TIGER TV ONLINE REPORTER
Hip-hop is common to bars, clubs, bad karaoke nights and radios. But during Spring 2010 semester, hip-hop will be common to the classroom.
“It’s basically an intro to poetry class,” said Sue Weinstein, the professor who will teach the English 2027 class. “There’s not usually special topics with English classes but I thought it would be fun to give it a spin with the poetic foundations of hip-hop.”
But hip-hop isn’t just music based around a beat.
“Hip-hop technically is a name of a youth culture that developed in the ‘70s and has been going on ever since,” Weinstein said.
Hip-hop’s four basic elements are DJing, MCing, graffiti and break dancing, Weinstein said.
“So the standard definition of hip-hop is when MCing and DJing come together,” she said. “I think that it’s a version of poetry that’s written to be performed with music.”
Rap and spoken word are other forms of poetry.
“The difference is spoken word poetry has an emphasis on the poem and vocal performance of the poem,” Weinstein said. “While there’s musical backup it’s not required, where as with rap the music is as important as the lyrics.”
Weinstein said she hopes the class teaches students that poetry doesn’t have to center around meaning.
“What makes a poem a poem is its form, the line breaks and the literary devices,” she said. “I want people to come away with a different understanding of what counts as poetry.”
Adam Pryor, mass communications sophomore, thinks poetry should contain meaning.
“I think just because you rhyme doesn’t mean you’re writing poetry,” he said.
Hip-hop’s heavy themes, like sex and violence, may put off some students to the idea of hip-hop as poetry.
“Poetry needs a deeper meaning or purpose or message other than what the lyrics say,” Pryor said.
But Weinstein explained that poetry dating back to the fourteenth century contains risqué subject matter.
For example, Weinstein said fourteenth century poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote subject matter that was “pretty dirty.”
“The idea of putting limits on what is acceptable as poetic content suggests no understanding of what art is,” she said. “The whole point of art is to take on all the elements that surround us in culture and investigate them and play with them.”
