AT THE HEART OF CULTURE: A PSYCHO-CULTURAL INTERPRETATION OF RAP POETRY

Abstract

The American literature is a rich body of literature that drew comparatively late attention.  And within the American literature, the African American one can be seen as a separate and distinct body as rich as the rest of that comprehensive body. One of the branches of this black body is the sub-genre of rap which the research attempts to study, using cultural and psychoanalytic principles. It is designed to work on two levels: First, Rap’s attribution to music or poetry or both, and secondly and more importantly, the cultural and psychological forces behind its existence. Thus, it attempts to highlight the inherent cultural- psychological-based behaviour of the African-American people which is supposed to resist the mainstream trends of the behaviour in the society where they live and act.  The study hypothesizes that there is a heavy impact of the culture of rap composers upon the route it takes, along with the social and political circumstances against which it is composed. It also supposes that the effect of such circumstances in this respect could be elemental in the style of this kind of poetry and the themes and subjects it tackles. The study includes four sections: The first one is introduction, while in the second section some definitions of rap along with a historical background about it are presented. Section three tackles the aspect of musicality in rap poetry and in the last section technical and thematic aspects are analyzed. At the end, the study reached a number of conclusions one of the prominent ones of which is the cultural, social, political, and even psychological influences behind composition of rap poems in America and the world at large