspects of art.
And HERE, I'm going to call in my biggest surprise witness ever...
LADY GAGA.
YES.
I am going to call in the person who's work I wrote one of my longest--seriously, that mess was a BEAST of a block essay, looking back!--and most scathing posts ever on as an EXEMPLAR of what I mean.
Now, when I did that post, and talked about "Bad Romance," I mentioned the cinematography as being GREAT, the angles and colors as being GREAT, the blocking and directing as being EXCITING...
And the music was shit, in my opinion, as is Lady Gaga's voice, but hey, that's just my opinion, you're free to have your own. ;)
But the point of all this--before I go on another Gaga-sized rant--is the lyrics and, indeed, the song, I felt, was weak...
But there were OTHER elements present to prop those up to an extent, and while I still consider the actual music and lyrics crap, I CAN see wehre someone might call the piece, as a whole, at least creative.
But again--the lyrics were NOT the full, 100% focus of the piece, so they not only could afford to be less dense than poetic verse, I'd say they HAD to be...denser lyrics would make it difficult to focus on that AND the richness of the performance aspect.
UNL0IKE POETRY.
THERE IT IS ALL LYRICAL, 100% WORD-BASED.
Homer or Dante or Shakespeare or Milton...
Tennyson or Keats or Shelley or Browning...
Lawrence or Eliot or Plath or Hardy...
Sonnet or Epic or Ode or Free Verse...
WHOEVER and WHATEVER it is...
ALL that counts in poetry, what receives 100% of the density of effort and the emphasis of the artist, are the WORDS and WORD STRUCTURE, ie, the TEXT.
The same is not and cannot be the same for a rap song or pop song or a song in a musical or, for that matter, a song in an opera--
Hence so much lyrical repetition in musicals and operas--not only are there other elements at work, and so the words aren't the only focus, it can be argued they're not even always the PRIMARY focus, so the repetition in arias and in musical numbers is a case of the lyrics complementing the richness and density MUSIC, not the other way around.
SO, I'd again say:
MAYBE as a rap Nas' work is good.
I don't know.
Rap isn't my genre any more than Country or Metal is.
But it does NOT work was poetry, as it is then being judged unfairly--
Without the jusic, without the singers, without the dancers, without the cinematography, without the staging and direction...
It'd be like trying to evaluate a movie as a radio program--
A vital part of the artistic quality of the piece
Low Pot, High GR, Fun Game.
pot, with 7 reasonably high GR-rated players for a classic, full press, 36hr, password game.
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