Experiment 3 | Minorinwriting

Experiment 3: Rap Genius

Mortal Man - Kendrick Lamar

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Proposal: For this experiment I want to take a portion of one of the tracks from TPAB and use it in a everyday tool i use titled : “Rap Genius”. Rap genius is a tool where people will take lines from each song and say what they mean , because rap music can be confusing sometimes. But I will be looking at the lyrics from “ A mortal man” in a way that is similar to rap genius but more complex, for example rather than just taking a line and saying well when Kendrick says he sells white he is saying he sells cocaine , I am going to magnify the lyrics and say how they relate to the song as a whole and what the deeper meaning of the lyrics are . Rather than saying what the lyrics translate to, this will help show the artistry of what Kendrick Lamar is trying to say (in my opinion of course.)

Sketch Draft:

The layout for this experiment is pretty simple and it is to take each line, state it and then in a few sentences just say what it means to me.

EXAMPLE.

Line 1: Life ain't always what it seem to be

Analysis: *Whatever I think of the interpretation to be. The ultimate goal is to do this with an entire song and to break it down by line to see the meaning of an entire rack on the album . My literary analysis of each line can run from 1-3 sentences and will be linked into each line with text so that when you click on each line you can see the analysis just like you can on rap genius

Genre Analysis:

The Genre analysis for my rap genius experiment would fall into the category of literary analysis and then would be sort of close-reading of the lyrics, where I dissect and expand upon a few lines from the song to say what they mean to me. A literary analysis is the practice of looking closely at small parts to see how they affect the whole. Not only will I be looking closely at some of the lyrics but I have the freedom of expressing what exactly the lyrics mean to me so I cannot be wrong in expressing how i feel about the lyrics or how they relate to the song as a whole.

Reflection: This experiment definitely wasn't my favorite, but I did enjoy getting to experiment with what it would be like to make my own rap genius of a song, being that I use this tool very often in rap lyrics. It was interesting getting to interpret the words of a song and say what they meant to me without having to consider what they might mean to someone else. Analyzing a song this close is something difficult because when I listen to music I think deeply about it in a visual matter rather than in a literary analysis mindset. I think this is because when I listen to music I imagine what it looks like in the form of a “Music Video”.