Few were surprised when Lana Del Rey announced her 2020 debut poetry collection, first released as a spoken word album accompanied by sounds of the ocean and then as a hard cover book.
was widely lambasted when officially published in 1971). Patti Smith was mentored by none other than Beat Generation icon Allen Ginsberg. And everyone from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed proved their words could be just as effective when unaccompanied by melodies.
Artists including Billy Corgan, PJ Harvey and Ryan Adams have all tried their luck at the art form with varying degrees of success. But this kind of moonlighting is no longer exclusive to rock or folk. Since the late 1990s, a whole host of names from the worlds of pop, R&B, hip-hop, soul and country have attempted to stake their claim as modern day bards.
In fact, you can’t peruse the poetry section of your nearest bookstore without stumbling across at least half a dozen names more synonymous with thecharts than the T.S. Eliot Prize. Mary Lambert, Cody Simpson, Mike Posner, Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, Ashanti, Jill Scott — these are just some of the hitmakers who have poured their hearts out in verse, sonnets or prose.
Their content isn’t much more substantial, with Drake often resorting to his hyper-macho default . There’s a handful of clever dad jokes in there, but“He would stare at the space between my eyebrows/too cowardly to make eye contact/and say/’I’m going to f–king kill you.’/And I would believe him.” As evident from the domestic violence tale “Lighthouse,”often made for harrowing reading, with the “Closer” singer addressing her experiences of sexual assault, miscarriage and bipolar disorder.
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