Allusion has always been a big part of hip hop. We talked about this a little in class; you hear a lot of allusions and homages to other songs and pop culture, but very rarely, if ever, do you hear a cover song in hip hop. We discussed in class how there are a lot of songs that put their own spin on the line "once upon a time, not long ago" from "Children's Story" by Slick Rick. In fact, one of the songs that alludes to the line was "99 Problems," another song we discussed in class. In the same verse, Jay-Z interpolates a line from LL Cool J's "To Da Break of Dawn" when he says, "You know the type, loud as a motorbike, but wouldn't bust a grape in a fruit fight", to cleverly describe someone who's all bark and no bite. He also throws in a plug to one of his own songs at one point, saying, "Rap critics say he's 'Money, Cash, Hoes'", an offhand reference to the song of the same name, and bemoaning the fact that people don't take him seriously based on some of his songs.
"99 Problems" also has many lines that are referenced in other songs. At one point, Jay-Z takes on his critics, saying, "I'm like, fuck critics, you can kiss my whole asshole." A bit graphic, but it gets the point across. In "Power," Kanye West makes an homage to this line, saying, "Fuck SNL and the whole cast, tell 'em Yeezy said they can kiss my whole ass." This itself is a response to an episode of SNL in which they parodied Kanye's Taylor Swift debacle, and also made a joke about his deceased mother. In the same song, he makes a subtle reference to the sampled song in the beat, "21st Century Schizoid Man" by King Crimson, saying, "I'm living in that 21st century, doing something mean to it."
This is just one example of how rap songs make homages to each other and pop culture. I could go on about all the references to Nas songs off Illmatic, or all of Jay-Z's lyrics that quote "old school" hip hop, but I chose these as concise examples, two of which we've talked about in class. I hope that instead of dismissing a line you don't understand, that you look it up, there's an amazing world of allusions out there in the vast wealth of hip hop lyrics.
And this is only one of the main categories of allusion in rap--I'd call it something like "intertextual allusion." There's an ever-growing body of familiar phrases and lines that have been quoted by other rappers, and which depend upon a listener's literacy to understand them. A whole other, just as common, category would be allusions to tv shows, movies, pop-culture icons, historical figures, and so on. The Anthology of Rap, in its 25th edition in 2112, would have to be bulked up with explanatory notes detailing what Underoos were, or who Batman and Robin are, or who Michael Jordan was, and so on. Since rappers are making reference to the cultural landscape most listeners inhabit, we "get" many of these allusions without having to do any research. But a future reader/listener might be as confused by the references as a current reader of Milton may be by his references to the Reformation or Oliver Cromwell.
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