“Rap may be the music of the street corner rather than the
conservatory, but mastering its verbal art requires as much attention
to craft as the most rarefied forms of artistic expression.”
So asserts Adam Bradley in his persuasive and rewarding Book of
Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, a serious and sustained argument
not simply that “Tupac was a poet,” but that rap as a whole represents
an evolution of the Western poetic tradition. As such, it can be
analyzed with the tools and techniques normally reserved for
poetry—and such an analysis leads to a deeper understanding of
and respect for the form.
Bradley’s writing gets technical at times, but never at the expense
of readability. Assonance and consonance, perfect rhymes and slant
ones—these poetic terms and more are invoked to ensure that rap
lyricists get their due as poetic innovators whose techniques follow in
a direct line from Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, et al. (Bradley is
careful to note that he is not whitewashing rap’s identity as a
“defiantly black form,” but that “African American rap artists
transformed the poetic forms they’ve inherited.”)
Because one hallmark of rap lyrics is that they sound effortless,
Bradley’s dutiful parsing of certain rhymes is essential in
highlighting their formal complexity, whether it’s Tajai’s use of
simile in “Disseshowedo” (“I flip the script like a dyslexic actor”) or
Tupac’s use of rhyme, assonance, and alliteration in “California
Love.”
Book of Rhymes is not merely an extended explication of Jay-Z
lyrics, however. In sections about rhythm, rhyme, wordplay, and more,
Bradley explains how the constituent elements of rap have evolved from
the two-turntable days of the 1970s. He also doesn’t shrink from
addressing some of the problems endemic to contemporary rap, in
particular the deleterious effects of commercialization and the
misogyny that seems to plague the genre. His conclusion about the
latter is worth repeating: “To define rap as poetry is not necessarily
to defend it as always good for us. But a mature audience can
understand rap in context and measure its value not simply in the
quantity of its curse words, but in the variety and sophistication of
its poetic forms.” Book of Rhymes is essential reading in
fostering just such an understanding.