Read Awakening

[cool jazz playing] Oh, hey.

I'm just here trying to find the connection between books and music that can explain how Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Don't get me wrong.

I think Bob Dylan's work is deserving of all the praise and accolades it receives.

And I agree.

Dylan's music has transformed the poetic potential of the lyric.

But as a dedicated bibliophile, I have to admit I'm not so jazzed about the idea of musicians winning literary awards.

I mean, are we blurring the lines between art forms so much so that today, music is being judged as literature, and tomorrow, film might be judged as architecture?

And if this opens the door for music to be judged for its literary excellence, what's the criteria for that?

What are the standards that a song must achieve to be considered a great piece of literature?

And can we flip the scripts on that and imagine a world in which authors contend for musical accolades, a Grammy for best metaphors?

[cool jazz playing] OK, maybe not.

But my point is, what or who defines literature?

The author?

The editors?

The critics?

And if Bob Dylan can be celebrated in the literary canon, why not singer-songwriter Carole King?

How about rapper Andr 3000?

Let's check out my conversation I had with one of my favorite music critics, Greg Tate, who talked to me about the link between music and literature.

Taking the cue from his innovative collection of essays, "Flyboy in the Buttermilk," we go deeper into this exploration of artistic expression.

Let's see what he had to say.

I was thinking about your question, you know, is hip-hop literature?

And the short answer is no.

How come?

Because literature isn't something that exists as a defined category in nature, you know.

I mean, it's amplified or sustained by the fact that it is institutionalized, that it does have its own what I would call industrial complex inside the academy so that if we're talking about literature with a capital L, in the strictest definition, you're talking about written work, what's been established as a canon in various categories, whether it's novel, plays, poetry.

What hip-hop writing does is not in conversation with that literary industrial complex.

That's not the reason.

It's not something that-- you know, those writers don't get to thinking about how am I extending the tradition of Tennyson, or TS Eliot, or Ezra Pound, you know.

That idea that hip-hop even has to be considered literature is like-- it's a forced equivalency.

You know, it's outside of those-- those canons.

It's outside of that kind of institutional support.

There's this term in literary studies called paraliterature.

And it applies to everything that's dismissed as being, air quotes, "real literature."

right?

You know, so that's genre fiction, you know, romance fiction, science fiction, mystery novels, and so forth.

Obviously, Ishmael Reed said he thought that the titles of jazz compositions should be considered a form of paraliterature.

And that's him taking the elitism out of the term and almost saying you need to think about it in the same way we talk about the paranormal.

What do you think hip-hop's effect on language has been?

If we're just talking about conversational speeches, it's everywhere.

I mean, you're really looking at the way in which what people call black talk or black speech has mutated and transformed people's own notion of what American English is.

I mean, what rap music has done is really popularize the inventiveness, the expressive poignancy of working class black conversational speech, I would say.

But then also, when given the platform of rhyming speech that rap provides, you can see people rise to incredible artistic heights in terms of their creative use of language and the ability to really sustain, like, an aesthetic statement through the construction of rhymes, the delivery of rhymes.

I think one of the things that hip-hop did that no other form of black music before it had done was it actually created a whole generation of writers, black writers and critics, about the form as it was emerging.

There are certain kind of proofs or tests to which you'd want to put hip-hop writing if you wanted to bring it into this sphere, I mean, one of which is you'd want to see some really knowledgeable, nuanced, sophisticated critics just really take on writing books about the aesthetic of hip-hop writing, you know, and putting those between covers.

And then that can subsequently become a basis.

How about Greg Tate, right?

That conversation set off a million light bulbs in my head.

And now that he's introduced me to the concept of paraliterature, I understand that the canon recognizes the canon, or real recognize real.

But maybe it's all just arbitrary and we can just keep remixing the art as we go.

That's all we have for you today.

Join us next week for another episode of "Read Awakening," where will take another field trip through the literary world.

Until then, remember to read or be read.

[cool jazz playing] WOMAN 1: (RAPPING) I'm free.

I'm claimed.

I'm my own best thing.

I'm not a king.

But I'll rock my crown royally WOMAN 2: "The Great American Read" is a new series on PBS about our most beloved books.

It leads to a nationwide vote on America's favorite novel.

So head over to PBS.org/greatamericanread to vote for your favorite novel today.

Check the link in the description box for more details.