Hip hop
Kate Tempest is, first and foremost, a rapper. In an interview with me, she explained how a hip hop sensibility underpins all her writing. She is often referred to in newspapers and online reviews as a ‘spoken word artist’; however, Tempest explains that she only began performing at so-called ‘spoken word’ events as a way to make money from her lyrics: ‘I never defined myself [as a spoken word artist], and I never knew anyone else who I respected who defined themselves that way either.’
Choosing to define herself as a rapper, positioning her work clearly within the tradition of hip hop, is a political choice as well as a stylistic one. The term ‘spoken word’, as Conrad Murray, the director of the Battersea Arts Centre’s Beatbox Academy has argued, decontextualizes rap from its social and political roots, sanitizing it for the kind of literary and cultural elite who attend events at theatres and art galleries.1
Hip hop is as much a cultural political movement as it is a popular commercial form: rooted in the experiences of those who are marginalized from society by virtue of their race and/or socio-economic status. Hip hop is deeply embedded in models of collective action and being together, or what hip hop practitioners call ‘oneness’.2 The ‘cypher’ (or ‘cipher’), for example, demonstrates how this concept translates into practice: a cypher in hip hop is a circle in which a group of artists gather to share lyrics and dance moves or to jam together. Tempest explained to me that this form of sharing helps foster a commitment to what she calls ‘improvement’, a word that suggests both the way it encourages artistic development of the form itself, and the way the sharing-circle creates a vision for an improved world.
Appreciating Tempest’s background in hip hop becomes significant when thinking about the function of the chorus in Wasted. Here the rhyming, poetic lyrics serve as a means by which the actors, stripped of their individual characters, epitomize ‘oneness’. (Note how the stage directions specify that during the chorus actors are ‘all and none of the characters’, and that they should ‘speak in their own accents’.3)
The Chorus are a collective; it is only when they speak together that they can address the audience directly, with profound truths the characters cannot express. Juxtaposed with the realism of the preceding scenes, there is a sense that the chorus becomes holy – the ‘something real’ that the characters long to touch (see Chorus Three).4 In this way the form offers us hope that we don’t find in the plot, as the chorus demonstrates the ‘different possibility for communication’ that the characters are unable to imagine for themselves.
Verse drama
The term ‘verse drama’ refers to plays that are written with a metrical rhythm (they often, but not always, rhyme). Famous historical examples include the blank (non-rhyming) verse of Ancient Greek theatre, and the Early Modern verse pioneered by Shakespeare, often presented in a metrical composition called ‘iambic pentameter’.5 It is tempting to think of hip hop and classical forms of verse drama as totally separate genres. This is because verse drama is associated with what we think of as ‘high’ cultural history, and often sits in elite cultural spheres that seem vastly removed from the contemporary street-level appeal of hip hop. But hip hop is, as theatre scholar Harry Elm writes, ‘a new form of cultural expression’ that ‘still retains, repeats, and revises the past as it pushes into the future’.6