“When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things. The first was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics—not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC—are poetry if you look at them closely enough.”
—
Jay-Z, about his forthcoming book Decoded.
Except they’re not. They are rap lyrics and are meant to be rapped. As soon as you strip them of a voice they lose a large part of their power and purpose. Jay’s lyrics on a page is no more a poem than Lil Wayne reading William Blake aloud would constitute a rap song (at least not without significant editing and re-purposing). The whole lyrics are poetry, maaan angle has been pushed for decades, across genres, by people who either aren’t smart enough to engage lyricism on its own terms or who are simply trying to impress and/or profit off those types. It’s really an insult to both poets and lyricists.
(Source: thesmithian)
