I feel like speculating irresponsibly about the racial motivations behind the media excitement over an English Professor who claims that rapping has its origins in an old Celtic dissing ritual, so I will: Rap is dead white folks, you don’t need to claim it posthumously through 11th hour revelations.
Ferenc Szasz, a professor of history at the University of New Mexico who specializes in American and Scottish culture, says in a new study that the lyrical tradition of battle rap derives from an ancient Caledonian practice called flyting, The Telegraph reported. Examples of flyting, a kind of verbal dueling in which opponents would trade rhyming (and often obscene) insults with each other, date at least as far back as the 16th century; Mr. Szasz said Scottish slaveowners brought the practice to America, where it later evolved into hip-hop. Comparing practitioners of flyting and hip-hop performers, Mr. Szasz said: “Both cultures accord high marks to satire. The skilled use of satire takes this verbal jousting to its ultimate level — one step short of a fistfight.”
Okay, well I’m going to come clean here and say that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on rhetorical competition and criticism in poetry, specifically the work of Alexander Pope and that of Jay-Z and Nas. To be sure, there are a great deal of similarities in the neoclassical and Hip-hop traditions with regard to competition. Both traditions have an abstract ideal, in neoclassicism it is “the natural” and in Hip-hop it is “realness,” and their artistic product must be weighed according to these standards. In Pope’s case, the violation of “Nature” justifies the barbs he tosses at his enemies, and Nas and Jigga spent two years arguing about who is “realer.” Both traditions prize the dispassionate, and effortless-seeming lyrical evisceration of one’s foe, and both use contextual references to each other’s work as weapons against their rivals. Both traditions utilize the rhetoric of instruction, mockingly explaining to a rival how to be a better poet or emcee. Like teenagers trying to get the latest diss tape, the emerging middle class in Pope’s England couldn’t wait to pick up the latest pamphlet from Pope calling out the Dunces. And if you don’t believe that Pope was as vicious as any battle rapper, pick up his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot where he eviscerates Lord Hervey as a cross-dresser. The dude is Jigga with a wig and a hunchback.
What does it mean? It means that competition is good for art, since without Jay and Nas battling Jay wouldn’t have stepped his game and Nas would have been lost to history, but it doesn’t mean that Nas and Jay-Z are the direct artistic descendants of Alexander Pope. Even if one could establish a historical link, the influences on Hip-hop are so varied, and competition between artists is so common in so many cultures that it’s impossible to draw a straight line. Whose to say rap battles aren’t also influence by traditional Muslim competitions involving the recitation of the Qu’ran? What we do know is that the art form would not exist without the mishmash of African, European and American culture as molded in the crucible of the black American experience. Szazs argument, even if true, essentially amounts to saying that a coca leaf is a can of Coca Cola, and as we all know, it isn’t.
