Book of Rhymes Read online

  With the thirty-year anniversary of “Rapper’s Delight,” it is instructive to reflect upon what remains of its once-startling appeal. When played today, it has a quaint and kitschy sort of funkiness, more akin to the disco records of the era than the radical rejection of disco that rap amounted to at the time. The rhymes sound naïve to those acquainted with the street themes of Rick Ross and Young Jeezy and the intricate poetics of Nas and Ghostface. And those who know the song’s history can’t help but hear it as a fraud perpetrated on the unschooled ears of the masses. Even the rhymes themselves are flawed; they are too insistently dictated by the rhythm of the track. They fall into or, rather, helped to fashion the singsongy style that dominates many old-school rhymes. It was a necessary precursor to today’s rap poetics, and yet it is as distinct from contemporary rap as Mother Goose is from Wallace Stevens. And yet for all of this, “Rapper’s Delight” is a landmark recording in rap’s poetic tradition: It makes beauty out of little more than rhythm alone.

  Rap’s early years are rich with easily observable poetic forms like those of “Rapper’s Delight.” The sound that would soon come to be identified as “old school” is a product of MCs’ strict reliance on formal patterns like the ballad stanza. Listen to these lines from the Fatback Band’s 1979 “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” widely considered to be the first rap ever released, and you hear echoes of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” given subversive new lyrics:

  Roll, roll, roll your joint

  Twist it at the ends

  You light it up, you take a puff

  And then you pass it to your friends.

  Or listen to Run-DMC’s alliterative take on Peter Piper:

  Peter Piper picked peppers,

  But Run rock rhymes.

  Nursery rhymes have long been a source of inspiration for poets of all kinds. Robert Frost once described the childhood source of poetic rhythm like this: “You may not realize it,” he writes, “but it is the way you have all come thus far from the days of your Godmother Goose through books and nature, gathering bits and scraps of real magic that however flowery still clung to you like burrs thrown on your clothes in holiday foolery. You don’t have to worry about clinging to such trophies. They will cling to you.” Poetic rhythms cling to us from our earliest childhood memories, and like magic we can tap into these formative lyrical experiences throughout our lifetimes. That rap understands this lyrical magic so well helps explain its longevity.

  While all poetry has its roots in our childhood love of rhyme, this relation is often most visible at the birth of a new poetic movement. This was certainly the case with hip hop, which seemed in its early years to revel in its naughty sendups of childhood verse that celebrated the familiar rhythms of common verse. As the years went by and rap developed a poetic heritage all its own, the general trend moved away from the rudimentary roots of rap’s early rhythms and rhymes to a more nuanced poetics. And yet rather than look down upon those early rhymes as rudimentary or restrictive, we might remember them as the necessary and revolutionary poetic acts that they were: bending the most rigid forms of an inherited tradition to a new purpose—new voices, new sounds, new ways of describing the world and the people in it.

  When tracing rap’s poetic roots, one is naturally drawn to the oral tradition. Oral poetry, from the lyric to the epic, has deep roots in most every continent, certainly in West Africa where the poet functioned as much as a musician as a wordsmith, weaving narrative verse around patterns of call-and-response with an active audience. For many rappers and scholars, rap’s connection to African poetic practice, charged as it is with symbolic meaning, is the most important progenitor to the poetics of contemporary rap. KRS-One makes the connection between rappers and griots, as much for their function within the community as for their aesthetic methods. This remains an essential bond, one with vital importance for the black diasporic tradition.

  As a practical matter of poetics, however, rap is most directly connected to the Western poetic tradition of the ballad and other metrical forms. To say that rap takes its form from Western sources is not, however, to whitewash its identity. Since its birth, rap has been a defiantly black form. Just as the early jazz musicians commandeered European marching band instruments like the saxophone and the trumpet and bent their sounds to fit the demands of a new expression, so, too, have African-American rap artists transformed the very poetic forms they’ve inherited. This is no less a creative act than if they had conceived the forms sui generis; indeed, it is the hallmark of a typically American, and specifically black American cultural practice, the vernacular process. Rap is a vernacular art, which is to say that it is born out of the creative combination of the inherited and the invented, the borrowed and the made.

  One can hear in rap the Anglo-Saxon tradition of accentual or strong-stress meter in which each line contains the same number of natural speech stresses. The most common iteration includes four stressed syllables per line with each line divided in half by a medial caesura, or an extended pause. As the basis for everything from Beowulf to Mother Goose nursery rhymes, accentual meter is perhaps the most familiar poetic form around. It creates a stylized structure that is at once natural and yet immediately distinct from everyday speech.

  The four-stress line has dominated popular verse from the Middle Ages to the present day in part because of its inherent orality. It promises enough regularity while still allowing for variability and surprise. In accentual meter only the stressed syllables count; a line may have as many unstressed syllables as it likes without compromising the form. Consider the following example of four-stress accentual verse from a common nursery rhyme:

  There WAS an old WOMAN who LIVED in a SHOE,

  She HAD so many CHILdren, she didn’t KNOW what to DO;

  She GAVE them some BROTH withOUT any BREAD,

  She WHIPPED them all SOUNDLY, and PUT them to BED.

  While each of the lines has four strongly stressed syllables, the total number of syllables differs significantly: Line two has fourteen syllables, while line three has only ten. The result is a rhyme with order as well as variety. MCs have made an art out of exploiting the range of syllables in given lines. Bun B, for instance, believes that a rapper’s virtuosity is at least partly a product of the artful manipulation of syllables. When asked how he might go about outrapping another MC, he explains it in terms of syllables. “If he uses ten syllables in a line, I’m going to use fifteen,” he said. “If he uses fifteen, I’m going to use twenty, twenty-five.” And yet often these hypersyllabic lines still include only four strongly stressed syllables.

  Rap veteran Busta Rhymes has developed a style that relies heavily upon both strong accents on unexpected syllables and expansion and contraction of syllable count. Among his most virtuosic performances is “Gimme Some More,” in which he delivers a rapid-fire sequence of syllables underscored by assonance, alliteration, and other forms of repetition.

  FLASH with a RASH gimme my CASH flickin’ my ASH

  RUN nin’ with my MONey, son, go OUT with a BLAST

  DO what you WANna, niggas CUT tin’ the CORner

  You fuckin’ UP the artiCLE, go ahead and MEET the rePORter

  Not surprisingly, Busta lends the greatest emphasis to the most important words in each line: the words that rhyme (“flash,” “rash,” “cash,” “ash,” and the slant rhyme “blast”) and the verbs (“runnin’,” “meet”). The stressed words help constitute the rhythm of the line, defining the terms of Busta’s flow. As the verse opens he establishes a clear pattern both of stress and syllable count; each of the first three lines contains twelve syllables. But the final line of the second couplet is dilated to contain sixteen syllables, a sonic feat that Busta achieves by accelerating the pace of his delivery.

  Unless you are familiar with the lyrics and can replay Busta’s performance in your head, you would be clueless in identifying most of the distinctive differences that define his flow, those qualities that set it apart from the conventional rhythms
of everyday speech. Accentual stress, after all, is not the same as natural vocal inflection. One of the ways that an MC emphasizes his or her artistry is by bending words so that they fit into the MC’s particular rhythm rather than adhere to the constraints of proper pronunciation. In Busta Rhymes’s case we see a small example of this in the final line above, when he eschews the conventional pronunciation of “article,” with the accent on the first syllable, for his newly wrought rendition of the word with the accent on the last syllable. The result is a small but significant transformation of sound, one that counts for rather little on its own but contributes mightily to the revolutionary effect of rap’s poetics in action.

  Big Daddy Kane is one of the truly revolutionary MCs in rap history when it comes to these matters of stress and articulation. He has expanded hip-hop poetics with his lyrical innovations, particularly when it comes to flow. Some of today’s greatest lyricists—Nas, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne—count him among their primary influences. In classic rhymes like “Wrath of Kane,” he experiments with vocal rhythms in ways that reward close analysis, not only of stress patterns, but of accentual-syllabic patterns as well. With his rapid-fire lines, laden with assonance, rich in rhyme—though often not in the expected place at the end of the line—he creates highly wrought, formal rhythmic structures.

  The MAN at HAND to RULE and SCHOOL and TEACH

  And REACH the BLIND to FIND their WAY from A to Z

  And BE the MOST and BOAST the LOUDest RAP

  KANE’ll REIGN your doMAIN! (Yeah, KANE!)

  Three lines of iambs (a pentameter, a hexameter, and another pentameter) are boldly disrupted by a fourth trochaic line. In the lines following the four quoted above, he returns to a more loosely iambic rhythm, though not one that scans as neatly as the opening lines. The effect of the rhythm pattern Kane develops in these opening three lines is almost dizzying in its repetition, making it all the more effective when he breaks it off. Had the incessant iambs gone on undisrupted for another line or two, it would have begun to sound monotonous. Instead, Kane introduces just enough variation to keep his flow fresh and his audience entertained by the play of rhythmic satisfaction and surprise.

  When that rhythmic expectation isn’t satisfied, disaster usually follows. Rap without rhythm is an absurdity. There’s a difference between rudimentary but functional rhythm and no rhythm at all. Because rap is an oral form, rhythmic errors are even more glaringly apparent. A wack flow is death to rap. Unfortunately, wack rhymes are everywhere, thanks to hip hop’s rampant commercialization. Rap sells everything from cars to breakfast cereals. I’m not talking here about whatever you might hear on the radio or see in a music video; with the advent of computer technologies like Pro Tools, most every professional rapper can rhyme on beat—at least in the studio. I’m talking about the many raps you’ll hear on TV commercials or on Saturday-morning cartoons. Worse still are those you’ll read that weren’t even written to be performed. Most such “raps” are either naïve attempts to dabble in youth culture or, worse, cynical efforts to scavenge from rap’s “cool.” One of the most glaring examples of the latter appeared on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s website at the time of Hurricane Katrina. It illustrates better than any recorded rap just what happens when rap loses its rhythm.

  Disaster . . . it can happen anywhere,

  But we’ve got a few tips, so you can be prepared

  For floods, tornadoes, or even a ’quake,

  You’ve got to be ready—so your heart don’t break.

  Disaster prep is your responsibility

  And mitigation is important to our agency.

  People helping people is what we do

  And FEMA is there to help see you through

  When disaster strikes, we are at our best

  But we’re ready all the time, ’cause disasters don’t rest.

  Putting aside the bitter irony of the lyrics, given FEMA’s dreadful lack of preparation for disaster and failure to act in the aftermath of Katrina, the most noticeable thing about the verse is its rudimentary rhythm. You can see the writer—and this is undoubtedly a rhyme of the page, not of the voice—straining to establish his flow. The ellipses in the first line and the dash in the fourth are visual manifestations of rhythmic exhaustion. By isolating “disaster” from the rest of the first line he disrupts his flow even before it has a chance to begin. Part of the problem is that the writer has stranded each line from the ones that surround it, meaning that the rhythm screeches to halt no fewer than ten times in the ten-line verse. Notice the way the sixth line struggles to match the rhythm of the fifth by cramming in too many syllables. Rhythmic difficulties like this lead to forced rhymes (like “responsibility” and “our agency”) or unimaginative ones (like “’quake” and “break”). With no rhythmic development, no flow at all, it bears no more than a surface relation to the rap it emulates.

  Skilled MCs know the rhythmic weight of their words. Syllables can be light or heavy, long or short. An effective rap verse balances its linguistic weight in such a way that it can be performed without awkward pauses, gasps for breath, or other infelicities. Rap has made rhythm into a science, a point Paul D. Miller (better known as DJ Spooky) makes in his multimedia text, Rhythm Science. “Rhythm science,” he explains, “is not so much a new language as a new way of pronouncing the ancient syntaxes that we inherit from history and evolution, a new way of enunciating the basic primal languages that slip through the fabric of rational thought and infect our psyche at another, deeper level.” He is speaking here primarily about the language of sound on the level of music and the protolinguistic, but it undoubtedly relates to the lyrical side of rap’s dual rhythmic relationship. “Give me two turntables,” he boasts, “and I’ll make you a universe.” The right rap lyrics can do the same thing.

  In the decades since “Rapper’s Delight,” and in the distance from unskilled attempts like the FEMA rap, hip hop has undergone a rhythmic revolution. Some of the best-known lyricists, from Nas to Talib Kweli, not to mention MCs in hip hop’s thriving underground, have liberated their flows from the restrictions of rigid metrical patterns in favor of more expansive rhythmic vocabularies that include techniques like piling up stressed and unstressed syllables, playing against the beat, and altering normal pronunciation of words in favor of newly accented ones. We now live in a time when rap can mean any number of things, depending on the place of its origin, the style of its production, and the particular sensibility of its lyricist. Exploring rap rhythm today requires a close attention to the specific rhythmic innovations of individual artists.

  Flow is an MC’s lyrical fingerprint. We remember rap lyrics in their specific vocal contexts because of the MC’s flow. Think of “99 Problems” and you’ll distinctly hear Jay-Z’s voice rhyming, “If you’re havin’ girl problems, I feel bad for you, son.” Think of “Lose Yourself” and you’ll hear Eminem’s rapping, “Snap back to reality, oh, there goes gravity.” No other voices could utter these words with the same style; imagining Eminem reciting Jay-Z’s lines or visa versa just doesn’t make sense. Pitch, intonation, accent, cadence, all flood our remembrance of the lyrics, setting the words in specific musical and poetic contexts. These contexts are not always coterminous—the musical concerns harmony and melody in instrumental accompaniment, the poetic concerns rhetorical figures and lyrical forms—but they overlap in their joint expression in rhythm.

  It is here, in rhythm, that rap’s relationship to lyric poetry most distinguishes itself from that of other pop music genres. This is not a distinction of kind, but rather of degree. Rock music and soul music and country and western music all, like rap, relate to poetry through rhythm. It is what music and poetry share in common. Poetry on the page has no melody or harmony; it is pure rhythm. Rap, though it frequently includes samples and choruses that employ memorable melodies and harmonies, expresses itself most powerfully in the dual rhythmic relationship between the beat of the drums and the flow of the voice.

  MCs face a particu
lar challenge, distinct from those faced by literary poets and song lyricists. Literary poets concern themselves with the rhythms in the language of their lines. They balance stressed syllables and select specific rhythm patterns to govern their compositions. They work with implied beats. The song lyricist, on the other hand, must contend with audible rhythms in addition to harmony and melody. Writing for a singing voice, they construct a melodic line that fits within the musical accompaniment. The MC’s task embodies elements of both, combined with a particular set of concerns unique to rap. Unlike a literary poet, an MC’s flow is not governed solely by the rhythmic structure of the poet’s words, but by the audible rhythms of the track. Unlike song lyricists, MCs are concerned almost exclusively with rhythm. This specialization opens rap up to its most obvious criticism from musicians in other genres: Rap is not music, they say, because it doesn’t care about harmony and melody. Rap, in other words, is nothing more than an extended drum solo, the rapper nothing more than another kick drum or snare.

  This rhythmic preoccupation should not obscure the wide range of aesthetic decisions an MC has to make in every rhyme. When presented with a beat, the first question for the lyricist is this: How will you rhyme to it? Fast or slow? Monotone or animated? A little bit ahead, a little bit behind, or right in the pocket? The answer is as varied as the number of individuals willing to pick up the mic and spit. You’ll notice that nowhere in these questions is, “What will you talk about?” Perhaps there are some MCs who begin this way; undoubtedly almost every MC has begun with that question at one time or another. But I would contend that the question of lyrical content almost always comes second to the more immediate concern of sound.