Editor's Note

You can pick out countless lines from hip-hop about rappers’ writing habits. It’s a subject they love to talk about, and unsurprisingly so: Rapping, even more than singing, is a linguistic pursuit, tethered to wordplay and dependent on the use of language in an interesting manner, whether it’s with dexterity, ingenuity or sheer force of meaning.

Such qualities make rapping sound a little bit like another writerly pursuit: poetry. And lately, critics have been making noise over whether hip-hop lyrics are, in fact, poetry themselves.

The conversation’s been fueled by the recent publishing of two books: Jay-Z’s Decoded, a collection of his lyrics alongside his own explanations and elaborations, and Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois’ The Anthology of Rap, a 900-page transcription of 30 years of hip-hop lyrics. The anthology has gotten raves from the likes of Sam Anderson at New York Magazine, who essentially said it opened his eyes to the world of hip-hop. Though I’m all for opening the eyes of the naive to rap’s best talent, there’s still something wrong here.

Reading Anderson’s piece on the book, you get the feeling that he almost doesn’t realize that these lyrics were initially delivered over beats. Because the question here should not be whether or not rapping is poetry. It is, no question: Poetry is not a narrow framework, and within the written realm of what is called poetry, the variety and range of content is incomprehensibly broad.

The great American poet Charles Olson described poetry as such: “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.” If this doesn’t describe hip-hop perfectly, then nothing does. Rap is all about the conveying of lyrics to listener, all about the delivery of the artists’ message or emotion, either by stressing the meaning of his words or the technique of his flow.

Instead, the real question people should be asking about this new anthology, and rap lyricism in general, is whether dealing with hip-hop on a written, paginated level is inherently reductive. Taking the beat out of the equation, divorcing the words from the tracks they once clung to, irrevocably changes the work, and although there might still be value to derive from the words on a page, the reasoning seems suspect.

Why not just point interested parties directly to the songs themselves? What’s to be gained by reading Rakim’s lyrics—or Nas’, or Ghostface Killah’s, or, in the interest of topicality, Kanye West’s—off a page, when you can just listen to the songs? It seems the only proper way to do so would be if the rappers wrote them down themselves; otherwise, the author’s intentionality is being compromised in a direct and unnecessary way.

In the end, if Sam Anderson and others are really interested in hip-hop, they should go directly to the music. If they are curious about how the words look on a page, they can always transcribe the verses. But to read the songs directly from a book, without any notion of their original context, cannot be the right way to deal with this art.