the craft. poetry and music.
I had a revelation this week about how much I love both music and writing. They are honestly two of the topics I could talk about for hours ad nauseum. It’s hilarious to me though that I didn’t become a music writer. It’s like I love them separately but equally. To close out our series on poetry this month, I wanted to talk about the marriage of poetry and music.
First and foremost, to love rap music is to know that the basis is poetry. Gil-Scott Heron was one of the pioneers of this beautiful collision. An American poet, jazz artist, singer, he laid a blueprint followed by many artists that would come after him with this fusion of jazz, blues, and the spoken word. “The Revolution Will Not be Televised” delivered over a soulful beat has influenced generations in addition to literally being sampled in contemporary hip hop songs. The messages delivered by Heron and acts like The Last Poets, a New York-based collective also rising to prominence during the civil rights and Black nationalist movements, were threaded through the DNA of hip hop music into acts that arose in the 80s and 90s like NWA, Public Enemy and more.
I spent hours wandering the 2Pac exhibit with my husband when it was in LA. Pages and pages of poetry lined the wall shielded by glass to preserve them. Those poems were the catalyst to the lyrics we all grew to love from the outspoken, unapologetic, son of a Black Panther.
Ayo, I remember Marvin Gaye, used to sing to me
He had me feelin' like black was the thing to be
And suddenly the ghetto didn't seem so tough
And though we had it rough, we always had enough
I huffed and puffed about my curfew and broke the rules
Ran with the local crew, and had a smoke or two
And I realize momma really paid the price
She nearly gave her life, to raise me right (oh, yeah)
And all I had to give her was my pipe dream (yeah, yeah, yeah)
Of how I'd rock the mic, and make it to the bright screen
I'm tryin' to make a dollar out of fifteen cents
It's hard to be legit and still pay your rent
And in the end it seems I'm headin' for the pen
/// Keep Your Head Up, 2Pac
Poetry is this excavation of the human experience, much like hip hop is, just over a beat. In these rhymes we hear the accounts of mostly young Black men, at the time, detailing the daily events happening in their lives, in their neighborhoods. We get insight into their inner musings, their vulnerability, their fear.
While it transitioned into much more than we could have imagined throughout the late 80s and early 90s, poetry still has a pulse that runs alongside the art of hip hop. Def Poetry Jam, the spoken word television series that aired between 2002 and 2007 emerged as a platform to illuminate this dance between music and poetry as well. Mos Def, a prolific emcee and hip hop artist as the host, and an array of guests that not only featured top poets like Nikki Giovanni, Saul Williams, Sonia Sanchez and more, but musical artists like Jamie Foxx, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, and Kanye West to name a few.
Feel how you must about our current iteration of Kanye, but he too brought back the prominence of poetry in music by featuring acts like J. Ivy on his debut album The College Dropout, the aforementioned Gil Scott Heron on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and featuring The Last Poets on “The Corner” by Common, which he produced. Beyoncé has even gotten into the mix, more recently featuring the poetry of Warsan Shire in her sixth studio album Lemonade. Acts like Chance the Rapper and NoName have acknowledged Chicago’s bubbling poetry scene with programs like YouMedia being a part of their early rise to prominence.
Poetry is a throughline within music, both as a starting point, and seamless companion. Most great songwriters started out writing poetry that they then figured out how to manipulate into melody. Aren’t we all just failed poets? I’ll raise my hand to say, I have notebooks stashed away that there will be instructions to burn when I leave this place. Oftentimes I’ve heard the exasperation of poets in this time, does it still matter? How can we publish our books? We seem undervalued. And I’m here to say that should not be the case. We run to poetry in the moments where we don’t understand. Where we need to process. It is a critical building block of most writing careers and apparently music careers all the same.
I believe that things like having the new Spoken Word category in the GRAMMYs and some of the largest music acts spotlighting poetry, the kids are going to be alright as long as we keep championing the artform.
I hope you’ve survived my indulgence of poetry this month. But I think it was owed. Support a poet this week. Buy a book, share a line on social media. Back to our regularly scheduled program, next week.
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