Hip-hop rhetors

Now I ain't saying he's a genius, but Kanye's not messing with no twopenny tropes

First off, my apologies for the laboured intro, an attempt to illustrate Kanye West's effortless mastery of the sharpest weapons in the rhetorical armoury.

This one is called paralipsis, or preterition, or even occupatio. I prefer paralipsis.

It was a favourite device of the schoolboy's favourite rhetor (whether he was a good orator is another question, and opinions vary), Cicero. It consists in drawing attention to something by claiming you are not going to talk about it. In this case, "I ain't saying she's a gold-digger, but ..."

This song is nearly 20 years old, I know, but I had cause to be listening to it intently, and I began to -- dare I say it? -- deconstruct the lyrics. That paradigm of paralipsis has to be one of the most brilliant starts to any song, but the question is, did Jamie Foxx's adapted version of I Got a Woman exist first? Or did West think of the Ray Charles song, suggest that Foxx change "gives me money" to "takes my money" and thereby spawn a work of magnificence?

One of my other favourite Kanye tracks is the Daft Punk tribute Stronger. In fact I think the rapper's finest moments have come from using other people's songs. TS Eliot wrote in his essay collection The Sacred Wood, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.” Exactly: the arch-modernist would surely approve of Kanye. Perhaps a collaboration -- The West Land? "April is the cruellest motherfucker ..."

Later Kanye albums such as Yeezus are remarkable in their own way -- and not only because his grip on sanity is loosening before your ears -- but I hope he rediscovers the rhetorical magic of his early work. And stops messing with the Republicans.

One last thought: could anyone else have come up with the immortal couplet: "You will see him on TV any given Sunday / Win the Super Bowl and drive off in a Hyundai"? Even Juvenal would be jealous. (I know, I mean envious, but the alliteration was just too good to resist.)