I've no doubt that prof. New has good intentions and I'm sure she's brilliant, but I often feel a weirdly reductive poetics is applied in rap analysis, where the text is treated as an allegory to be decoded 1:1 through understanding of slang
it gives a pretty closed interpretation, it misses the complexity of rap lyrics, and perhaps there's something faux-naif about treating lines like "wisdom be leaking out my grapefruit" as if they were difficult to understand
it's something I believe was also very prevalent in early rock criticism where endless hours were wasted "deciphering" Dylan lyrics and the like
― niels, Wednesday, 17 May 2017 09:45 (seven years ago) link