The Aesthetics of Hip-hop and Rap [Multimedia]

Is hip-hop dead?🎤

"Stay far from timid, only make moves when your heart's in it," Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G., once told us, "and live the phrase 'Sky's the Limit'." Hip-hop and rap music, discussed jointly in this article, have had a far greater and longer-lasting impact than its founders and early listeners could've guessed. Once thought to be a fad, hip-hop and rap have become controversial mainstays of music and have even integrated with other forms of art, from Broadway to galleries.

The genre’s ubiquity and influence warrant an analysis of its aesthetic value as art. Aesthetic value stems from art’s unique engagement of the cognitive faculties in ways everyday language cannot. Normally, the cognitive process involves accumulating and analyzing perceptions to develop a conceptual understanding (an abstraction). Art, however, offers a shortcut—it presents abstractions directly, conveying complex ideas and emotions in a single sensory or symbolic stroke.

To see how and with what quality hip-hop accomplishes this, we first need a broader theory of artistic cognition. The Objectivist philosopher and fiction writer Ayn Rand discussed art as the artist’s retelling of reality according to their values, containing emotional and perceptual metadata (except perhaps non-representational art, which has only what I refer to as the “metadata” without content). The pathway art uses to deliver that information varies across branches of art and possibly within branches by media type. Music, for instance, uniquely evokes emotion directly, bypassing the usual cognitive process of perception leading to conceptual understanding. Literature, on the other hand, re-creates reality through language. Rap, like other forms of music containing vocals, fully retains music's direct link to emotion and augments it with an element of language, analogous to literature. If we were to consider music videos, it could even be said to encompass visual art, like painting.

“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.”

- Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition” (1962)

That’s enough to establish at least the potential for rap to have significant aesthetic value, but with what level of quality has it manifested itself? That is, what’s the reality of it? Two-time Assistant Secretary of State and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Alan Keyes, highlighted the double-edged sword of rap music in the African American community — gaining visibility and breaking down racial barriers, but inadvertently misrepresenting the larger, highly religious overall group with negative stereotypes (see “Masters of the Dream”, pp. 135-136). External to the African American community, a similar duality of rap might be constructed as bond-building intercultural communications counterbalanced by negative selection biases in the content curation process.

Musically–in terms of instrumentals, beats, and sung background vocals–it has no shortage of value and has been a major area for creativity, innovation, and creative remixing of past songs across genres. The spoken rhyme component, however, has been more problematic. As Keyes alluded to, it’s been a mixed bag. Starting in the late 1980s rap and hip-hop began to heavily feature explicit content, sometimes referencing drugs or crime, and usually with shallow subject matter. Such content runs the risk of not only misrepresenting the larger African American community, but perpetuating the use of offensive language or glorifying lifestyles that typically lead to severely negative outcomes for those who adopt them as well. Yet, to the extent that even offensive content serves to document the life experiences and perceptions of reality held by the artists and those who identify with their work, it may have both artistic and historical value. In Rand’s language it may serve to evoke a ‘sense of life’ in listeners, perhaps transmitting a summary of what philosophy of mind calls ‘qualia’, meaning an instance or instances of a specific conscious experience.

Importantly, the stereotype of limited artistic value in rap isn’t accurate in many cases. Within mainstream rap, and even in the harder subgenres like “gangsta rap”, there have long been artists like ChinoXL, Nas, and Gza, who have been known for expanding rap’s intellectual depth through their lyrics. Individual songs from otherwise controversial artists like the seminal gangsta rap team NWA, with their smash hit song and video “Express Yourself”, offer a window into the more enlightened heights that rap may reach. Stepping out of the mainstream, one can discover even greater value in subgenres such as “nerdcore” and “lit-hop”, which have emerged in recent decades.

Raheem Jarbo, better known as “Random” or “Mega Ran”, is a nerdcore rapper and chiptune DJ who serves as one example. In the song “Infinite Lives” on his 2015 album “Rndm”, rapping under the name Mega Ran, he commented on the sustained cultural value of the music to he and his listeners. The reflection that contributions to music outlast the artist may not be unique, but it resonates more deeply in Jarbo's case, given his overall thoughtful and stimulating content reflective of his work as an educator.

Live through your creations and the people that you teach

So I Live through my music, eternally through the beats

– Mega Ran, “Infinite Lives” (Rndm, 2015)

In doing so, with his overall eclectic, cross-genre approach, Jarbo sits at the intersection of mainstream and alternative hip-hop. Some artists in the emerging niches, like nerdcore duo “Dual Core” and NASA-hacker-turned-manager “YTCracker”, rap tales of corporate employment, IT technical support, and computer science. Others rap about classical fiction, poetry, or the English language, like MC Lars, who calls his sub-genre “lit-hop”.

I said, "Can I help you, evil prophet? If you got a problem, look, I'll solve it."

He checked my hook, DJ revolved it, perched on Pallas, chalice dropped it.

– MC Lars, “Mr. Raven” (The Laptop EP, 2005)

As a form of art blending music, language, and sometimes visual expression, the potential artistic value of rap music is high. Problematic or shallow content may be the norm, but exceptions to the norm are not rare. Mainstream and niche artists have demonstrated the added value of thoughtful lyrics, although the rate of adaptation of the genre leaves room for improvement. Prior generations of rappers competed on the toughness of their lyrics, in sales, live “battle rap” competitions, and in (often unofficial) prerecorded “diss” tracks. Newer artists have a tendency to too closely imitate the flaws old, sometimes continuing to use offensive language or promoting vice and crime. There’s value in almost all rap as a cultural record reflecting the population identifying with the artist or song, and lyrical content involving crime or socially unacceptable attitudes could function as entertainment akin to action films. That kind of value is added upon by some artists who introduce new themes rather than continuing the old focus on drugs, sex, and violence with unnecessarily offensive language.

Government intervention (censorship) and other forceful approaches aren’t effective strategies for raising the aesthetic bar in rap. Aside from being an unethical assault on freedom of expression, heavy-handed approaches understandably embolden those they seek to silence, as was demonstrated by NWA in the biopic “Straight Outta Compton” in response to censorship attempts by local and federal law enforcement. Rap music is a business and a culture. The music becomes more enlightened as we reward intellectual and motivational rappers with our downloads, likes, plays, subscriptions, and purchases.