In Gunnar's community, poetry plays a dominant role. Gangs have their own poets, sport teams are named after poets, it seems like everybody is obsessed with poetry. What if this wasn't the case? What if Gunnar's community was obsessed with rap? Most things probably wouldn't change. Gunnar would still become a community sensation, instead of being asked to speak at funerals, he would MC at clubs and bars. However, I think that after he leaves his community, his life would be much different.
Even if his rap skills matched his poetic ability (they aren't all that different), he probably wouldn't draw as much attention from the college students and professors in Boston. Their high minds wouldn't consider some underground black musician from the west coast as someone to study and draw inspiration from. He would go through his college life without gathering nationwide attention or publishing anthologies of poetry. Instead, he would go back home and continue his rap career. With his skills and rep, he could probably make a good amount of money as well. The book would also lose its signature, "kill us all" ending, but, maybe, in its place, he could start a movement promoting rap as something more than just an underground trend, something that more people should be interested in.
You make a good point that Gunnar's life in Hillside wouldn't change much if his thing was rap rather than poetry, but he would have a much harder time leaving Hillside because of the general consensus about rap outside of Gunnar's community. I agree that the ending would probably be different because Gunnar probably wouldn't have the chance to encourage the entire nation to commit suicide, but I don't know how I feel about the starting a movement idea. I think that Gunnar would probably be happier if he stayed in Hillside, so definitely no smaller-scale version of the mass suicide idea, but I also think he would do his best to remain out of the spotlight. He doesn't really have a passion for leading people, despite his talent at doing so, and without other people, such as college recruiters and members of the student organizations, pushing him to step up into the role of leadership, I don't think Gunnar would take on that responsibility. I think if Gunnar was a rapper, he would lead a simple, but content life in Hillside.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting. What would have happened to Gunnar if he was into rap? It's almost as if Beatty set up Gunnar to "succeed" by making it so that he was into poetry which therefore allowed him to gain a "white" audience rather than a black one. I feel that if Gunnar was into rap, which would have gotten a huge audience among the west and east coast black community, and would have maybe set him off a different path than becoming the "messiah". It would just completely change his life and the direction it took.
ReplyDeleteI think this is definitely intentional on Beatty's part to have the poetry parallel rap in African American culture. The only fundamental difference between the two here (as Ansel of course pointed out) is that one is more recognized by white audiences. This tells me that Beatty is probably making a statement about rap being a form of poetry that is equally as good, but it's just not seen as such by the white communities because of the skin color the people who perform it.
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