How Hip-Hop Influenced My Writing

On the genre’s 50th birthday, a meditation on its importance to my writing.

Photo by Zac Ong on Unsplash

When my wife and I first started dating, she joked that every boy she ever dated who grew up in New York City eventually revealed that they secretly wanted to be a rapper. It turned out she was correct. Because I, too, had a book of rhymes lying around. 

I can’t rap for shit. I would always stay quiet and drift to the back when freestyles broke out in the cafeteria or in the yard during my school days in the Bronx. But some of my first attempts at creative writing were these rhymes, or more specifically, poetry in the style of hip-hop bars. 

This makes sense, given that hip-hop artists were some of the first literary influences in my life. 

Before James Baldwin, Piri Thomas, Junot Diaz, or Ernesto Quiñonez, there was Jay-Z, Nas, Biggie, and Big Pun. Their lyrics rocked around inside of my brain. Their words were the ones I analyzed. Their imagery and descriptions made me want to try writing things on my own that were just as vivid. 

More than the beats or even the music videos with busty women, I loved the fact that true hip-hop artists made me feel things with their words. That they allowed me to see life through their eyes and, in some cases, feel a kinship with them I wouldn’t experience with fiction writing until I was in college. 

I still remember, for example, listening to Jay-Z’s 1999 track “Anything” and feeling something tingle. Through his rhymes, I felt he was speaking directly to me, to my problems, and my existence.

Dear nephews, I’m writing' this with no pen or a pad

And I’m signing it, ya uncle, ya best friend, and ya dad

Don't look back if you fall and you’re feeling bad

I’m right there from you’re cut to when you peelin' the scab

If it comes a time when you ain’t feelin' your real dad

Put my face on his body don’t wait for nobody

Don’t follow no nigga, that's ho shit man

Stand on your own two, do your shit man

Then, of course, there were rappers who I admired simply for their lyrical dexterity. For rhymes that perhaps weren’t as inspirational, but still made me stop the track, rewind, and think: How the fuck did they do that? 

Of course, Big Pun’s legendary verse on “Twinz” in 1998 is a clear example. 

Ready for war Joe, how you wanna blow they spot

I know these dirty cops that'll get us in if we murder some wop

Hop in your Hummer, the Punisher's ready

Meet me at Vito's with Noodles, we'll do this dude while he's slurpin' spaghetti

Everybody kiss the fucking floor, Joey Crack

Buck 'em all if they move, Noodles shoot that fucking whore

Dead in the middle of Little Italy little did we know

That we riddled some middlemen who didn't do diddly

That last couplet, to this day, makes me shake my head and admire the skill embedded into it. 

The experience of being moved by tracks like these as a young kid are what made me wonder if I could accomplish similar feats on the page. I never had (serious) dreams of rocking a crowd. But at a certain point, I did begin to imagine myself writing things that could also make people feel stuff. 

Things that might make people laugh in the way that Eminem lines made me laugh, that might motivate them in the way that 50 Cent lines motivated me, or that simply might make them smirk at what I’d said, as Lil’ Wayne often made me do—especially during his infamous mixtape run in the early 2000s. 

Even once I began to connect to novels and switch my writing form of choice from free-verse poetry to fiction in college, hip-hop remained—and remains to this day—a big force in my literary life. 

It is no surprise that there are many hip-hop references in my forthcoming novel, VICTIM, which led to some funny moments during the copy-edit phase. (See below) 

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A post shared by Andrew Boryga (@borywrites)

When I first started writing my novel, it was a very different story. But at its core, it still has remnants of a story about a kid from the hood trying to balance newfound “success” with the survivor’s guilt he has from making it out and seeing his old ties take drastically different paths in life. 

In 2012, around the time that a real first draft of the novel started to coalesce, Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city had just dropped and quickly became the soundtrack to my efforts on the book for a long time to come. More so than any novel I was reading at the time, I felt that Kendrick was telling the sort of story that I wanted to tell, and doing so in a way that was raw, lucid, and captivating.

Kendrick’s music would remain a constant source of inspiration to me. In my mind, he’s one of the few mainstream, commercially successful rappers still dedicated to the story-telling aspect of rap that most attracts me. His albums have become timestamps of sorts for my novel. 

His 2017 album DAMN., for example, was released during a turning point in the life of my book, when I wanted to try and take it in a different direction, but was a little afraid to do so. As ever, Kendrick was fearless on the album, especially on songs like “DNA”, and I have to think a bit of that rubbed off on me. 

The same can be said for his 2022 effort, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, released around the time my book was getting ready to go out on submission. I wondered how publishing houses might react to the latest iteration of it. How they might receive my satire of the writing world, and the fact that I pulled no punches in calling out the odd commodification of identity, and lived experience that I was seeing everywhere. 

It was Kendrick’s words, on songs like “N95” that helped put me at ease, and reassure myself I wasn’t crazy. He was seeing the same stuff, too. 

Where the hypocrites at?

What community feel

They the only ones relevant? (Let's go)

Where the hypocrites at?

What community feel

They the only ones relevant? (Let's go)

It was also his words that I returned to when I had doubts about how the work might be received by critics, by Twitter. Whenever I momentarily worried about what people might say.

What the fuck is cancel culture, dawg?

Say what I want about you niggas

I'm like Oprah, dawg

I treat you crackers like I'm Jigga, watch

I own it all

Oh, you worried 'bout a critic?

That ain't protocol (bitch)

For a time, somewhere around the 2015 to 2020 years, I bought into the hype of the industry at large. I drank the Kool-Aid. Tried to water things down. Tried to make sure I didn’t offend anyone in my fiction. And, as a result, the art suffered. 

It took a lot of things happening to break out of that. Becoming a dad helped, as did receiving some great advice from veterans in the game. Finding God and putting him at the center of my life instead of clicks was important. But hip-hop played a huge role, too—as it always has in my life.  

I’ve found that I can always return to key verses, lines, and moments of brilliance in tracks to re-center me. To remind me what I’m really after here, and what sort of energy and spark I’m trying to put out into the world with my words.

More often than not, the songs I return to were made many years ago. Sadly, I can’t say I love much of today’s hip-hop.

I might just be an old head at this point, and perhaps I have fallen into the inevitable trap of believing that whatever music you grew up listening to in high school is the best music. 

Nonetheless, much of modern day hip-hop remains unlistenable to me. When I try to get through one of those playlists of the new, hot stuff on the charts, I can only get through a few songs before I must turn it off out of disgust and cleanse my palette with something older I know I’ll enjoy. 

Part of me wishes there was more substance to the music. Less about glorifying violence, guns, and gang life, less about taking drugs (at this point, I’d even prefer more raps about selling the drugs) and treating women like objects. But, of course, my own influences were no better—look back at that Pun verse, for instance—so who am I really to judge? 

Despite all of this, as hip-hop enters its 50th year of existence, I’m still grateful for the medium. 

I’m happy it is thriving. Having interviewed pioneers of the form back in the day, I know they never thought it would get to this point. The evolution of it all, from something that young, poor, black and Latino kids did in the Bronx to where it is now is quite incredible—no matter your opinion of the offerings of the genre today. It is a story of success and triumph that is as American as any other. 

So, cheers to hip-hop, for inspiring me, and for getting here. Cheers to the OG’s and innovators who made it possible. And cheers to young artists coming up—especially those still trying to push the artform and, hopefully, inspire some young kids in the same way that I was inspired all those years ago. 

Peace, 

Andrew   

Recommendations:

• My friend and fellow Miami resident, Alex Perez, wrote an excellent essay for The Mars Review of Books about a new class of female fiction writers who are skewering our “rotten cultural condition in a highly stylized manner without deploying tired tropes and manipulative literary techniques.”

• Prominent psychologist and researcher Jean Twenge is back on the scene with a new essay in The Atlantic on Millennials and why, perhaps, we’re actually doing a lot better at life than we like to think.

• The Drink Champs Podcast had rapper Wiz Khalifa on for a wide-ranging and insightful conversation. A lot of people assume Wiz is just some stoner rapper, but, as this interview proves, he’s much more than that. He also moves through life with a vibe I genuinely admire and appreciate.

• I recently finished The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar and loved it. I found it to be a gritty portrait of early motherhood, and all the struggles women go through that are often unseen by men. There was absolutely lovely language throughout, too. For more, read Valerie Stivers excellent review of the novel in Compact.  

• The Paris Review recently unlocked an interview with novelist, literary critic, and essayist Albert Murray. I recently purchased Murray’s often cited, Omni-Americans (still haven’t read it, but it’s on my list) and found this interview to be a great primer on his nuanced thoughts about race, representation, and the true purpose of art. I’ll leave you with his quote: “...when the complexities of human motive, of human behavior, of human aspiration are oversimplified in the interest of a specific social or political remedy, then we’d call it propaganda.”