This is my poem for my first assignment in Intermediate Poetry Writing with Professor Welch. The style is prose poetry.
Hip Hop Hooray
I guess I was exposed to poetry mostly when I was a kid sitting with my sister watching her obsess over MTV, which honestly, I didn't get initially. But by doing so I was able to see a skinny, blonde, white guy named Slim Shady on TRL rapping over beats courtesy of Dr. Dre, which appealed to me for many reasons.
You see, previously all I had been listening to was classic rock because that's what my parents liked. I would have my bed side boom box tuned and cranked to the top hits of the seventies and eighties, my eardrums exploding from hearing ACDC, Zeppelin, and Clapton rocking my world, trying to avoid all the Top Forty stations my sibling clung to like a social life preserver. I hadn't yet had my musical revolution.
I remember my sister had the Eminem Show CD and during a family vacation to Florida I borrowed it and I would listen to it over and over again in the car, memorizing the lyrics, mesmerized at the style in which rappers were using words to further emphasize their points. Note that a point I try and make is that Drake, T-Pain, and the Black Eyed Peas aren't rappers and just barely hip hop; the line between hip hop and pop is blurry nowadays and not what it once was. What we need to be doing is decombining hip hop and rap like they're somehow reflexive of each other; it's why R & B has its own category now. So, it needs to be with them too, we're suffering from a lack of specificity in our music types.
Anyway, rap and poetry are like second cousins, they share similar genes but still remain separate. This metaphor doesn't have the legs to make it much further but I can assure you there is subtle similarity between both, only in rap is there beats behind the rhythm and rhyme adding accentuating circumstances, but other than that it's just poetry of the spoken word…word.
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