„BO MÔJ RAP JE TAK TLSTÝ, ŽE MÁ PO BOKOCH STRIE...“ (TEXTOVÉ TELÁ A TELESNÉ TEXTY SLOVENSKÉHO RAPU)

Hip hop as a “cultural complex” – as Richard Shusterman conceptualises it – can generally be seen as one of the most somatic and gestural cultural phenomena. The paper focuses on the verbal gesture as one of the forms of hip hop gestures. Its scope is the analysis and interpretation of a representative sample of Slovak rap lyrics and is methodologically anchored in Nitra School reception aesthetics and Richard Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics and somaesthetics (and in part by the phenomenologically oriented works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty) which are productive in the study of the body as a topic or iconic element in the text. The leitmotif of the article is, somatically speaking, “feeling up” – of the genre, conventional verbal gestures tied to the body and corporeality (e.g. masculinity, expressivity and explicitness, objectification of the female body) and, conversely, those that defy or rather challenge core-like genre conventions of hip hop (and, within it, rap) by such mechanisms as “embodying” self-irony or by making the tracks take on the character of motivational or socio-politically engaged statements.