One of my goals as a professor of English is to teach students to recognize and think critically about what makes something art.

Rap isn't poetry, not least because it involves music and often other elements that aren't words. But the way poets in English use things like rhyme and meter, and the ways these conventions both do and don't apply to rap we try to lay out the rules for rap, in order to understand the techniques that artists like Jay-Z and Kanye employ.

The history of modern culture is a history of popular entertainments evolving into art.