Honours
Thesis
Supervisor:
Sheila Roberts
April
10, 2000
Competitive
Poetics
An
Examination of Speaker/Audience Relationships in Hiphop Lyrics and The
Canterbury Tales
Baba
Brinkman
963017591
If men shal telle
proprely a thyng,
The word moot cosyn
be to the werkyng. (209)
-Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Manciple’s Tale
When comparing two texts in an English
Literature paper, it is commonplace to first discuss the obvious differences,
then demonstrate the similarities and parallels one has observed, and finally
to talk about the common influences that have caused such similarities to
arise. The texts I have chosen, however, may not be entirely conducive to this
process. The poetry produced by Geoffrey Chaucer in late fourteenth-century
England and the lyrics produced by Hiphop artists today are as widely separated
as virtually any two texts in English. Any similarities I discuss will
therefore inevitably be obscured by more obvious contradictions. Generic,
cultural, racial, temporal, economic, geographic, literary, oral, textual, and
political differences confuse and complicate the poetic correlation I intend to
illustrate. Furthermore, it is nearly impossible to attribute this correlation
to common influences, save perhaps those applying to all poetry produced in a
highly competitive atmosphere, written for oral performance, and judged
according to some definable poetic standard, such as skilled rhyme, regular
meter, intelligent content, and entertainment value. The near isolation of
these texts from common social or cultural influences complicates things
immensely, yet it also allows me to talk about similarities in poetic technique
and structure without the baggage of having to identify any tangible shared
origin. This was, or course, the desired effect in choosing these texts, yet it
has also resulted in a paper that is both culturally and academically
unorthodox, and is bound to be met with skepticism and even some hostility.
Hiphop purists will likely object to the association of a primarily
African-American art form with the poetry of a medieval Englishman. Academic
purists may object to a comparison between their beloved Chaucer, the
"father of English poetry," and the lyrics of a few ghetto-born
urban-American rappers. I will therefore proceed only with the understanding
that I mean no disrespect to anyone, and hope to both elevate Hiphop lyrics
from their status as merely a "popular" form, while at the same time
reconnecting Chaucer’s poetry with its roots in popular styles and orality.
Neither side, I would argue, has anything to lose from this partnership.
I intend to compare the fictional speakers in
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, with the semi-fictional
speakers found in Hiphop lyrics. The interdependency of the speaker and
audience represented in both Chaucer’s fictional frame narrative and in
recorded Hiphop is the basic foundation of my argument, since I have found the
most distinct parallels in this relationship. The fictional interactions
between different voices in both texts symbolize actual oral transactions
rendered in a competitive framework, with remarkably similar poetic standards
of judgement. To make this comparison, I propose to begin with a discussion of
the Hiphop genre, focussing specifically on aspects that reflect poetic and
structural dynamics similar to those in Chaucer’s poetry. The areas of Hiphop
revealing the most concrete parallels are its inherent orality, its permeating
atmosphere of competition, specifically regarding the poetic skill of the
speaker, its constant recycling of previous themes and materials, and finally
its extreme self-referentiality. Once a clear understanding of the relevant
facets of Hiphop has been established I will apply these concepts to the frame
narrative of The Canterbury Tales. This discussion will focus
specifically on "The Tale of Sir Thopas," which represents the height
of Chaucer’s ironic self-parody. "Sir Thopas," and especially the
surrounding dialogue, presents us with a scene that is highly oral, strongly
competitive with regard to the speaker’s poetic skill, adapts and parodies
previous narratives and conventions, and is Chaucer’s most blatantly
self-reflexive verse in the text.
I’m breakin’ the
laws of physics with metaphors and lyrics,
Speakin’ to dead
poets by conjuring up their spirits
From Shakespeare to
Edgar Allen,
Yo, the whole dead
poet society couldn’t mess around with the talent
-Canibus freestyle
Hiphop music, a contemporary Urban-American
form approximately twenty-five years old, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales, an elaborate text written in Middle-English over
six-hundred years ago, must seem at first an unlikely combination. Hiphop is
above all a genre originated and dominated by African-Americans. My research
has revealed comparisons between Hiphop and other contemporary American and
traditional African poetic forms, but barely any criticism linking Hiphop
poetics with those of the English literary tradition. Hiphop critics most often
trace the genre’s precursors through black music and African myth, grounding
its roots in the history of black people, and positing Hiphop as the latest in
a long line of black poetic and musical expression. Most of these connections
have already received critical attention, but David Toop provides us with a
useful overview:
Rap’s forebears
stretch back through disco, street funk, radio DJs, Bo Diddley, the bebop
singers, Cab Calloway, Pigmeat Markham, the tap dancers and the comics, The
Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, Muhammad Ali, a cappella and doo-wop groups, ring
games, skip-rope rhymes, prison and army songs, toasts, signifying and the
dozens, all the way back to the griots of Nigeria and Gambia. (Toop 19)
As one black poet and academic I spoke with
pointed out, "the originators of Hiphop were more into Parliament
Funkadelic than they were into ‘The Parliament of Fowls.’" This is just a
clever way of saying that Parliament Funkadelic, referred to above as
"street funk," was definitely influential in Hiphop’s formative
years, whereas rap’s pioneers were no doubt unfamiliar with Chaucer’s poem,
"The Parliament of Fowls." Thus if I were tracing Hiphop’s origins,
rather than examining its poetics, Chaucer would be totally irrelevant.
Suffice to say, English Literature did not
play a vital role, if any, in the founding of Hiphop. Though the cultures
represented by Hiphop and Chaucer may have little in common, one definite
connection does exist; on a very basic level, Hiphop lyrics are a form of
poetry in English, usually working with (or against) the same structures of
rhyme and rhythm used for centuries by English poets. Also, Hiphop’s tendency
to borrow from other texts and genres leads to the recirculation of material, a
process that causes Hiphop lyrics to intermix with other poetic genres. English
poetry may not have been influential in the first expressions of Hiphop, yet
the lyrics gradually began to incorporate themes and narratives from this
tradition as the genre diversified. What criteria these lyrics must meet to be
considered literary poetry is of less concern to my discussion than the basic
poetic form they take, i.e. consistent rhyme and rhythm, and the thematic
content they express. Today the criteria defining poetry is nearly as
complicated as the criteria defining literature, but in Chaucer’s world things
were simpler; poetry was rhymed and metered, while prose was not. Hiphop
lyrics, were they heard in fourteenth century England, would probably have been
recognized as a form of poetry, bizarre and perhaps unrefined, but verse
nonetheless. Likewise, if a few lines of Chaucer were slipped into a Hiphop
track, they would function the same way as other lyrics, sounding a bit out of
place, but easily meeting the demands of rhyme and rhythm Hiphop has
established. More importantly, both texts represent inherently self-referential
forms of poetry. Hiphop artists rap about writing rhymes and rapping just as
Chaucer writes poetry about writing and reciting poetry. In spite of the
centuries separating them, two poetic forms with such similar structural and
thematic characteristics effectively lend themselves to comparison.
Black soldier:
"Haven’t you heard of the emancipation proclamation?"
White general:
"I don’t listen to Hiphop."
-The Southpark
Movie
The poetics of Hiphop have so far been
overshadowed by politics, at least in the majority of criticism published.
Hiphop has been studied mostly in the social and cultural fields, in the
context of black cultural production. It has also been a vital outlet for
racial tension, both for the black artists frustrated by their oppression in
white culture, and the white artists frustrated by their exclusion from the
genre. This later phenomenon represents a more trivial and ironic form of
oppression, yet it exposes the complexity and multi-layered nature of race
relations in Hiphop:
If white-boy’s
doin’ it well, it’s "success;"
If I start doin’ it
well it’s "suspect."
Don’t hate me, my
folks is poor, just got money,
America’s five
centuries deep in cotton money,
You see a lot of
brothers caked-up, yo, straight up,
It’s new, ya’ll
livin’ off a slave trader’s paper. (Mos Def)
Some people only
see that I’m white, ignorin’ skill
‘Cause I stand out
like a green hat with an orange bill
But I don’t get
pissed; Ya’ll don’t even see through the mist
How the fuck can I
be white? I don’t even exist. (Eminem)
Much of Hiphop criticism and theory deals
with the black/white relationships it both reflects and dictates, within the
lyrics and without. Perhaps the only consensus among these critics is the
sentiment that questions of race are central to Hiphop music. "One thing
is certain: it’s impossible to consider and understand hip-hop outside the
context of race; the music remains so inextricably linked with black culture
that it is nearly impossible to separate them"(Ehrlich 13). It would
therefore be impossible for me to circumvent these issues as well. Questions of
race and politics, however, do not undermine my argument. It is true that I am
comparing black poetry with white poetry, yet the two are poetically connected
by a common language and use common terminology when referring self-reflexively
to their own poetics.
I would argue that most of the differences
between Chaucer and Hiphop are political while most of the similarities are
poetic. According to M.A. Neal, "digitized recordings of hip-hop
theoretically served to distribute the critical narratives of an isolated
working class and underclass youth culture across the dis-jointed African
American diaspora via the marketplace."(Neal 160) Neal’s theory of Hiphop
music emphasizes its role in black culture, a context from which it cannot be
removed. Comparing Neal’s "black critical narratives" with those of
medieval English culture, however, is not my intention. My comparison is
primarily based on poetics and speaker/audience correlation in the narrative
frameworks, rather than cultural or political questions. When considering
Hiphop in Neal’s context, the medium is less important than the message and its
impact, i.e. by his description Hiphop music might as well have been prose
fiction. This may clarify the distinction between the focuses of Cultural
Studies and Comparative Literature, since the area of Hiphop Neal disregards is
exactly the basis of my argument.
DJs continually
extend the music into other genres. Investigating jazz, soul, R&B, blues,
salsa and country they cross into new cultural territories and histories. In
return people all over the globe insert themselves into hiphop hybrids,
changing the genealogy of the music and further expanding the range of the
practice. (18)
- Brian Cross, IT’S
NOT ABOUT A SALARY…
In order to provide some contextual
background for my comparison, I will include a brief discussion of Hiphop music
as a genre; this is intended to convey a sense of the complexity surrounding
Hiphop lyrics, which are only one element of an art form notorious for evading
generic distinctions. Like many popular and literary genres, Hiphop is both a
medium and a message, at the same time music and poetry, able to incite its
listeners to dance as compellingly as it makes them think. Artists have used it
as a medium for political debate, social commentary, and racial outrage, while
others have turned it into parody, joking and making fun of themselves and
their audiences. The most effective artists manage to combine the two
approaches to find a balance. Debates have raged over these divisions in the
genre, fueled by both the artists themselves and by the critics writing in
response to the lyrics. Critics and artists have split Hiphop into various
sub-genres to accommodate these debates, and various offspring include Message
Rap, Pop Rap, Gangsta Rap (or G-funk), East Coast and West Coast styles, Latin
Rap, Underground, Mainstream, Afro-centric Rap and cross-over Rap with numerous
other established musical and poetic genres. There is still considerable
blurring among these genres, and even the most rigid classifications tend to
break down under scrutiny. Some critics have attempted to define the genre by
reducing it to its basics, filtering out internal divisions to settle on
characteristics that seem consistent. Mark Costello takes this approach in Signifying
Rappers, and includes the following definitive traits:
a) No melody besides canonized fragments w/o
progression…
b) A driving,
oh-so-danceable 4/4-cut-time… a pyramidical rhythms-within-rhythms structure…
c) Lyrics that are
spoken or yelled, often rhymed or assonant, but always metered, complicating
and complementing the marriage of back-bass, scratches, and drums…
d) A consistency in
its deployment of maybe a half a dozen themes… and
e) An overall
esthetic that mainstream pop critics and performers… scorn as shallow,
materialistic and self referential.
(Costello 82)
In the ten years since this book was
published Hiphop has diversified considerably, and few of these traits can
still accurately be applied to all Hiphop music, the exception perhaps
being the 4/4 rhythm, which in my experience does appear to dominate.
Costello’s observation that Hiphop is built on "canonized fragments"
or samples of previously recorded music remains generally true as well,
although original instrumentals and percussion are becoming more and more
acceptable. Some groups, such as the Philidelphia-based ensemble, The Roots,
perform shows with lyrics recited over live music and drums. Fifteen years ago,
however, Hiphop was almost devoid of new musical notes: "serious 80s rap
is the first ‘music’ composed entirely of notes created and performed,
copyrighted and peddled, by precursors"(Costello 85). Despite the recent
influx of original music in the genre, the use of samples still remains one of
Hiphop’s trademarks, an element that ensures the novelty and diversity of the
genre, since any previous recording is the potential raw material for a new
song. The lyrics, usually both rhymed and rhythmic, now deploy about as many
themes as any poetic medium, since the number of prominent and aspiring artists
has grown exponentially in the last ten years, and the sheer volume of lyrics
written and produced is now immense. Even with this expansion, the belief is
still widespread that the esthetic of Hiphop remains shallow, self-referential
and materialistic. Now, however, this criticism comes from within the genre as
much as from without and many artists direct the focus of their lyrics at the
ignorance and materialism of their peers.
Lost generation,
fast paced nation,
World population
confront their frustration,
The principles of
true Hiphop have been forsaken,
It’s all
contractual and about money makin’,
Pretend-to-be cats
don’t seem to know their limitations,
Exact replication
and false representation.
You wanna be a man,
then stand ya own,
To MC requires
skills, I demand some shown.
-Black Thought of
The Roots
For the sake of simplicity I will use this
definition: Hiphop includes a rhythmic percussion line, music that is either
original or sampled, with lyrics of varied thematic content, delivered in a
wide range of individual verbal styles conforming to the rhythm. The most
integral and basic form of expression for Hiphop lyrics is the freestyle
battle. Freestyling is any rhyming that is completely spontaneous and
unrehearsed, existing in contrast to those rhymes that are written, memorized, and
then recited. Battling is where two or more lyricists enter into a rhyme
competition, promoting their own lyrical skills while belittling those of their
competitors. The two terms are not inseparable, and neither are they exclusive,
since battles can have both freestyle and also memorized rhymes, and
freestyling can be either demonstrative or competitive, depending on the
situation. The importance of live freestyling and battling is that in both
cases the audience, whether it is a crowd of spectators or merely the listening
participants, determines the ability of the lyricist through active response.
If the lyrics fit the rhythm well and the rhymes are fresh, original,
entertaining, and edifying, then the lyricist will be cheered. If the rhymes
lack content, are awkward, cliched, or boring, the speaker will not last long.
This direct connection exists only with live events, of course, but recorded
lyrics usually incorporate the conventions of the freestyle battle, using
similar language, and emphasizing the themes of intense competition and lyrical
ability. The response of consumers to a recorded CD subsequently reflects the
same speaker/audience dynamic, although indirectly. The relationship in this
case is far more complex because so many other factors may compel people to buy
CDs, such as production quality, promotion, or simple curiosity. In the case of
live performances, however, the audience and speaker enter into a directly
interactive relationship. The audience will listen, and provide encouragement,
so long as the lyricist can prove he deserves it. The arts of freestyling and
battling therefore represent the very foundation of Hiphop music, since
virtually every lyricist who achieves commercial success must first undergo the
trial of countless verbal competitions to prove their ability.
The function of freestyling in Hiphop is
discussed by T-Love, a lyricist from Los Angeles:
Freestyling is
important to the livelihood of true hiphop because: 1. It helps keep the music
form alive by encouraging creative competition among the artists, 2. It helps
to define the line between an MC and just a rapper and 3. Aids in the fear of
never letting people forget where hiphop/rap came from… it has proved to be a
pliable and ever-changing music form. Partially responsible for its rapid
evolution is its constant breeding of competition. Where there is competition,
there is change… The main difference between an MC and a rapper is freestyling.
(Cross 306)
Rappers are those lyricists who can only
write and recite, but can’t compete in a freestyle battle; these artists
compose their lyrics and characters primarily for commercial appeal. An MC on
the other hand is capable of either delivering memorized rhymes or freestyling,
as the situation warrants. Every MC is a rapper, but not every rapper is an MC,
and the later is thus a more interactive and versatile performer. For rappers,
the competition transfers from lyrical skill to record sales, hence the
materialism and shallowness that becomes the target for criticism. What is
important to my discussion in this paper is the competition entailed by
freestyling and battling, a competition where the only judges are the listeners
present and willing to respond. Equally central is the shifting role of speaker
in a freestyle battle, where the microphone is passed from person to person,
and the speaker takes turns alternately delivering rhymes and appraising the
rhymes of others.
It’s the black
Cyrano Debergerac of rap,
With the ghetto
Anglo-Sax poetics intact.
-Canibus
One of the most striking similarities between
Chaucer and Hiphop appears when we consider how they both integrate oral and
textual forms. Since the time of its conception Hiphop has undergone a definite
transformation from a primarily performative or non-written genre to one that
incorporates more textual forms. This has occurred as the lyrics are
transcribed and published, as the genre becomes an acknowledged influence on
the generation of young writers who grew up listening to it, and as Hiphop
artists themselves begin to publish works of poetry and prose. One example of
Hiphop’s fusion with the page is manifested in a related genre, spoken word
poetry. This is a form similar to Hiphop, but with a greater emphasis on the
lyrics as poetry, conducive to being anthologized and read, rather than only
heard as music; also, spoken word is not consistently rhymed, and could perhaps
be called the urban equivalent of free verse.
Speaking of the
connection between spoken word and hip-hop, Amiri Baraka notes: ‘It’s the same
continuum; it just depends on where you get on the train.’ Jessica Care Moore
proudly admits to being influenced by hip-hop’s thirty-year lineage and
acknowledges that it has wielded considerable impact on spoken word poetry.
Elaborating on Baraka’s view, Moore says: ‘Hip-hop and poetry stem from the
same thing; it’s just that the aesthetics are different. Hip-hop requires
music… [their] lyrics show that they twist their poetry a little bit and call
it hip-hop and then they put a beat underneath it, and make some money."
(Anglesey xxi)
Spoken word also manifests a speaker/audience
relationship similar to Hiphop battling and freestyling, since spoken word
poetry is also delivered to an interactive audience. "On open-mic nights,
initiates to spoken word learn their poetics, not by studying Contemporary
American Poetry, but the hard way – through audience approval, or
disapproval"(xviii).
The interaction between orality and
textuality in Hiphop lyrics greatly resembles the court poetry in Chaucer’s
England, a literate manuscript culture employing the conventions of an oral
poetic tradition. These early manuscripts function as direct representations of
an oral transaction between fictional speaker and fictional audience, a
reflection of the actual speaker and audience present at a reading. Lois Bragg
examines this relationship in Old English lyrics, where "their manuscripts
often mimic or record an oral performance or oral transaction… ‘You scratch out
on the surface words you imagine yourself saying aloud in some realizable oral
setting’"(Bragg 27). This scene is distinctly reminiscent of the Hiphop
artist writing in his notebook and practicing for the chance to deliver rhymes
to an audience. Tricia Rose’s description of the oral/literate dynamics
involved in Hiphop lyrics sounds remarkably similar, "They are rhymes,
written down first, memorized, and recited orally… oral performances that
display written (literate) forms of thought and communication"(Rose 87). I
would even argue that the poetry of England’s medieval manuscript culture has
more in common with Hiphop lyrics than much of the text-based poetry of today.
Bragg indirectly indicates this connection as well:
Modern audiences
for poetry and belles lettres of
any kind, are quite different from the Anglo-Saxon audience for works of verbal
art. Poets today write for an elite audience which consists chiefly of scholars
and other poets… One does not drink beer or eat pretzels or flirt with a fellow
member of the audience at a poetry reading… For us, poetry usually means
reading, and reading is inappropriate in a group setting. (Bragg 34)
Appropriately, one might easily find audience
members drinking beer and flirting with each other at a Hiphop show.
It’s the sights and
sounds and smells of it that you have to capture to be a great rapper and bring
listeners into the story, so they can close their eyes and it’s almost like
they’re there.
-Jay-Z
Bragg is mainly concerned with the Old
English Lyric, however, which is not my focus in this paper. The connection to
Chaucer is made when he is situated in the context of this manuscript culture:
In oral cultures,
the poet often is present with his audience during the presentation of the
poem… in print cultures, he is absent, and usually unknown to his readers. This
change came about gradually in medieval England. In a manuscript culture, the
poet composes in solitude (although not in silence), but he often reads his own
work to his audience. As late as the fifteenth century we find Geoffrey Chaucer
portrayed as doing just that. Poetry in a manuscript culture was essentially
communal not only because the poet often read his own works, but because the
audience for the work was more likely to be an audience in the original sense of the word – a group of
auditors rather than individuals who read the work privately. (Bragg 28)
Chaucer’s central position in the transition
from oral to manuscript to print culture complicates his sense of audience in The
Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s poetry often demonstrates a strong sense of his
audience as present listeners, rather than absent readers. "The word
‘audience,’ as he uses it, remains close to its etymological sense of ‘those
within hearing,’ and his own poems almost always contain references to those
who ‘hear’ or ‘harken’ or to whom he is ‘telling’ his ‘tale’"(Strohm 47).
This sense of a listening audience is intensified within the frame narrative of
The Canterbury Tales as well, since each tale is delivered in the voice
of a fictional pilgrim addressing the rest of the group. "Chaucer’s
interest in inscribed situations of telling and hearing is apparent at every
stage of his career, but never so vividly as in the realization of his compaignye of pilgrim-narrators"(Strohm 64). In reality,
however, Chaucer’s audience was probably very different from this company of
middle-class pilgrims. "The most plausible supposition about Chaucer’s
audience is that it consisted mainly of those gentlepersons in service who,
together with a few London intellectuals, [comprised] Chaucer’s social and
literary circle"(Strohm 50). Also, Chaucer’s pilgrim persona in The
Canterbury Tales is conscious of writing for a reading audience as well as
a listening one, and occasionally makes reference to his future readers. The
conflation of oral and literary forms in this text is perhaps best represented
in the "Prologue to the Miller’s Tale." Chaucer’s pilgrim persona
introduces the Miller’s rude narrative with a warning: "And therfore,
whoso list it nat yheere, / Turne over the leef and chese another
tale"(3176). For Chaucer it was apparently not a contradiction to
"yheer" the words written on a page, which solidifies the connection
between his poetry and Hiphop lyrics, since both are written explicitly to be
heard and experienced, rather than simply read in silence.
The
dynamics between the oral and literate aspects of Hiphop are further
complicated by technology. I have so far examined Hiphop as it incorporates
recorded and textual forms into a primarily oral and performative genre; this
likens it to medieval manuscript culture, yet I don’t mean to suggest that
Hiphop is evolving into a textual genre. English poetry transformed slowly into
a print culture over centuries, responding to complex social and political
factors, and as a side effect it lost much of the orality that originally
defined poetry, largely represented by rhyme and/or rhythm. Hiphop on the other
hand is inextricable from its orality, defined by its incorporation of complex
rhymes and rhythms, and could never have the same effect or reach the same
audience if it became a textual genre. In Hiphop, we see a rare fusion of oral
and literary forms, where the oral traditions are necessarily maintained, as
they are in a manuscript culture, and yet still can be mass-produced, which was
a characteristic exclusive to print culture before the invention of recorded
sound. Tricia Rose has examined some of these complexities in Hiphop music using
Walter Ong’s highly influential theory, articulated in Orality and
Technology: The Technologizing of the Word. She writes:
Rap is in part an
expression of what Walter Ong has referred to as ‘post-literate orality’…The
concept of postliterate orality merges orally influenced traditions that are
created and embedded… revised and presented in a technologically sophisticated
context. It also has the capacity to explain the way literate-based technology
is made to articulate sounds, images and practices associated with orally based
forms, so that rap simultaneously makes technology oral and technologizes
orality. (Rose 86)
Within Hiphop, the relationship between
freestyling (MCs) and writing rhymes for recital (rappers) reveals a modern
analogy for the relationship between oral and manuscript cultures in medieval
England. Freestyling is inherently oral, and like oral cultures it has no
recorded or textual medium for reference; the poetry exists only in the mind of
the performer and in the moment of performance. Rappers are more like poets in
a manuscript culture, as detailed by Bragg above, because both entail the
writing of lyrics to enable an oral performance later on, either from memory or
read from the page. The poetry of medieval England’s manuscript culture
integrates the forms and conventions of oral performance, just as digital
recordings of Hiphop lyrics contain the themes of competition and verbal
creativity required by the freestyle battle. In both cases the more complex
recording is meant to capture the performative power of its oral predecessor.
It’s the arrival of
the carnival
New beats, I never
recycle
While you looking
for samples
You might get
trampled.
-Wyclef
One of the greatest discrepancies between
Hiphop and traditional oral cultures lies in the concept of communal
authorship. In an oral culture, "narrative originality lodges not in
making up new stories," instead, "formulas and themes are reshuffled
rather than supplanted with new materials"(Ong 42). Hiphop artists in
contrast define themselves as producing original material, and a common theme
in the lyrics has always been disdain for unoriginal lyricists. This is further
complicated by Hiphop’s tendency to borrow heavily from other genres, a trend
reflected both in sampled music, and the constant lyrical echoes and
references. Ironically, lyricists usually claim sole authorship of their
lyrics:
Rap lyrics are
closely linked with the author; unlike traditional Western notions of
composition in which the composer’s text is in a separate sphere from that of
the performer, rap lyrics are the voice of the composer and the performer.
(Rose 87)
In an interesting twist, the concept of
communal authorship central to Ong’s understanding of oral cultures is
reflected more vividly in the music of Hiphop than in the lyrics. The use of
samples and re-mixes resembles the reshuffling of themes and stories in an oral
culture, and unlike the lyrics, artists take pride in creative reformulation.
"Rap DJs and producers reshuffle known cultural formulas and themes. It is
in this context that narrative originality is lodged"(Rose 88).
Another interpretation of this issue is
raised by Costello in Signifying Rappers, and leads me to an important
site for comparison. "The coldly manufactured, self-consciously derivative
sound-carpet of samples over which the rapper and DJ declaim serves to focus
listeners’ creative attention on the complex and human lyrics themselves."(Costello
97) This differs from Rose’s reaction to Hiphop sampling significantly, in so
far as Costello appreciates the originality of the lyrics in contrast to the
"unoriginal" music, rather than appreciating the way they compliment
each other by reflecting different sides of postliterate orality. This may
demonstrate the creative development of DJs over the five years between these
publications, or perhaps the critical development of Hiphop theorists. The two
seem to agree, however, that the emphasis on originality in the lyrics
obviously contrasts the general recycled nature of the music. Although this is
still the case, the division is now far less absolute. Hiphop today is full of
original instrumentals and percussion, and many external references have
entered the lyrics, which are later sampled and reintegrated into new songs. In
terms of the music, Costello observes that Hiphop sampling "is but one
theft in a hoary history of ‘musical quotation’ going back to Bach – who ripped
off 17th-century court dances in his French Suite for Harpsichord – and before"(58). As with academic writing,
musical quotation in Hiphop is acceptable if the reference is a clear tribute
to its source, and becomes an offence only when the sampler tries to pass off
old work as his own.
I
began with a desire to speak to the dead…
-Stephen
Greenblatt
The concept of poetic authorship and
intertextuality raised here is an issue that also appears recurrently in
English literary criticism. Harold Bloom’s book, The Anxiety of Influence
examines some of the effects of intertextuality in English poetry: "Poetic
history… is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong
poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative
space for themselves"(Bloom 5). Hiphop’s tendency to incorporate old
lyrics into new songs, and even to reproduce old songs with new beats or
instrumentals follows Western European poetic tradition. This tradition
inevitably reflects the same ambiguity of authorship found in oral cultures,
though complicated by technology. Chaucer is also writing in the context of
this tradition, alongside the more imaginative Hiphop DJs and producers who
combine the communal authorship associated with oral traditions, and the
intertextuality of English poetic tradition. In both cases older work is
constantly being revitalized and adapted into contemporary dialects and
settings, a process that pays tribute to the original author/producer while at
the same time revealing the skill of the translator through his (humble)
revisions. In Hiphop we see this in both the lyrics and music:
Sampling in rap is
a process of cultural literacy and intertextual reference… these samples are
highlighted, functioning as a challenge to know these sounds, to make connections
between the lyrical and musical texts. (Rose 89)
We often see Chaucer doing just this, only
with literary, classical, and mythological references, rather than musical
ones. Inevitably, all kinds of references and samples filter into Hiphop from
outside of itself as well, and occasionally lyrics will contain literary
allusions alongside the musical ones. This indicates yet another parallel
between Hiphop culture and the manuscript culture represented by Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales. Both specifically define themselves through adaptation,
remixing, sampling, etc, and are unabashed in their appropriation of previous
material, having arisen out of traditions patched together from fragments of
other traditions.
The Canterbury Tales is a text
representing an oral transaction between speaker and audience, which is typical
of Chaucer: "his poetry frequently apostrophises a listening
audience"(Bradbury 118). Besides the text itself, however, the internal
narrative structure Chaucer has chosen to frame the tales involves the same
dynamic. The Canterbury Tales takes the form of a pilgrimage composed of
a diverse company of mostly middle-class pilgrims to the city of Canterbury,
England, in the month of April. Along the way, each of the twenty-nine pilgrims
present must take a turn as speaker and tell a story in rhymed and metered
verse; those tales told in prose are set up in contrast to this norm. The tales
were adapted from classical and contemporary texts, and Chaucer’s voice comes
through most clearly when his narratives diverge from the original source.
Chaucer narrates the entire book in the first person, recounting his fictional
experience among these pilgrims by relating each individual tale in the voice
of the teller, and also by detailing the framing interactions surrounding them.
Although these characters are his own creations, Chaucer’s pilgrim persona
speaks as if the pilgrimage actually took place, and attributes each story to
its teller, rather than to himself:
But first I pray
yow, of youre curteisye,
That ye n’arette it
nat my vileynye
Thogh that I
playnly speke in this mateere,
To telle yow hir
words and hir cheere
Ne thogh I speke
hir wordes proprely.
For this ye knowen
al so wel as I:
Whoso shal telle a
tale after a man,
He moot reherce as
ny as evere he kan
Everich a word, if
it be in his charge,
Al speke he never
so rudeliche and large,
Or ellis he moot
telle his tale untrewe,
Or feyne thyng, or
fynde wordes newe." (725)
For this comparison I am less interested in
the tales themselves than the peripheral interactions that serve to
contextualize them, and the various dialogues between the performing speaker
and responding audience. As each tale is told, the other pilgrims, led by the
Host, assume the role of critically responsive audience, and the role of
speaker is passed on one by one. The dynamics at work within this group greatly
resemble those found in a freestyle battle, especially since the tales are
framed in a charged atmosphere of competition.
Avyseth yow, and put
me out of blame;
And eek men shal
nat maken ernest of game.
-Prologue
to The Miller’s Tale (3185)
At the onset of the journey the Host proposes
a game to help them pass the time pleasantly, "And therfore wol I maken
yow disport / As I syde erst, and doon yow som confort."(775) The Host’s
role as mediator in this contest is much like the MC of a freestyle battle, who
introduces each lyricist and provides feedback and moderation between
competitors. The Host, who is ironically described by Chaucer as a "marchel
in an halle"(752) or master of ceremonies (MC), defines the competition in
the "General Prologue":