Rap Started In Russia With 1920s Soviet-Era Poet According To Russian Culture Minister

Al Gore invented the Internet, at least according to Al Gore. Now Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s culture minister, is laying claim to rap.  On October 16, he told a group of people at the Valdai Discussion Club that the first rapper was actually Vladimir Mayakovsky, a poet/actor during the 1920s and 1930s Bolshevik era.

He argued that whereas Russia did not invent ballet as an art form, it is now very much a Russian art. Same with rap.

“It’s bothered me for some time now, I wanted to say, it infuriates me: this fascination of modern urban youth with rap, but when I try to dig into this business more closely, I’ll chat with my son, listen to what he’s listening to, and read, and I get the feeling that soon we’ll be saying that rap is Russian art,” Medinsky was quoted by Russian news agencies are saying. “Of course, it was born somewhere in America, but its flourishing occurred with us, of course.”

Medinsky also said he told his son that Mayakovsky — whose avant-garde poetry in the 1910s and 1920s made him a darling of the new Bolshevik leaders of the Soviet Union — was in fact the first rapper.

“And now he’s going around in class telling everyone that. And they’re reading Mayakovsky and they all agree,” he said.

Then again this is a man who has some other wacky ideas, including nefarious U.S. government ties to Netflix. You can read more about those on RFERL.

discussed the possibility that Netflix was a way for the US government plot to take over the world’s tv sets.

And a short video of his oh-so-rapper-like poetry. Not.

Mayakovsky wound up committing suicide at the age of 36 possibly as a result of unrequited love.

One of his poems A Cloud In Trousers, from the prologue:

Your thoughts,
dreaming on a softened brain,
like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart’s bloody tatters I’ll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I’ll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I’m devoid,
there’s not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by – handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.

Well, maybe this is a little rapperesque.