Origin

Roland Barthe's concept of intertextuality maintains that every text is a new tissue of past citations. Therefore, there is no exclusive origin of a text. Much like people, texts are displacements of their previous origins, which are in turn displacements of other texts (Bennett & Royle, 2004). 

In Hip Hop, what's more important? The lyrics or the beat? A professor, asked his students why they listened to their beloved rap.  They replied in one voice-the beat. The professor then proceeded to  argue that the value of rap music is not in the beat but in a songs level of literary prowess. According to the professor, rap was first and foremost poetry and the beat-a side note. 

Sitting in the auditorium the students know that rap is more than what their greying professor has essentialized it to be. To say rap is solely poetry is to limit the extent to which rappers are able to accomplish what they do. Rappers navigate the relationship between the lyrics and the beat to insight a rhythmic response from DJ and crowd (Alim, 2006).  Rappers do more than recite- they flow.

We came of age in urban areas in the eighties and nineties and regardless of race, class, gender, sexual-orientation, religion or ethnicity, the inextricable link between the beat and the lyrics was in the air that we all breathed. Our blood is pumped by words riding  beats. We know that allusion is not exclusive to a lyric but occurs on all levels of a track. It's the foundation of all sample-based music. Sampling is a form of intertextuality. The beat itself, is a citation of something else. And the connection between the sample and it's new mutated form creates depth of meaning.