A rap mint retorikai célú népköltészet

Abstract

The popularity of music has elicited a variety of critical responses, but very little focus on the poetry itself. This essay discusses Rap's ties to earlier forms of African-American folk-poetry and analyzes the conventional structures of rhetoric, rhythm, and rhyme within which artists operate. Twenty years after its genesis, poetry remains a vastly popular art-form across the continent and around the world, although its importance as a new type of expression has been virtually unexplored by the scholarly community and by most poets. The reasons for this lack of attention include cultural differences between Euro-American and African-American sensibilities, the reluctance of academic poets and critics to embrace popular culture, and the inability of print-based analysis to deal adequately with oral artistry. Recently, however, a number of critics have begun to explore from a variety of perspectives. Richard Shusterman (1991), for example, presents a case for as a postmodern art-form by focusing on the music's technological aesthetic and rampant intertextuality. Houston Baker's Rap, Black Studies and the Academy (1993) treats the roles of race and class in determining attitudes toward Rap. Russell Potter's Spectacular Vernaculars (1995) pulls back the various facades of to rev eal an inspiring subversive politics. Other critics, like Tricia Rose (1994), take a sociological perspective, while still others, such as Tim Brennan (1994) and Robert Walser (1995), focus on the musical aesthetic. While each of these studies has its own obvious merits, what seems most required at this point is a more basic and poetic approach, one which would give poets and scholars some context and keys to understanding as poetry and not merely as a phenomenon of popular culture. What is needed, in short, is a focus on the three R's which form the material essence of Rap: rhythm, rhyme, and rhetoric. Thus, in the following essay, I will attempt to demonstrate that is a contemporary form of the ages-old tradition of folk-poetry and that it derives its rhetorical power from a unique use of rhythm and rhyme. Specifically, in the first part of this essay I will show how the rhetorical traditions of African-American folk-poetry co-evolved with electric communication technology and how both eventually came together to form the style. This overview will provide the necessary context for the second part of this essay, in which I will illustrate the interrelationship between the three R's of rhythm, rhyme, and r hetoric through an analysis (and attempt to chart the beat) of the recordings of several well-known, commercially successful artists, all of which should be readily available (for listening purposes) in libraries and used-record shops. I should state at the outset that I will be writing about as a poet and a musician who loves and honors African-American and musical traditions, and that I make no claim to provide a thorough review of the pantheon of professional artists, nor to do any more than lay out the basics of this art-form. To prevent any misunderstanding, I should also state that in this essay I will be discussing strictly as vocal performance and that I will be using the term Rap to refer to the principally rhythmic vocal component of the music which has come to be known more generally as Hip-hop, a term which also refers to the urban subculture and includes expression through graffiti, fashion, dance and lifestyle. I should mention as well that the term Rap itself predates the style being analyzed here, originally being used to refer to verbal exchange in general and later to declaming poetry over music, and in fact has fallen into disuse in Hip-hop culture--where such performers are more likely to refer to themselves as an MC (from Master of Ceremonies) or a rhymer, than as a artist. It is fruitless to attempt a critical appreciation of as poetry without a historical context to help explain its significant differences from contemporary print poetry. …