You have full text access to this content “My Pen Rides the Paper”: Hip-Hop, the Technology of Writing and Nas's Illmatic 1. Graham Chia-Hui Preston Article first published online: 8 SEP 2008 DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x © Copyright the Author. Journal Compilation © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Issue Journal of Popular Music Studies Volume 20, Issue 3, (/doi/10.1111/jpms.2008.20.issue-3/issuetoc) pages 261–275, September 2008 (http://www.altmetric.com/details.php? domain=onlinelibrary.wiley.com&doi=10.1111/j.1533- 1598.2008.00161.x) Additional Information How to Cite Chia-Hui Preston, G. (2008), “My Pen Rides the Paper”: Hip-Hop, the Technology of Writing and Nas's Illmatic. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 20: 261–275. doi: 10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x Author Information University of Melbourne Publication History 1. Issue published online: 8 SEP 2008 2. Article first published online: 8 SEP 2008 Abstract (/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x/abstract) Article References (/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x/references) Cited By (/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x/citedby) Enhanced Article (HTML) (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x) Get PDF (487K) (/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x/epdf)Get PDF (487K) (/doi/10.1111/j.1533- 1598.2008.00161.x/pdf) You a slave to a page in my rhyme book! 1 Nas, “Made You Look” (2002) The Author, when believed in, is always conceived as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (2001: 222, emphasis in original) Hip-hop music and culture have been primarily presented and then transmitted through aural and/or visual rather than written forms. Hip-hop's canonical four elements—DJing, emceeing, break dancing, and graffiti arts—are, for the most part, not invested with and determined by what one could traditionally think of as the technology of writing, to use terminology from Walter Ong. Instead of engaging one on a primarily textual level, the emphasis in hip-hop culture is on the visual and aural experience of the work. Graffiti art, which is also known as “writing,” could perhaps be seen as an exception but even in graffiti, the word (usually the name of the artist) is extremely aestheticized almost beyond 2 recognition. The word itself is turned into a visual experience and the scriptural meaning of the word is obscured if not impossible to discern. 3 In the case of rap lyrics, this point can be born out by noting that most rap albums do not feature the lyrics in the liner notes. Anyone trying to experience them must do it through an aural encounter with the raps (that is, before turning to the Internet). In other words, rap is meant to be heard, not read. While this may seem like a somewhat self-evident notion, it must be taken into consideration when attempting to subject rap lyrics to an interpretation derived primarily through literary techniques. But a close reading of a mostly oral poetic form is not inherently problematic and without merit. Importantly, I contend that such an approach can open and interrogate spaces that are created in the tension of this duality between literacy and orality. I should add here that this article does not wish to side-step questions of how elements of performance strategically foreground or obscure meaning in the lyrics, or, in other words, how presentation of the lyrics brings life to the words. Instead, the emphasis in this article is squarely focused upon how formal features can be decoded and explained through close reading, a specific analytic rubric of literary studies, of hip-hop lyrics. In the end, I think performance is inherently linked to formal qualities; the two form a mutually reliant relationship that need not be oppositional. This article purposefully limits itself to close readings of Nas's lyrics themselves in order to give the proper attention and space to primarily how Nas's poetics work in literary terms and second how they work with aural, visual, and performance media. On his classic debut album Illmatic (1994), Nas (Nasir Jones) is acutely aware of the predominance of the oral in hip-hop music. Simply put, his gripping narratives and rhymes are a virtuosic example of the possibilities of heard rap through their intricate uses of interior rhyme, complicated 4 rhyming patterns, and enjambment. But, in explicit terms and somewhat paradoxically, Nas constructs himself as a writer or, in other words, he sees his rhymes as operating very much in the literary realm. This article then seeks to explore his work on these very literary terms. For example, in “N.Y. State of Mind,” Nas tells us that he is a [m]usician inflictin' composition Of pain. I'm like Scarface sniffin' cocaine Holdin' a M-16, see, with the pen, I'm extreme (emphasis added). Nas stresses the importance of the pen and all that it signifies as a metonym. The pen is also opposed to the gun (“a M-16”) when Nas asserts that it is the pen and his ability to write, and not the gun (which is held by the cocaine abusing film character Scarface) that makes him “extreme.” His status as a radical and perhaps his worth as an artist, is primarily derived not from the gangster fantasy perpetuated by Brian de Palma's film but from his ability to write rhymes, which he in turn delivers when he raps. Nas's conception of himself as a writer, a street poet with a pen and a microphone, influences the narratives that he creates and disseminates. He sketches himself as a solitary observer of the life, death, and grime of the city rather than as an active participant in the stories of his raps. This paradox—Nas's self-construction as a writer exactly through participation in and mastery of an oral culture—is not an example of incoherence but should be seen as a fundamental feature of Nas's poetry. Before I go further, I think a brief account of Nas and his importance as an artist in hip-hop culture is necessary here. Nasir “Nas” Jones was born on September 14, 1973 and he is the son of Olu Dara, a talented jazz and blues musician (Birchmeier 2008; Dyson 2007: 42). He grew up in the notorious Queensbridge Housing Projects in Queens, New York and he dropped out of school in the eighth grade (Dyson 2007: 42). He has released nine albums to date, including Illmatic in 1994, with a tenth record to be unveiled in 2008. Nas is well known for his smooth flow and his complex lyrics, which are introspective, intensely crafted, and densely rhythmic. Michael Eric Dyson has called Nas “one of the most fiercely gifted lyricists in the history of hip-hop” (42–43). Dyson goes further when he names Nas a “rhetorical genius” (43). In an interview with the Associated Press published on MSNBC.com, Nas describes himself as merely a “storyteller” (“Nas: The Mature Voice of Hip-Hop”(2005)). These two positions need not be seen as contradictory, as it is through Nas's recounting of stories that what one could call his “rhetorical genius” comes through. In other words, Nas's genius is made apparent exactly through his lyrics and music, which, as we shall see, are mainly concerned with stories. In any case, in “One Time 4 Your Mind,” Nas offers us a way to think through the apparent paradox of his literary orality. In the second verse, he raps: My pen rides the paper, it even has blinkers Think I'll dim the lights then inhale, it stimulates Never plan to stop, when I write my hand is hot. In only three lines, Nas presents a complex metaphor by purposefully conflating his writing, an automobile and his flow—his ability to rap on beat. The first two are perhaps much more obvious than the latter. In Black Noise, Tricia Rose (1994) isolates three “stylistic continuities” (38) that typify most hip-hop music, one of which is flow. Rose tells us that “[r]appers speak of flow explicitly in lyrics, referring to an ability to move 5 easily and powerfully through complex lyrics as well as of the flow in the music” (39). This ability is also commonly called “riding the beat” and thus, when Nas tells us that his “pen rides the paper,” he gestures toward his ability to rap while introducing the car metaphor and speaking about his prowess at writing and delivering rhymes. Nas, in a sense, unites rapping (the oral) and writing (the literary) in the image of the mechanical car. Through the setting in place of the triple-pronged metaphor, this union also technologizes both his writing and his rapping. Contemplating the metaphor from another angle, the pen becomes a stand-in for Nas himself. In actual fact, it is rappers themselves who flow or ride the beat, but here the pen takes the place of Nas. More directly, the pen is Nas's actual voice. Nas corporealizes and personifies the pen in the last line when he tells us that the act of writing actually warms his hand and also—if one takes the hand as a metonym—his body.