RAP = Rhythm And Poetry
Most believe that rap started in the 80s, with the advent of new electronic equipment that allowed for sampling ease.
But rap is older than classical music itself! What is a war chant? Imagine the first time a proto group of people beat their chests and chant before a battle. How is that not rhythm and poetry?
Before the main point of this, have you ever wondered why the taxonomy of knowledge is the way it is? How all knowledge of the world, fits neatly into about 10 branches of thought?
Humanities and Arts
Languages and Literature
Law and Politics
Philosophy and Religious Studies
Science and Medicine
This is a heavily condensed topical list of our major schools of thought. But with the advent of the internet, there have been many pushes towards more interdisciplinary thinking. There’s a combinatorial movement of taking pieces of completely separate fields and coming up new solutions to problems.
With this in mind, let me remind you the importance and function of the arts. The arts across all mediums is useful in our society, because they function to expose unseen facets of all other fields of thought.
The over all point is that rap is an extremely powerful art form, and because of this inherent power, it has been totally infiltrated in this modern age. Anti development fills the airwaves of the genre, and the messages of irresponsiblility, substance abuse, violence, and infidelities have become the prominent messages in rap, to the point that most people thinks that’s what rap itself is.
But I’m here just to remind you that rap is older than the first Gregorian chants which are the basis for classical music. And I’m here to convince you that rap itself is a potent artistic tool that can vastly improve the world, if we move more in the direction of the light side of rap.
If you are a fan of rap, here’s a test you should try. Pick your favorite artists, and look up the lyrics of some of your favorite songs. Then read aloud the lyrics without a beat. Think about how it sounds, does it pass the sniff test? Does it sound literate, do the messages of the actual words resound with your soul? We are dynamic beings and parts very well may! But I remember distinctly one night I was in my sister’s kitchen and I was trying to convert my sister into a Kendrick Lamar fan. And she asked to see the words, and I played a YouTube free beat and she read his words. Now Kendrick is known as a rap genius, and uses language in much more nuanced and complicated ways that major players in the genre simply don’t have the intellect for. But she read the words to his track Backseat Freestyle, and even me as a major fan thought he sounded like an idiot. But the way the words are delivered, the hypnotic production of the beat, makes him sound ethereally amazing.
This same formula can be used for good. So when I teach students how to rap, I try to get them to really think about what they’re saying. I try to promote messages of development, instead of anti-development. Because we are seeing in my view a huge cultural virus that has spread across the world. It has turned many away from rap itself, and with good reason. But I truly would love to see a movement of the light side of rap. The underlying promotion of higher vibrational schools of thought, like peace, love, and unity. Rap itself is hands down the best genre for bottling and leveraging negative thought paths. The very human experience of cynicism and doubt shouldn’t be ignored and sugar coated. But using rap, the most negative thoughts in the human experience can be released, organized, and ultimately leveraged into grand leaps in the individual’s improvement of soul, on a local level. And this can be encapsulated and shared to save the world.
So don’t write off rap, just find artists whose underlying messages you can support, messages that are good for you. Make rap that helps shape the world you want to see, not the world we live in. That’s the power of art, and rap is the most powerful of all forms.
Amen