Yeah you often see people who have just bars of dope rhyming, and it's like, alright, that's pretty cool and all, but why should I be impressed? The goal is to write to a topic, or to write punches at your opponent. ONLY doing lyricism isn't impressive at all to me.
I doubt the majority of rappers have even read a full book before (I haven't either). It's not a very intellectually fuelled industry, so that's why we see so little intelligent additions to the rap game. For it to be poetry, you'd have to have poetic techniques, and I bet the majority of current rappers cant explain what alliteration is. Sure you have a few guys, like as someone said before Mos Def and Lupe, but you cant hold ALL of rap by the standards of the few guys who take a different direction. You have to look at rap overall, and the overall thing we see is that rappers talk about the streets, claiming it's storytelling and not genericism, they don't think of their bars in terms of imagery, subtle metaphors, tone. They think of their bars in terms of what rhymes next and how they can try and link it to the bar before, and when the bar before is about guns and shit, that's when they go down the same route as everyone else.
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