Book of Rhymes (11 page)

MCs have found many ways around rhyme's restrictions. While perfect (or full) rhymes still play an important role in rap's poetics, they increasingly exist in the context of a host of other rhyme strategies. We've already looked at slant, multisyllabic, and broken rhymes, but another category is intentionally forced rhymes, what I'll term
transformative rhymes.
Transformative rhymes start with words that only partially rhyme or don't rhyme at all and alter the pronunciation to fashion perfect rhymes. For an example outside of rap, think of these famous lyrics from Arlo Guthrie's “Coming into Los Angeles,” once heard at Woodstock: “Coming into Los Angeles / bringing in a couple of keys / Don't touch my bags if you please / Mister Customs Man.” Guthrie fashions a transformative rhyme when he playfully alters the emphasis and pronunciation of “Los Angeleez” to forge perfect rhymes with the words that follow, “keys” and “please.”

Rap often takes these transformations of pronunciation to the extreme. On “So Many Tears” Tupac delivers the following lines: “My life is in denial, and when I die / Baptized in eternal fire.” They look straightforward enough on the page, but in the performance he makes “fire” rhyme with “denial” by essentially pronouncing it “file.” The transformation
achieves a pleasing echo of sound across the lines without sacrificing comprehension. Similarly, the Notorious B.I.G. artfully demonstrates this technique by refashioning language through rhyme on “Juicy”:

 

In the course of four lines, he offers two sets of multisyllabic rhymes; first, “dissed us,” “Christmas,” and “missed us,” and next “birthdays,” “worst days,” and “thirst-ay.” It is with this last rhyme that he demonstrates the creative capacity to use rhyme's restrictions in his poetic favor, adding flavor to the verse by forcing “thirsty” just this side of its breaking point to rhyme with the two words before it.

Kanye West has made such forced rhymes an important part of his poetic style. In ways that are playful and sometimes mischievous, he uses rhyme to reshape words themselves—taking two words that do not naturally rhyme and bending one of them, sometimes nearly to the breaking point, until it fits the other. For instance, on “Gold Digger,” one of his biggest commercial hits to date, he rhymes the following names: “Serena,” “Trina,” “Jennifer.” It's obvious which one of these doesn't belong, but Kanye makes “Jennifer” rhyme with the others by transforming it into “Gina-fa.” The rhyme is forced to the point of not being forced at all. Quite the opposite, it appears by design, just another way to do something with language. Here's another example from Kanye's “Can't Tell Me Nothing” (2007):

 

 

“Collagen” is a word with absolutely no perfect rhymes. Rather than avoid the word entirely, Kanye instead uses the word's intractability to rhyme as a tool to reshape another word. We immediately understand what he means when he says “apolagin',” so he has not sacrificed meaning. Or take this rhyme from “Barry Bonds”: “I don't need writers I might bounce ideas.” He somehow makes “writers” rhyme with “ideas” by transforming the former into “wry-tears.” What he has done in each of these cases is distorted sound for the sake of style, the poetic equivalent of Jimi Hendrix using his amp's feedback in his solo. Certainly many other artists have forced words to rhyme—often awkwardly, in a desperate attempt to make it fit—but few have forced them with such purpose and such measured understanding of the desired effect.

Where MCs rhyme their words has become just as important to rap's poetics as how they rhyme them. Rap is often presumed to rely heavily upon rhyming couplets. Most rap parodies are nothing more than a series of rigid couplets. But real MCs are rarely bounded by such limitations. While end rhymes, and particularly couplets, remain the foundation of rap's rhyme scheme, they are far from the only rhyme scheme in rap.

Over the years rap has undergone an internal rhyme revolution. Internal rhymes broaden rap's expressive range, enabling MCs to satisfy their listeners' lust for rhyme even as they claim greater freedom of motion to express complex ideas beyond the bounds of end rhyme. Unlike literary poets,
who also wished to liberate themselves from the restrictions of end rhyme, MCs have done so while still satisfying their audience's desire for lines rich in rhyme. The explanation for this lies in rap's orality. Because rap is meant to be heard rather than read, it matters less where exactly the rhymes fall in the line. Two rhymes in the same line, while not the same as two lines with end rhymes, still have a pleasing effect on the ear. Notice how Posdnuos from De La Soul uses this technique on “The Bizness”:

 

 

He begins with four rhymes in the first two lines, follows that with an internal rhyme in the third, no rhyme in the fourth, returning to an internal rhyme in the fifth. You would not have been likely to find that unrhymed line in rap's early years. Andre 3000 is a master of using internal rhymes to create opportunities for unrhymed lines, often eschewing end rhymes for a complex pattern of internal ones. Consider these lines from his guest verse on the R&B singer Lloyd's 2007 song “I Want You (Remix)”:

These four lines include no end rhymes, and yet they more than satisfy our desire for rhyme. He achieves this by including internal rhyme, a phonic echo that fuses lines one and two (“off,” “off,” “cough”).

Heading in the direction opposite to that of MCs like Andre 3000, who often eschew end rhyme entirely, a host of MCs have embraced a rhyme style that extends the repetition of a particular rhyme sound even beyond the couplet. Embracing the restriction of rhyme repetition, they seek to accentuate rhyme's pure effect. Many southern rappers, from Gorilla Zoe to Plies, follow this model. It would be a mistake to dismiss their styles as pedestrian. Instead, it might be useful to interpret them as aspiring to a different aesthetic from those MCs with more complicated rhyme styles. The fact that Jeezy, for instance, ends every line of “I Luv It” with a straightforward rhyme doesn't get in the way of his rhyme style, it
defines
it.

We might think of these extended end-rhyme riffs as links that form a rhyme chain.
Chain rhyme
is a technique whereby a poet carries a single rhyme over a succession of lines. The effect is often incantatory, lulling the listener into an almost trancelike state. Rhyme takes on a kind of rhythmic function here, underscoring specific patterns of sound to achieve its desired effect. While chain rhyming is now common in rap, rap was certainly not the first genre to use it. We can trace chain rhyming at least as far back as the fifteenth-century English poet John Skelton, who composed these lines:

 

Skelton's lines consist of two and sometimes three stressed syllables connected by rhyme “leashes”—extended runs of the same end rhyme. The style is known as Skeltonics. In the above example, Skelton rhymes six short lines with “yll” and another five with “age,” creating bursts of sound, a quickened pace, and an aggressive assertion of pattern. It comes as little surprise, then, that Skelton often used such a style when delivering, as he does in the above example, comic insults. Like a fifteenth-century battle rapper, Skelton uses rhyme chains to underscore his energy, aggression, and—to use a very twenty-first-century word for it—swagger.

Fast forward from Skelton to the present day and we can witness numerous hip-hop artists extending the spirit, if not the explicit form, of his rhyme style. While the nature of rap beats won't allow for Skeltonics' strict adherence to two- and three-syllable lines, it leaves ample room for chain rhyming.

Among the increasing number of rappers who use the chain-rhyming style is Fabolous. Since his debut in 2001, Fab has been known for delivering two distinct and even contradictory themes in his rhymes: crafty punch-line disses and plaintive love laments. Regardless of the theme, however, he employs the same rhyme-rich style. On his 2001 hit “Trade It All” he spits these lines in chain rhyme:

 

Using identity (the repetition of the same end word in successive lines, like “for” and “for”), and rhyming internally as well as at the end of his lines, Fabolous delivers a verse dominated by the ebb and flow of his repetition. Such repetition is the hallmark of his style, as we can see when comparing the above lines to his more recent hit, 2007's “Baby Don't Go”:

 

Like “Trade It All,” “Baby Don't Go” is dominated by Fab's run of rhymes. But his style seems to show some development in the direction of variety and versatility. Instead of rhyming on a single sound, he weaves together three distinct rhymes, interlacing the last two (“pride” and “love”) through chiasmus (a rhetorical figure in which two clauses are related to each other through reversal of structure or terms). The rhythmic effect is just as strong as it was in the earlier example, but he has added to it a more varied range of poetic effects, of thought as well as sound. Rap poetics as a whole has
undergone a similar rhyme expansion and built upon its foundation to explore novel innovations in sound.

 

The way rappers rhyme has changed dramatically over time. Part of why old-school rap sounds old to our ears when compared to more recent rhymes is that it tends to employ simple end rhymes. The difference between the sound of old-school and new-school rap is largely attributable to the delivery and the position of the rhymes. Old-school rappers tended to employ end-stopped lines with rhymes falling at the end of lines, often in couplets. Their styles generally sound more effusive, dramatic, and artificial. Today you are more likely to hear conversational flows and natural rhymes, both internal and end rhymes, delivered in something closer to the rapper's natural voice. Rap rhymes in recent years have increased in variety and frequency. Layered patterns of internal rhymes and rhyme chains are now as important as end-rhymed lines.

To say that rap has developed, however, is not always to say it has improved. No rapper has ever improved upon the best rhymes of Rakim, or KRS-One, or Melle Mel. Distinguishing the ways rap's poetics have expanded in the years since these great MCs first recorded is not to discredit them, but rather to celebrate them anew for fashioning excellence with fewer poetic tools from which to choose.

Rap's rhyme revolution has not come in degrees, but in fits and starts—individual artists introducing new ways of rhyming, often going against the established practices of the era. Rap's development has also been responsive, new rhymes born to fit the increasingly complex and melodic rhythms in its instrumental production. New beats demand new rhymes.

The earliest rhymes in rap were basic, improvised, almost coincidental, recalls Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers, one of hip hop's originators. “When I started out as a DJ, MC-in' as an art hadn't been formulated yet,” he says. “The microphone was just used for makin' announcements, like when the next party was gonna be, or people's moms would come to the party lookin' for them.” The MC was born out of necessity. Caz's description of how he came to rhyme reads something like a rap creation story: