I Got a Story to Tell: Narrative Techniques in Hip-Hop and Rap Music Part 1
With a rich
history that extends back into oral tradition, it’s no surprise that rap and
hip-hop music is rife with exquisite storytellers. Hip-hop giants like Slick
Rick, the Notorious B.I.G. and Nas are counted among the best for their
storytelling abilities as much as their rhythmic flows and vocabularies. But
what exactly makes a “good” story? And are the stories told in rap on the same
level as what we commonly know as “literature?” Certainly nobody is comparing
Soulja Boy to Shakespeare, but here, I will analyze three different rap songs
in terms of traditional narrative elements: characterization, plot, setting,
style, and themes. I will attempt to pin down how each of these elements is
used to make the songs intriguing, unique, and effective as literary works. (Note:
these three songs do not by any means represent the entire spectrum of hip-hop,
nor do they span the entire history of the genre, or all its offshoots and
iterations. They are simply three of my favorite songs.)
I’ll begin
with perhaps the most straightforward of the three songs: the 2001 underground
hit “Dance With the Devil” by Peruvian-American rapper Immortal Technique.
Check out the lyrics HERE.
And the Audio/Video HERE.
The plot of this story is delivered matter-of-factly, in a
linear fashion that details the rise and fall of William “Billy” Jacobs. Similarly,
the same blunt delivery applies to Billy’s character; even his driving desire
throughout the story is stated in the first few lines of the song: “His primary
concern was making a million / being the illest hustler that the world ever
seen / he used to fuck movie stars and sniff coke in his dreams.” Stylistically,
the narration resembles Hemingway in both its brusqueness and the frequent
judgment of Billy’s character by the narrator. The narrator is as keen to
distance himself from Billy as Jake is ready to insult Robert Cohn (and all of
his “friends,” really) in The Sun Also
Rises. Billy’s and his mother’s fates are linked from the start, when the
narrator sets their life paths in opposition (lines 7-8), and the story follows
a typical tragic arc, in which both Billy and his mother die at the end. At the
end of the song, the narrator asserts its truth by claiming that he also
participated in the brutal assault on Billy’s mother, and knew the protagonist
Billy personally. Here there is an element similar to both some of Hemingway’s
work, as well as the original Sherlock Holmes stories—the narrator (Jake in The Sun Also Rises, or Dr. Watson, for
example) is a participant in the action, but not always its central focus. This
creates a strong ethos, and adds weight to the final warning he delivers not to
follow down the same path. This message underlined with the lingering presence
of the devil in the narrator’s life, reminiscent of the “deal with the devil”
trope found in classic works like Faust and
All Dogs Go to Heaven 2. The lesson
of the story is clear: no one should aspire to the lifestyle described, and
Immortal Technique conveys this moral with as much deftness as any poet,
playwright or novelist.
-Michael Cohen