{"id":459,"date":"2012-06-05T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/?p=459"},"modified":"2012-06-05T14:27:20","modified_gmt":"2012-06-05T19:27:20","slug":"killer-mike-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/2012\/06\/05\/killer-mike-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Killer Mike, R.A.P. Music, and Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

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WARNING:<\/span>\u00a0 This is the literature side coming through.\u00a0 Some may find this tedious and boring.\u00a0 But it\u2019s my blog, so\u2026<\/p>\n

One of the arguments I\u2019ve been making in my classes and (sometimes indirectly) in my published work is that rap deserves the same kind of serious attention that we readily accord literature.\u00a0 Sure, a lot of rap doesn\u2019t stand up well to close reading, but the same is definitely true for fiction and other literary forms.\u00a0 Pick up a supermarket romance novel with a Fabio-looking guy on the cover and you\u2019ll see my point.<\/p>\n

Anyway, one person who\u2019s making my argument easier is Killer Mike.\u00a0 His rhymes sound good, especially over EL-P\u2019s production, but they are often literary <\/em>as well.\u00a0 I\u2019m not just talking about his use of devices like metaphor, symbolism, etc., which most rappers employ, but his frequent references to literary works.\u00a0 On more than one track in R.A.P. Music<\/em>, he emphasizes his love of books\u2014at one point saying he\u2019s \u201caddicted to literature\u201d\u2014and it shows.\u00a0 One of the songs I\u2019ve listened to several times is \u201cAnywhere But Here,\u201d which surveys the violence against black bodies that has become a universal fact of American urban life. \u00a0He opens with \u201cMoving through New York City in a black seven fifty \/ like Batman moving through Gotham,\u201d a setting that not only matches the dark, heavily synthed backdrop (it actually sounds like it could be a Batman<\/em> soundtrack) but also sets up his description of the Gotham-like violence he describes\u2014first in New York and then in Atlanta.\u00a0 It also sets him up to be the \u201chero\u201d who, from the space of his black cars, is going to \u201cpeel away\u201d the fa\u00e7ade of these cities to reveal their gritty and disturbing undersides.\u00a0 His choice of expensive cars (in the next verse it\u2019s a Mercedes SL) is not just his bowing to rap convention; it’s establishing his wealth and power, allowing him to serve as a counterweight to New York\u2019s \u201cbillionaire\u201d Mayor who presides over New York\u2019s inequality and violence.\u00a0 (The blackness of the cars speaks, I think, to the dark deeds in the song, but also the black bodies always seem to be the victims of them\u2014including, as in the case of Atlanta, at the hands of other black men.)<\/p>\n

His rhyme scheme throughout is noticeably constant\u2014plenty of internal rhymes, but with particular emphasis on the trailing end-rhyme.\u00a0 The rhyming pattern and cadence stay smooth and even throughout the entire song, a delivery style that lends support to his early claims that he’s moving “gently” and “dodging potholes”–in juxtaposition with the harsh, rough world that “Gotham” and those potholes are setting us up for.\u00a0\u00a0In addition, I think Mike’s constant repetition works to reinforce the idea that the violence and self-destructive behavior depicted in the song keep repeating as well.\u00a0 Setting the song in two different cities–and recalling the murder of Martin Luther King–makes this point, too: across time and space, the outcome has been the same.<\/p>\n

But the repetition also relates, I think, to the song\u2019s debt to Langston Hughes\u2019s poem \u201cHarlem.\u201d \u00a0(Harlem is the first neighborhood Mike mentions, just a few lines in, obviously foreshadowing this eventual move to Hughes.) \u00a0The last verse of the song concludes with \u201cSo you ask what happens to a dream deferred \/ Langston, well it kills itself.\u201d\u00a0 Hughes\u2019s poem\u2014which opens with \u201cWhat happens to a dream deferred?\u201d\u2014also emphasizes repetition by answering the question with a series of more unanswered questions.\u00a0 It concludes with a final, italicized \u201cOr does it explode?<\/em>\u201d\u2014a thinly-veiled threat that if people\u2019s dreams are deferred for too long (just as Hughes perpetually defers answering his own question in the poem) there could be explosive violence.\u00a0 I have always read Hughes\u2019s final line as a warning to the people who force those dreams to be forever deferred, but Killer Mike\u2014calling and responding to Hughes\u2014offers a very different reading.\u00a0 For him, the result of deferred dreams is that \u201cyoung black boys \/ seem to self-sabotage they selves.\u201d\u00a0 The alliteration in this line is yet another use of repetition that speaks to the ongoing self<\/em>-destructive consequences of deferred dreams.\u00a0 The dreams don\u2019t explode; they implode<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot more that could be done with the song.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t even touched the Emily Panic chorus or the use of a well-known BDP line.\u00a0 But the point here is that Killer Mike is doing a hell of a lot more than making catchy songs over great beats\u2014he\u2019s calling and responding to a wide range of artistic predecessors, in the process making his songs treasure troves of poetic expression.\u00a0 This is what rappers should be doing more of!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WARNING:\u00a0 This is the literature side coming through.\u00a0 Some may find this tedious and boring.\u00a0 But it\u2019s my blog, so\u2026 One of the arguments I\u2019ve been making in my classes and (sometimes indirectly) in my published work is that rap deserves the same kind of serious attention that we readily accord literature.\u00a0 Sure, a lot … Continue reading Killer Mike, R.A.P. Music, and Literature<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1656,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1656"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/enielson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}