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Excellent points, willravel. I think it's important to note that rap is a popular art form. To see what has worth requires going underground. Poetry has always been like that. Lord Byron vs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge! Go! (i.e. One was a lord, the other a well-known drug addict.)
I know Whitman didn't talk like he did in his poetry, but his use of language in everyday speech had an influence in his work, as it does with rappers and their own work. It is the difference that they become obsessed with. What is the difference between poetry and speech? A question for the ages. This is what even rappers explore. (Your Nelly example is suitable.) What you see is that art and life borrow from each other; it always has. The memes of Whitman's day differ from the rapper's memes of today, but the mechanics are similar. Rappers don't rap at the dinner table to their mothers. Especially if it's Thanksgiving.
Gone are the days when we wrote: "And Apollo, riding his emblazoned chariot down from lofty Olympus...."
Now, we simply say: "The sun was shining."
It is within the progression from one extreme to the next that we see the marked differences between Whitman's and Nelly's respective lines.
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot
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