Hip-hop, I love you

He said, “I write what I see
Write to make it right, don’t like where I be
I’d like to make it like the sights on TV
Quite the great life, so nice and easy.”

— Lupe Fiasco, Hip-Hop Saved My Life

Although I can recall many days chanting apple bottom jeans and crank that on loop as an eight-year-old, it wasn’t until I was 13–14 that I started listening to rap music more broadly, in earnest. I had asked a friend for a copy of Pokémon Emerald, and he gave me the emulator setup on a pen drive that, incidentally, also included a bunch of music by Eminem, Akon, Lil Wayne, and others. My rap library very slowly grew through my school days, in which time I would also engage in toxic Eminem vs Lil Wayne debates on Facebook: my edgy teenage self arguing that Weezy was so much better than Eminem—not really knowing what I was talking about—whilst bopping to Rap God and MMLP2 behind the keyboard.

My undergraduate days left rap on the sidelines a little bit, mostly because few people around me were into that music aside from the radio hits. My friends did have some good music taste though, and my musical horizons definitely broadened for the better during that time. I did, however, still indulge in rap when I could, and importantly, discovered the growing rap culture in India with artists like Brodha V and All Ok.

I had much more time to myself during my master’s, which also included the COVID-19 pandemic months. This period was the real gamechanger, reigniting the genre’s many embers I had fallen in love with in the first place. Curiously, it was a backwards loop: I discovered many of the latest trap hits, and started curating a Spotify playlist of my favourites at the time; eventually, I got recommended more rap, like The Game by Russ; some of the catchy TikTok hits also stuck with me, and I even discovered rap artists from Kerala. An open-minded friend patiently listened as I rambled on in translating the rhymes, wordplay and entendres in Morumvellam. Before I knew it, I was going back to my old favourites and adding them to my playlist. My friends from France and Italy introduced me to unique European artists; my New Guinean friends brought the taste of classics like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and also showed me Tok Pisin reggae/rap. I discovered YouTubers who discussed and broke down rap music. Safe to say, by now rap had transcended beyond a genre I liked, and had become my music, my thing.

Fast-forward to the present day: I identify as a hip-hop head ^{1 2}; rhythm is internalised to the extent that I can’t help but bob my head to even genres like Carnatic music; my ever-growing rap playlist currently stands at 739 songs from at least five continents; stank faces are a regular occurrence. The trinity of J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and Drake kept me pushing through 2024, the most difficult year of my life.

Feeling rap

Knox Hill suggests that there are six main facets to a rapper’s skillset:

1. Rhyme
2. Cadence
3. Flow
4. Storytelling
5. Bars ³
6. Artistry

I really like this perspective, and it is an excellent sneak peek into just how intricate the craft of rap music really is. For me, these six elements are further grouped into two distinct themes I’m passionate about.

Magic in words

During my school days, I had picked up writing as a (questionable) passion. I was writing cringeworthy blog posts regularly, and was also attempting weird rap-poetry chimaeras about my mushroom haircut and chaotic classes ⁴. Point being, rhyming was something I was naturally interested in, and storytelling and wordplay were things I had started paying attention to.

Over the years as my reading has broadened and my views have distilled, the line between poetry and rap has gotten clearer but also murkier at the same time. Part of the latter line of reasoning is that both art forms to me are fundamentally about the endless magic and beauty in words; as many have stated, the challenge of putting together the practically finite set of words in a language in new combinations to unlock surprising layers of meaning is incredibly enticing and rewarding. Embracing the craft is almost like embarking on a ceaseless quest of discovery.

This magic is what shapes my taste in poetry, and is also responsible for my disconnect with much of contemporary poetry that has intentionally and emphatically strayed away from the use of poetic devices—poetry which often feels dry, empty, and half-assed to me. To be sure, I’m not wishing for the rule of iambic pentameter or for rigid poetic forms—but there are plenty of ways for verses to be alive and gilded with core poetic⁵ elements, while still staying contemporary. Rap has certainly figured out how to do so, and is a prime example of how to evolve while still staying true to the roots.

I find myself coming back to Richard Feynman often; his brilliant articulation of how two different, perhaps orthogonal, perspectives need not take away but can rather add to overall beauty: