Literary Allusion Runs Deep Through the History of Hip-Hop

One of the defining characteristics of hip-hop music is the use of allusion. On his song “Dumb It Down,” Lupe Fiasco rhymes, “I’m brainless, which means I’m headless, like Ichabod Crane is…” In Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, schoolmaster Ichabod Crane never actually loses his head. That honor lies with the Headless Horseman. We let it slide though. These references are flexible. No one flinches when Method Man grabs his “Charles Dickens” on Biggie’s “The What.”

Allusions like these activate two texts at once, bringing to mind more than what they say on the surface. Rap lyrics are rife with allusions to other songs in the canon, as well as other media artifacts. These allusions give the oral history of hip-hop music a cohesion and a history similar to that created by the musical riffs of other live instrumental-based genres.

Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, the guy who gave us the idea of paradigm shifts, described an essential tension in science between innovation and tradition: Too innovative and the theory is untestable, too traditional and it’s not useful. The same tension can be said to exist in hip-hop, as if one “innovates” without regard to “tradition,” one is no longer doing hip-hop. Where lyrical allusions are concerned, one must not adhere too closely to the original source lest one be accused of rote repetition at best and plagiarism or biting at worst. A practitioner must make something new while still adhering to the traditions of hip-hop. In this way, lyrical allusions can be viewed a lot like the musical samples over which they’re spoken. It is often difficult to tell which side of the line a lyric, a song, or an artist falls. The listener is often the one who must resolve the tension between innovation and imitation because rap itself is always somewhere in the middle.

Aesop Rock, widely considered one of the wordiest emcees, claims not to read books. “Yeah, reading bores me,” he told me years ago. He might have changed his media diet somewhat since then, but back in 2005 he claimed his intake and influences were “mostly movies and TV and comparing real life situations to similar nostalgic movie situations or things like that.” That methodology doesn’t seem that strange for any songwriter, raps, rhymes or otherwise, but the first rule of writing is to read. A lot. Through literary allusions, these are just a few of the ways that books have influenced hip-hop lyrics.

When it comes to rap lyrics and authors, two easy examples are Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim.

Donald Goines wrote about himself and his associates and their struggles as street hustlers, pimps, players, and dope ends. Goines wrote sixteen books in five years and helped redefine the genre in which he wrote. He interrogated the nature of human identity through the inner city. To retrofit a description, one could say that Goines wrote gangster-rap literature. They’re referenced in rap songs by everyone from Tupac and Ice-T to Ludacris and Nas.

Iceberg Slim, whose 1967 autobiography Pimp: The Story of My Life got a recent best-seller bump from a mention on Dave Chapelle’s Netflix special, The Bird Revelation, is also mentioned on Ice Cube’s “Who’s the Mack?” Ab-Soul’s “Christopher Droner,” Gucci Mane’s “All These Bitches,” Nelly’s “E.I.” Pimp C’s “Grippin’ on the Wood,” Too $hort’s “Money in the Ghetto,” “Bad Ways,” and Biggie’s “What’s Beef?” among many others. Jay-Z alone mentions Iceberg on his songs “Kingdom Come,” “So Ghetto,” “Fuck All Nite,” and “Who You Wit?” Ice-T even borrowed his name on his 1990 record, The Iceberg: Freedom of Speech: Just Watch What You Say, on which he raps, “Call me The Ice… or just The Iceberg.”

“Soul on Ice,” the last song on Ice-T’s previous record, 1988’s Power—the first record to bear a Parental Advisory sticker—can be seen as further homage to Iceberg Slim in both style and subject matter. Instead of riding a beat as is an emcee’s wont, Ice-T rhymes in a slow, storytelling style, much like Iceberg Slim’s own record from 1976, Reflections. Soul on Ice is also the name of Eldridge Cleaver’s first book. Written while Cleaver was locked up at Folsom State Prison, the memoir was at least as influential as contemporary texts by Slim, Goines, and Malcolm X. Upon his release, Cleaver served as Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party from 1967 to 1971. Ice-T’s fellow L.A. emcee Ras Kass also adopted the name Soul on Ice for his debut record in 1996, and he makes reference to the book several times on the album’s title track. For example, “In limbo, I lamp, rape the lady, kill the tramp. The wrong action for the right motive,” which is from the first chapter of Cleaver’s book, “On Becoming,” in which he describes taking revenge on his white oppressors by ravaging their women. The cover of the record shows Ras Kass reclining in a jail cell.

Emcee Killer Mike mentions books and literature itself on several songs. On “Big Beast,” he raps “We the readers of the books and the leaders of the crooks.” On “Willie Burke Sherwood,” he says, “books I read ‘cause I’m addicted to literature.” On the latter track, Mike takes his cues equally from Tupac Shakur and William Golding. He compares himself to Jack in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Of the three would-be leaders on the island, Jack was the mean one, the one wielding weapons instead of words. The weaker boys, the strangely calm Simon and the overweight and overwrought Piggy, lost their lives, while Ralph, the more benevolent, diplomatic and democratic of the leaders, lost his mind. Killer Mike uses the situation in the book to illustrate that a civilized man can’t survive among the animals in the streets. At the very least, he must assert himself as such.

Speaking of animals, on “Animal in Man” (2000), Dead Prez retell the story of George Orwell’s best novel, Animal Farm (1945), adapting it from the Russian Revolution to the state of the United States at the start of the century. For instance, the farmer in the book becomes Sam, as in Uncle Sam.

Waka Flocka Flame’s raucous debut Flockaveli, a name that combines Flocka’s own with that of Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli, recalls Tupac’s last record as well, which was released under the name Makaveli. First disseminated in 1513 and finally published in 1532, Machiavelli’s The Prince is a standard of political strategy for those with agile ambition and flexible morals. It is used in the same way that Killer Mike uses Golding above: to justify tactics that might otherwise be taboo.

Any mention of Machiavelli’s The Prince in the context of rap leads to two similarly influential works, one before and one after: The Art of War by Sun Tzu (5th century B.C.) and The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene (1998). For instance, on the Remix to Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire’s “The Last Huzzah,” Kool A.D. of Das Racist says, “Let’s battle and see who sons who. I’m reading Sun-Tzu,” making clever use of the genre-old tradition of emcee battles but also referencing the author of the military strategy classic. He brings it back to Tupac, The Prince, and Miguel de Cervantes in the very next line, claiming he’s “translating Don Killuminati into Spanish.”

Greene’s 48 Laws have been referenced in songs by everyone from Drake, Kanye, and Jay-Z to Beanie Sigel, Rick Ross, and Ras Kass, the latter of whom did a whole song called “48 Laws (Part 1)” applying the first 24 laws to the hip-hop industry. For example, Ras Kass indicts mogul and producer Sean “Puffy” Combs for his liberal use of borrowed labor, rapping, “And Puff Daddy perfected rule number seven: Get others to do your work, but take all the credit.” 50 Cent even went so far as to collaborate with Greene on a book called, The 50th Law (2009). The book is a memoir written in the tone of inspirational business strategy, a street hustler’s manual.

No stranger to the streets, Detroit’s Danny Brown grew up on the works of Dr. Seuss. The nme of his fourth record, 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition, is inspired by both the Joy Division song and the J.G. Ballard book of the same name. The Ballard book is a series of condensed novels, which is an apt description of the songs on Brown’s record.

On the Roots’ “100% Dundee,” Black Thought says, “Push pen to paper like Chinua Achebe.” The song is from their 1999 record, Things Fall Apart, which was the name of 1958 debut novel by Achebe. The Roots also reference Malcolm Gladwell’s debut book, The Tipping Point (2000), with their 2004 record of the same name. Now, this particular naming may be a coincidence, but Gladwell’s book had become a best-selling nonfiction title by then, and the Roots are smart folks. Years later in 2012, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis released The Heist, which jumps off with a song called “Ten Thousand Hours.” The track is named after Gladwell’s theory of mastery from his 2008 book Outliers. The theory states that in order to master a skill, one has to practice it for 10,000 hours, which Macklemore claims to have put in on his rap craft.

Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye provides the inspiration for Black Star’s song “Thieves in the Night” from their only record, 1998’s Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star. The song, like the novel, is about the differences between being seen as a person and being perceived as a persona: that feeling when where you’re from is at odds with where you’re at.

Allusions are everywhere in our media and can be found throughout hip-hop. The manner in which the music is made and the words spoken on top are often borrowed and bent for new purposes. It not only gives the genre agility and grace but also connections to everything it cobbles.