Book of Rhymes (10 page)

Pharoahe Monch's verse is the work of a poetic technician, to be sure, but what makes it also the work of a virtuoso is that the lyrics are completely unburdened by the potentially ponderous weight of this intricate structure. On the page and, even more, in the performance, the lines gain an effortless, almost offhanded eloquence that liberates the listener to enjoy the line in the sound alone. Looking behind the rhymes takes none of that pleasure away. What it does instead is add a measure of respect to the craft of fitting rhymes to beats.

MCs inevitably run up against the boundaries of expressive possibility through rhyming two words together. In response, they often employ rhyme techniques that cross the limits of word pairs to fashion rhyme groupings made up of several words that relate to one another in rhyme. The Notorious B.I.G. does this on “Who Shot Ya”: “Saw me in the drop, three and a
quarter
/
Slaughter
, electrical tape around your
daughter
.” Blending end rhyme and internal rhyme, Biggie creates an aural sensation that emphasizes the key words in the lines.

By contrast,
broken rhyme,
or split rhyme, involves rhyming a single multisyllabic word with several monosyllabic words. In the Western poetic tradition, such a technique is most often employed for comic effect, as it is in these famous lines from Canto XXII of Lord Byron's
Don Juan:
“But—Oh! ye lords of ladies
intellectual
,
/ Inform us truly, have they not
hen-peck'd you all
?
” As the punch line for the canto, Byron's playful rhyme underscores the humor of the lines. In contrast to the more conventional perfect rhymes in the lines that precede it (“wed,” “bred,” and “head”), the broken rhyme delights the ear.

But where broken rhymes were nearly always played for comic purposes in literary verse, rap has made them a commonplace element of its poetics. Rap has given broken rhymes a new and larger life. Like multis, broken rhymes have becomes more pervasive and versatile as rap poetics has developed. So while we might hear a broken rhyme like this from Melle Mel on “White Lines,” “Ticket to ride a white line
highway
/ Tell all your friends that they can go
my way
,
” we get a more inventive use of the technique when the Notorious B.I.G. boasts on “Hypnotize,” “
escargot, my car go
one-sixty, swiftly.” The difference is that Melle Mel's example is intuitive, even obvious, while Biggie's is unexpected and fresh. Not surprisingly Big Daddy Kane, the master of the multi, was also fond of broken rhymes. On “Wrath of Kane,” he unleashes a swarm:

 

 

In both Biggie's and Kane's rhymes, the intended effect is far from comic. Certainly there's an unmistakable playfulness
in Biggie's enumeration of his riches—the fancy snails contrasting with the fast and fancy cars—but the broken rhyme is less about comic relief than it is about evincing a self-aware rhyme virtuosity. The same holds for Kane. In a verse where he is extolling his lyrical excellence, the broken rhymes manifest that very excellence with audible evidence.

A host of effects accompany rhyme, all relying upon the echo of sound across poetic lines.
Alliteration
is the repetition of initial consonant sound. It is older even than rhyme itself. In the following lines from
Piers Plowman,
written in the fourteenth century, alliteration works to underscore the music of language itself:

 

 

Repetition has reached almost to the point of parody here; indeed, in a contemporary piece of writing, it would be difficult to read these lines as anything else. Such sonic effects can come in subtler forms as well. When alliteration occurs at different places within words rather than simply at the beginning, we call it
consonance.
These lines from John Milton's
Paradise Lost
show alliteration (the
h
sound) and consonance (the
d
and the
g
sounds) working together to achieve a common effect:

The sonic repetitions in Milton's lines are at once unobtrusive yet inescapable; they underscore a unity of thought and expression. Consonance such as this is quite often employed in rap, whether to underscore rhyme or to offer a kind of rhyme substitute. Lauryn Hill's lines from the Fugees' “Zealots” show consonance at work alongside rhyme:

 

Consonance with one sound (“eck”) shifts to multisyllabic rhymes with another sound (“projectile,” “Gentile,” “percentile”) and then another (“gamma rays,” “grammar pays,” “Santana plays”). The result is as intricate as it is effortless.

A related linguistic technique is
assonance,
which relies upon the replication of unaccented vowel sounds. Its purpose in oral expression is to delight the ear, but also to center the listener's attention on a given set of lines. Often the exercise of assonance is imperceptible, though its subconscious effect is almost always pronounced, helping to generate a subtle mood or tone. Consider the effect assonance has on these lines from John Keats's
Ode on a Grecian Urn
(1820): “Thou still unravished bride of quietness, / Thou foster child of silence and slow time.” Its long
i
sound extenuates the sound of the line beyond its actual bounds, adding an unmistakable languorous quality.

In rap, one of the masters of these techniques of sonic identity is Eminem. Eminem's style favors both assonance and alliteration; he has elevated them to an art. In the following lines, a guest verse on “Renegade,” a track Eminem
produced for Jay-Z's
The Blueprint
(2001), Eminem demonstrates a virtuoso's control of sound and sense.

 

 

Rhyme, at least full rhyme, is almost absent from this verse, replaced instead by the concordance of sound. Assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds, is the governing structure here; he packs no fewer than thirty-seven instances of it into the full verse's twenty lines (the
u
sound predominates). When he does employ rhyme, it is most often slant. Perhaps the most striking instance of this is the chain of interlocking slant rhymes, both internal and end rhymes, that spans the lines quoted above (“lyrics,” “inherit,” “hysterics,” “steer it,” “merits,” “interference,” “hear it”). Those who doubt the conscious artistry exercised by rap's greatest MCs need look no further than these lines for evidence of its vitality.

 

When rhyme and all of its allied forms are at work in a single performance, the effect is often unforgettable. In 1995, shortly after leaving prison, Tupac Shakur released what would become perhaps his best-known song, “California Love.” It reached number one on the
Billboard
charts, and
Rolling Stone
included it as Tupac's sole entry in its 2004 list of the five hundred greatest songs of all time. Produced by Dr. Dre, who also spits the first verse, the song is driven by an infectious piano riff and a catchy hook performed by Roger Troutman of Zapp and Roger. All of this would likely have
made it a hit; Tupac made it a classic. His opening lines are among the most unmistakable in all of rap:

 

In just two lines, Tupac combines rhyme (both end and internal), assonance, and alliteration to create a feeling of tension and energy. The first line includes three rhyme elements: a monosyllabic internal rhyme (“bail” and “jail”) and the first part of a multisyllabic rhyme (“dreamin',” which he rhymes in the next line with “screamin'”). Along with this, he includes alliteration with the
s
and
h
sounds. Almost every word is somehow sonically connected with some other word in the lines. Hip-hop fans often talk about an MC sounding “hungry,” the necessity with which they're driven to express themselves. These may be the hungriest two lines in rap history.

Rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and consonance combined often produce tongue-twisting linguistics. Big Punisher's “Twinz” includes this couplet, as inspired in its way as Tupac's lines. “Dead in the middle of little Italy / Little did we know that we riddled a middle man who didn't know diddly.” Like a jazz sax run or a scat riff, Pun's lyrical delivery balances sound with sense, using the full array of rhyme techniques to underscore the rhythm of his flow. Keying in on a single sound, he runs a staggering series of rhyme variations (“middle,” “little,” “riddled,” “middle,” “diddly”), which he further builds upon with consonance
(
d
) and assonance (
i
) and alliteration (
d
and
l
). This is what happens when a poet is in complete control of his or her rhymes.

Sometimes, however, rhyme can take control, leading the poet to unintended and unwanted expressions. This is what John Milton feared when he spoke of rhyme as “a constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have exprest them.” Not surprisingly, he includes not a single end rhyme in
Paradise Lost.
A generation before Milton, the English poet Thomas Campion warned in 1602 that the “popularitie of Rime creates as many Poets as a hot summer flies.” Rhyme, he argued, could actually impede good poetry.

All rhyme, after all, is a kind of coercion: The poet forces the audience to connect disparate words and reconcile them, both in sound and meaning. Of course, as mentioned before, this accounts for a great deal of the pleasure to be had in rhyme: that process of recognition and differentiation and the balance achieved between them. But what happens when poets are overwhelmed by rhyme's coercive force—when, either for the purposes of sound or sense, poets find themselves with few rhyming options for a given word? Maybe the MC uses a word, like “pizza” or “olive,” that doesn't have a perfect rhyme to fit it. Or maybe the problem is that the perfect rhyme comes too easily, and too obviously.

There was a time when Lexus was the car of choice in hip hop; it seemed like every MC was rhyming “Lexus” with “Texas”—for no other reason than it is one of the few words that rhyme with “Lexus.” Whether Lexus became less popular among rappers or the rhyme became too predictable
(or both), you rarely hear this pairing nowadays. But it demonstrates an important tension in rhyme: the problem of overdetermination.

Overdetermined rhymes
are those that the MC or poet chooses not out of conscious design but out of desperate necessity or lackadaisical passivity. Overdetermined rhymes are in effect forced upon the poet by the limits of language itself rather than emerging out of the imaginative use of language as a tool. They signal the loss of poetic control.

For an MC and literary poet alike, it is almost always a bad thing if the audience can complete your rhyme. This suggests that your rhyme lacks freshness, which is essential to powerful communication. Artists in any genre that employs rhyme face a similar challenge. One lyricist who has given a tremendous amount of thought to the process of rhyme composition is Bob Dylan. Dylan alongside rappers may be an unlikely combination, but it is fitting. Like the best MCs, Dylan revels in the ingenuity of his rhymes. He offers a striking insight into the mind of a rhyming lyricist, in the midst of the “unconscious frame of mind” necessary for the artistic process:

 

 

For Dylan and for rap's rhyme animals, the process of lyrical composition is fundamentally a process of rhyming. “It
gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that's never been rhymed before,” Dylan told an interviewer. “But then again, people have taken rhyming now, it doesn't have to be exact anymore. Nobody's going to care if you rhyme ‘represent' with ‘ferment,' you know. Nobody's gonna care.” Dylan's remarks point the way towards rap's rhyme revolution, its expansion of rhyme's formal possibilities in the face of overdetermination and the loss of meaning.