by Cole Lamkins
There are poets living among our pop culture and we call them rappers. Poetry lives within authentic hip-hop and yet I truly feel that most fans of the culture still don’t comprehend the subjective value behind it’s lyrics. I was inspired to write about how poetry and hip-hop go hand-in-hand due to a Spotify playlist I recently encountered titled “Urban Poets.” An Urban Poet is a MC (rapper) that has a unique ability to tell a story in a poetic fashion through their creative use of lyrical ability and rhyme.
The Argument
If hip-hop is poetry then all music is poetry right? I can agree to a certain extent, but fundamental hip-hop is different because at its core hip-hop is a collection of creative expressions in the form of verses that come together to form a whole. True hip-hop artists look at their songs as having a bigger concept and will purposefully produce music that will influence their audiences in a specific way.
Tupac
If you don’t believe me then check out the book “The Rose That Grew from Concrete” by Tupac Shakur. Many hip-hop heads (including myself) believe that Tupac is the greatest artist to ever have laid their hands on a hip-hop track. Tupac once said during a police interrogation that he initially started writing poetry in high school, and that this happened before he started to rap.
Tupac then said later in the interrogation that “it is of my opinion… that I was rapping while I was writing poetry, and so I was into rap I guess you could say from junior high whenever I wrote my first poem.”
All in all, I think that I am going to have to agree with Tupac on this one and say that hip-hop is very much so a form of poetry. Urban Poets exist and hip-hop artists around the world are taking poetry to a larger audience that has not quite been reached by the traditional poet in the past.
Semi-Poetic 