Prep
- Adam Bradley, ‘The Artists Dismantling the Barriers Between Rap and Poetry’, The New York Times Style Magazine (4 March 2021). Hip-hop MCs embracing poetry, hip-hop generation poets influenced by hip-hop. Plus the Third Way of spoken-word poetry, or poetry as live performance. And the role of women of colour in creating all this synergy.
- Audio: Adam Bradley, ‘American Poets on the Hip-Hop Songs That Most Inspire Them’, New York Times (4 March 2021). To complement T’s recent feature on how the barrier between rap and poetry is becoming increasingly porous thanks to a new generation of practitioners in both art forms, we asked a number of poets mentioned in the piece about the hip-hop songs they return to again and again. (These excerpts from interviews with various poets shouldn’t be read apart from the embedded Spotify playlist, ‘A Playlist from the Poets’.)
- Video: ‘Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time’, Vox (19 May 2016)
- Homework: What’s your favourite hip-hop verse of all time? Identify one technique from ‘Rapping Deconstructed’ (e.g., crossing the bar line, motifs, daisy-chaining, etc.) or Bradley (2021; e.g., assonance, consonance, epistrophe) used in this verse. (Note: Using one of the verses discussed in the videoessay is cheating, obviously.) Post a link to the song, along with a brief explanation as to how this technique is illustrated in the verse you’ve selected, in the #discography channel on our Slack webspace before our next class.
In Class
- Attendance
- Q&A: What can the study of poetics teach us about rap lyricism?
- Reading Notes for Next Time
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- Murray S. Davis, ‘That’s Interesting! Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences (1971)
- Video: Robert Glasper: “Jazz is the mother of hip-hop” | JAZZ NIGHT IN AMERICA (19 April 2017). An example of a clearly stated, interesting thesis—and one that’s EXTREMELY debatable.
