I Got a Story to Tell: Narrative Techniques in Hip-Hop and Rap Music Part Two

In the first part of this mini-series, I examined the narrative landscape of Immortal Technique’s “Dance With the Devil,” a Faustian tale of greed and violence. Continuing this theme, I want to examine a piece that is contemporaneous with “Dance With the Devil,” but occupies the opposite end of the hip-hop success spectrum. Where most outside the underground hip-hop scene haven’t been acquainted with Immortal Technique’s work, it’s hard to find someone alive in the U.S. (and indeed, much of the world) who hasn’t at least heard of Eminem. He’s the best-selling artist of the 2000’s, has won fifteen Grammy Awards, and is a mainstay in current popular culture. So, as is often is the question with print books, can material with mass appeal also be literary?

I’ll explore this idea through the third single from Eminem’s 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP, “Stan.” Look at the lyrics HERE. And the audio/video HERE.

 The plot of “Stan,” is less explicitly detailed than “Dance With the Devil,” and lacks a narrator. Instead, the story arrives in the form of letters between “Slim Shady,” (Eminem’s alter ego) and a superfan of his, named Stan. This epistolary structure is reminiscent of classic novels like Dracula and The Color Purple (among others) and allows for characterization to come in the first person, directly from Stan and Slim Shady themselves. As with Walker’s The Color Purple, the vernacular of the narration reveals Stan’s and Slim’s speaking style, as well as gradually revealing Stan’s character arc. In each subsequent letter, Stan’s narration grows more aggressive and obsessive, his voice rising and getting more frantic, showing the gradual deterioration of his mental state. Stan makes frequent references to other Eminem songs, taking the meanings as literal, though Slim says he “says that shit just clowning.” Here Eminem shows the way songs, like other texts, can be misinterpreted—it’s reminiscent of the misinterpreted poem lines that give The Catcher in the Rye its title, and added thematic resonance (And really, aren’t Stan’s problems just Holden Caulfield-y whining gone too far?) The setting is left mostly obscured, though Stan mentions Denver. There are also sounds in the background of rain, and Stan mentions “blistering cold” and in the first letter says “back in autumn,” implying a bleak, winter landscape. Winter, being the traditional season of death, foreshadows Stan’s eventual demise. By the end of the song, we know Stan’s fate, but still listen to Slim eventually try to reply, slowly figuring out who Stan is. This is a clear use of dramatic irony—a frequent staple in Greek tragedies and highlights the cautionary nature of the tale. 

-Michael Cohen

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