Mos Def, a rapper from Brooklyn, is a master of the metaphor. He's so good, in fact, that I think he deserves to be considered not only in the context of hip-hop but in the context of the literary canon.

My focus in this article will be on a few songs from Mos Def's collaborative album with Talib Kweli, "Black Star." It's one of my personal favorite albums, a crystallization of what makes New York boom-bap great, and a textbook example of two artists bringing out the best in each other. And despite being released in 1998, the lyrics strike home. "This ain't no time where the usual is suitable," raps Mos Def on "Respiration." This and many other lines have only strengthened in the years since the release of "Black Star."

For the sake of simplicity, I use the word "metaphor" to broadly mean a comparison between two, unlike things, so a simile would be a particular type of metaphor in this case.

Mos Def writes some of his best and most evocative rhymes on the song "Astronomy." The song is a meditation on the title of the album, in which Mos Def and Talib Kweli take turns sharing thoughtful bars that unpack the idea of a "black star." During a series of lines that start with "black, like ____" (also known as anaphora, for you rhetoricians out there), Mos Def writes the following: "Black, like the cheeks that are roadways for tears, / that leave black faces well-traveled with years." Mos Def's language here is remarkably efficient, not to mention elegant. The "cheeks that are roadways for tears" are not only roads, which already implies high volume, but they are "well-traveled" roads. To my mind, this language evokes Niobe from Greek mythology. After her children are killed, she weeps so profusely that her tears form a river--a "roadway for tears." And a black mother weeping at the loss of her children/child is not a foreign image to our times. All this, Mos Def fits within a couplet.

Here's another couplet from later in the song: "I'm dark, like the side of the moon you don't see, / when the moon shines newly." Aside from the surface-level meaning--Mos Def's complexion is dark like the dark side of the moon--there are deeper reverberations to be heard in these lines. There is a certain image of America presented in pop culture, largely a white image. Mos Def, as a literal "black star" himself, is on the other side of that binary. America ignores his stardom, or maybe they simply can't see it at all--just like the dark side of the moon.

These are examples of quick-hitting, efficient metaphors, but Mos Def can pull off the extended metaphor with similar ease. The song "Respiration" is an exploration of the idea that a city is a living, breathing thing. To my ear, this is Mos Def at his most literary, and there are parallels to be drawn between him and his literary precursors. Here is the hook to the song:

Breathe in, inhale vapors from bright stars that shine,

Breath out, weed smoke retrace the skyline,

Heard the bass ride out like and ancient mating call,

I can't take it y'all,

I can feel the city breathing,

Chest heaving,

Against the flesh of the evening.

Two poets come to mind for me here: Walt Whitman and TS Eliot. The first line of the hook echoes a sentiment found in Whitman's "Leaves of Grass": "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars." Both writers feel an intimate connection to the universe, so much so that the connection extends all the way to the stars.

The rest of the hook to me has strong echoes of TS Eliot, in particular, the poem "The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock." Here are that poem's famous opening lines: "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky, / like a patient etherized upon a table." The echoes become even clearer later in the poem: "The yellow fog that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, / the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes."

My point is not that Mos Def is profoundly influenced by either Whitman or Eliot or that he was a student of Greek mythology. In fact, it's likely that he's never read the works I refer to. My point is that his writing--in particular his knack for metaphor--has such a literary value to it that it is a fruitful exercise to place him in the literary canon and see where we can trace his ideas.