Vegetables” stirred up righteous anger only to be subsumed a few years later by the art-punk Dadaisms of Wire’s “Chairs Missing,” underground hip hop today is on the verge of a revolution in subject matter, form and overarching aesthetics.
While figurative lyrical flourishes were once treated as mere embellishments on relatively representational rhymes with concrete subjects, today’s avant-garde rappers approach abstraction for its own sake. When Mr. Lif and Insight, two Boston rappers still on the fringe of broad recognition, collaborated on the track “Iron Helix” on Lif’s “I, Phantom” concept album, they didn’t trade spars about each other’s virility or compare bling quotients.
Instead, the pair engages in a dialectical debate about the perils of modernity, focused through an eerily post-colonial conversation in which Lif subtly enslaves Insight with the allure of modern techno-commerce. Does pegging them “conscious rappers” do justice to the scope of their creative project, as much an experiment in form as a social critique?
SAVE YOURSELF
Aesop’s seemingly facile dodging of the “But is it poetry?” question strikes at the arbitrary nature of this balkanization of artistic expression, an othering which manifests itself across many cultural boundaries. In an example of Aesop’s, a punk kid in D.C. and a weekend free-styler in the Bronx both lack “money, [and] don’t have a singing voice.”
But what their music lacked in classically-trained polish, it “made up with twice the heart,” and the young Aesop eagerly devoured diverse mix-tapes given to him by his older brother, regardless of the ostensible categorization of the artists included.
To call KRS-One less “punk” than Jello Biafra is to treat musical genres as purely formal in nature, characterized by instrumentation, song structure and other easily sortable attributes. But such structuralist definitions ignore the unique aesthetic of the artist’s act of creation; their motivation does not intuit such boundaries.
Aesop stresses the importance of the creative method in his own work, as an assembly of “little phrases or sentences,” lyrical fragments typed into cell phones or scrawled onto scrap paper, “metaphors without links.”
During this process, he becomes equal parts writer and musician, all shades of categorization afterward inevitably falling prey to crude underlying cultural assumptions and models, both about poetry and rap. Aesop acknowledges that “some people like my shit, some don’t,” but refuses to get sucked into marketing himself as an “intellectual rapper.”
At this point, it seems as though conscious appeals to the academic merit of his work aren’t even needed. Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Jorie Graham was so inspired by Aesop’s lyrics that she assigned one of her poetry classes to bring in samples of rap lyrics for analysis.
The first thing Teskey mentioned in his analysis of “Float,” before any mention of media theory or tumbling measure, was a simple and immutably subjective judgment: “I like it.” As the academy warms up to the rigorous analysis of hip-hop, it is finally beginning to appreciate Aesop’s dedication to “spittin’ the illest shit,” whether he likes it or not.
—Staff writer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu