ABSTRACT
Rap is today’s fastest-growing genre of popular music, but also the most maligned and persecuted. Its claim to artistic status is drowned under a flood of abusive critique, acts of censorship, and commercial cooptation.1 This should not be surprising. For rap’s cultural roots and main following belong to the black underclass of American society, and its militant black pride and thematizing of the ghetto experience represent a threatening siren to that society’s complacent status quo. Given this political incentive for undermining rap, one can readily find aesthetic reasons that seem to discredit it as a legitimate art form. Rap songs are not even sung, only spoken or chanted. They typically employ neither live musicians nor original music; the sound track is instead composed from various cuts (or “samples”) of records already made and often well known. Finally, the lyrics seem to be crude and simple-minded, the diction substandard, the rhymes raucous, repetitive, and frequently raunchy. Yet, as my title suggests, these same lyrics insistently lay claim to and extol rap’s status as poetry and fine art.2
