Jay-Z: Rap Is Genius

13 years ago view-show 1,158,102

Jay-Z has released a clip in which he discusses the main reasons behind his decision to write the book ‘Decoded’. Basically he wants people to view the lyrics of rap songs objectively…and then they will release that rap is genius/poetry:

“I hope readers take away from this book that rap is…it’s poetry. It’s thought-provoking and there’s thought behind it and there’s great writing in rap as well. You never hear rapper being compared for like the greatest writers of all time. You hear Bob Dylan, but so is Biggie Smalls. In a Hitchcock way some of the things that Biggie wrote — Rakim! I mean listen to some of the things he wrote. If you take those lyrics and you pull them away from the music and you put them up on the wall somewhere and someone had to look at them, they would say, ‘This is genius. This is genius work.’

So I want people to take that away, I want people to also take away the quick judgments. Listen to the song. Listen to its intent. Try to figure oout why a song like ‘Big Pimpin” can exist. The same way you try to figure out why a song like ‘Meet the Parents’ exists. I mean it’s clearly obvious that this has [a] different meaning but this on the surface is just as fun…party music. But there’s reasons behind that as well. So I really just wanted to lay this out in a clear and concise way that people can look at it and say, ‘Ok, and if there’s thought and there’s intelligence and there’s reason and logic behind it, then maybe I can deal with everything like that.”

Well fair enough point, there are/was a whole lot of eloquent rappers out there. But that whole Chris Rock argument also comes to mind; you know, it’s hard to defend rap music these days with lyrics like “Till the sweat drips off my balls” and “Move bitch, get out the way”. Let’s see Hov break down those lyrics ‘intellectually’. Spotted at NB.

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