This Das Racist song will get in your head and do all sorts of insidious things. Not because it’s bad, but because it makes brilliant use of two of the most crucial creative weapons: repetition and variations on a theme.
In an excellent Village Voice interview, the rap duo decree, “My top five favorite poetic devices of all time are repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, and repetition.” By merely repeating a word, such as repetition, each iteration takes on renewed intensity and a slightly different meaning. Texts that seek great depth often rely on this mechanism. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance: “To die, to sleep; / To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…”
Posted by Jaime Gassmann in Music | 1 Comment »
