Rappers Meek Mill and Drake have been come to blows lately, since Mill claimed Drake doesn’t write his own raps. This also launched a series of Meek Mill memes which Drake projected on stage at OVO Fest while he performed. All of this takes into question originality in art, and over at The Quietus, writer Karl Smith breaks down the fallacy of originality:
If rap is somehow set above other music, beyond pop and all its subdivisions, alone in the upper echelons because of its honesty and its purity, and Drake — positively, negatively and frequently labeled as the “sensitive” rapper — is somehow a fraud by those parameters, particularly in light of the introspective quality of his lyrics, then why not the art form so often touted as the purest form of writing?
Smith explores Eliot’s The Wasteland to show that collaboration, in rap or in poetry, public or ghosted, is nothing new.
