Nick DeHoust: Poetry and Hip-Hop

I love hip-hop, like a lot. I also happen to live with a talented rapper, David. We talk hip-hop all the time (especially 90’s-era boom bap), and he and I have made a bunch of songs together. We are both inside and outside hip-hop. We observe, and we participate. Recently, he told me about a conversation he had had with another friend of his. Apparently, this individual advised David to read poetry in order to help him write more coherent raps. I laughed. David said this person also couldn’t name three rappers off the top of their head. David asked what I thought, and I realized that, between this class, Existentialism, and a class devoted entirely to Martin Heidegger, I have learned more about the philosophy of poetry than I care to say. I began to try to explain some of what I know (it’s really difficult to figure out where to start), but I quickly realized something else — something better. David’s raps already accomplish the goal of poetry that I have come to know academically as poiēsis (see my other post for details). His raps set truth into language and bring forth the truth of reality in profound ways. David’s other friend was approaching his rap as if it were a New York Times Best-Selling novel. He was searching for continuity and concision — for a “central theme” (I gagged while writing that). In this way, he missed the essence of poetry (thus betraying his ignorance of a more careful thinking toward poetry itself, his supposed advantage): its ability to break language and free it to explore new ways of finding truth and reality — the saying of the true. Poetry is wild, free, beautiful, and vivifying. David’s raps as such are already this way. He is a true artist, and he doesn’t need the affirmation of a bunch of dead philosophers (nor his misguided friend) to prove it. He already is. And his art speaks for itself. So I decided to just say that his friend is wrong. I’ll leave the essayistic explorations of the nature of poetry to Heidegger, and I’ll let the artist create his art freely.