Why We Shouldn’t Treat Rap As Poetry

Jesse Kramer is a 24-year-old freelance writer, of sorts, but one whose talents are actually in demand. Right out of USC, with a major in Business, Kramer started a business called Rap Rebirth. It’s a one-stop shop for all your rap needs. Jesse will help you punch up your rhymes, hooks, metaphors and similes; he’ll write you anything from a 16-bar verse to a whole album. He can even make you sound like Drake, if you want (odds are you will, apparently), and his business just might pose a problem to academics who want to make a name off of treating rap as something it is not.

In academia, elevating a “low art” to the status of high art can get a young scholar a good deal of attention. Late last year Yale Press released the Yale Anthology of Rap, to both fanfare and criticism. The book is an excellent example of how much attention high-low-brow academic efforts can draw. Slate ran a three-part series on the transcription errors in the volume, with writer Paul Devlin eventually visiting Grandmaster Caz at his house in the Bronx to go over the various errors made by editors Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois while transcribing a low-quality recording of Caz’s “Live at Harlem World 1981.”

What Devlin doesn’t mention is that Grandmaster Caz’s words appear elsewhere in the anthology, credited to Big Bank Hank of the Sugarhill Gang, in “Rapper’s Delight.” “Rapper’s Delight” was the first rap song to go mainstream, and its second verse was not written by the person performing it. Furthermore, Caz was not a willing collaborator in “Rapper’s Delight”; his words were stolen and he never made a nickel off the song. This sort of thing can be impossible to prove one way or another, but, in this case, an astute listener can pick it out—it’s all pretty clear if you know who’s who. Right at the top of the verse, Big Bank Hank declares “I’m the C-A-S-A-N-O-V-A and the rest is F-L-Y”; Casanova Fly was Grandmaster Caz’s other name, aside from the one on his birth certificate. In the same song, Hank also claims that he’s 6′ 1″, though video evidence suggests Big Bank Hank has a more George Costanza-esque frame than that line would suggest. In a later verse, Hank boasts that he’s “the grandmaster with the three MCs”; Sugarhill Gang only had three MC’s; The Cold Crush Brothers, Caz’s group, had four (actually the size varied, but let’s not get bogged down in details).

DuBois and Bradley mention this debate in passing in the intro to “Rappers Delight” in the form of a question—”Did Big Bank Hank, who was discovered by [Sylvia] Robinson rapping while working at a pizzeria, steal his rhymes from the rhyme book of his acquaintance Grandmaster Caz?”—when everyone else familiar with the story seems to agree that Caz’s account is factual. So while Devlin’s critiques were fascinating, valid and clearly time consuming (the Bronx!?), I think he missed the opportunity to level an even bigger (more…)

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