Is Lil B Oakland's new Gertrude Stein?
To join today's trend of applying literary theory to hip hop (like the Economist and the Language Log comparing Lil Jon to Beowulf), here's my addition:
Could Lil B be the Bay Area’s next Gertrude Stein? His play on repetition of words like “swag” and “winning,” is similar to Gertrude Stein’s repetition and modernist wordplay with everyday items and phrases, like she does in her book Tender Buttons and poems like "If I Had Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso."
Stein’s writing emphasized “the sounds and rhythms rather than the sense of words.” In her poetry, she wrote to capture “‘moments of consciousness,’ independent of time and memory.” In a similar fashion, Lil B plays with repetition turning modern catch-phrases and pop culture references into items to be repeated, dissected, and flipped.
Instead of writing about objects, food, and rooms, Lil B raps about Swag, Charlie Sheen, and Ellen Degeneres. This thesis could perhaps be turned into an academic paper by someone studying language poetry or modernist literature.
To listen to these chronologically disparate, but sonic and rhythmically similar styles, listen to Gertrude Stein’s playing with words in “If I Had Told Him” and then listen to Lil B’s Ellen Degeneres.
"If I Had Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso" and Lil B’s repetition of Swag seemed to be incessant on many of his tracks. So much so, that Funny or Die even released a video about Investigating Swag Syndrome.
So what do you think? Is Lil B continuing Gertrude Stein's literary legacy?
Could Lil B be the Bay Area’s next Gertrude Stein? His play on repetition of words like “swag” and “winning,” is similar to Gertrude Stein’s repetition and modernist wordplay with everyday items and phrases, like she does in her book Tender Buttons and poems like "If I Had Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso."
Stein’s writing emphasized “the sounds and rhythms rather than the sense of words.” In her poetry, she wrote to capture “‘moments of consciousness,’ independent of time and memory.” In a similar fashion, Lil B plays with repetition turning modern catch-phrases and pop culture references into items to be repeated, dissected, and flipped.
Instead of writing about objects, food, and rooms, Lil B raps about Swag, Charlie Sheen, and Ellen Degeneres. This thesis could perhaps be turned into an academic paper by someone studying language poetry or modernist literature.
To listen to these chronologically disparate, but sonic and rhythmically similar styles, listen to Gertrude Stein’s playing with words in “If I Had Told Him” and then listen to Lil B’s Ellen Degeneres.
"If I Had Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso" and Lil B’s repetition of Swag seemed to be incessant on many of his tracks. So much so, that Funny or Die even released a video about Investigating Swag Syndrome.
So what do you think? Is Lil B continuing Gertrude Stein's literary legacy?
