A University of Virginia teacher is convinced Lil Wayne is a genius. The scholar wrote a book on Weezy’s poetic skills in comparison to Bob Dylan and William Shakespeare. Check out a clip of the college’s official press below and read the full article here.
There will come a time in the life of every hip-hop fan when he or she will be called upon to defend the art form. We are told that rapping is not really an art, that it is a bastardized form of gutter poetry or that it is intolerable for its glorification of drugs, violence or rabid misogyny. To the rescue comes Kreston Kent, author of “The Literary Genius of Lil Wayne: The case for Lil Wayne to be counted among Shakespeare and Dylan.” In a long essay posing as a short book, Kent presents thorough and incisive proof of Lil Wayne’s genius. He credits Lil Wayne with the construction of language puzzles that take even this University of Virginia professor some time to solve: “I still got the vision like a line between two dots,” where “the vision” is pronounced “da vision” — meaning division, or ÷. It is this kind of layered loveliness that Kent dissects in order to prove the genius of Lil Wayne.
