East Coast Street Poets

Many regard the East Coast Street Poets personified by such emcees as Rakim and Nas to be the pinnacle of the art form. And while the region's microphone superiority is contestable -- fans of Scarface and Tupac would offer differing opinions -- there is little debate that the modern art of rhyme was born on the dirty streets of N.Y.C. and mastered throughout the Eastern seaboard.

But what has become the East Coast's signature contribution began as a lark. The first explicitly lyrical rap song -- Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" -- wasn't even intended to be released. Flash thought it too slow and depressing. Hip-hop was primarily thought of as party music until that time, and lyrics were generally secondary and oftentimes nonsensical. With emcee Melle Mel's opening image of "broken glass, everywhere," that song set the stage for the grimy street narratives that would soon become the default setting for the fledgling genre. While Flash and Mel may have given birth to hip-hop lyricism, it would take a duo from Queens to refine the practice. Calculating Rakim's influence on the craft is like trying to gauge Thomas Edison's contribution to the phonograph. East Coast rap lives in the shadow of Eric B. and Rakim's landmark 1987 debut, "Paid in Full." Emcees had long been using their voices as a percussive counterpoint, but Rakim incorporated poetic devises such as internal rhymes, metaphor and rhetorical questions. And he did this all within a context that hip-hop audiences would understand and appreciate.

In Rakim's wake, an entire generation of streetwise poets would emerge during the late to mid-'90s, most prominent among them Nas, Jay Z and the Wu Tang Clan's GZA, Ghostface Killah and Raekwon the Chef. Like Rakim, these emcees focused on tales of ghetto glory and tragedy. Their imagery was oftentimes bloody and boastful, but their rhymes were also undercut with an awareness of the economic, moral, and emotional cost of poverty and criminology. With groups such as Public Enemy, Brand Nubian and X-Clan setting the groundwork, this strain of "conscious" lyricism became increasingly popular throughout the late '90s, with Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Pharoahe Monch.