Book of Rhymes (15 page)

Wordplay resides in such multiple meanings, even in the very names MCs choose to call themselves. Most rappers have aliases. You might not have heard of Dante Terrell Smith but you surely have heard of Mos Def. Dennis Coles is Ghostface Killah, sometimes just Ghostface, and also Iron Man or Tony Starks. This process of naming, of exchanging one identity for another, has found its way into the very language of rap lyricism. In general, rhetoricians classify such names as
epithets,
which literally means “imposed.” A more specific variety of epithet is
kenning,
a trope that exchanges a given word or proper name for a compound poetic phrase. This style was first popularized in Old English poetry, largely forgotten, and now reborn today in rap. We can see kenning at work in rap precisely because it is the type of trope that elevates the speaker. So when Biggie rhymes “Teflon is the material for the imperial / mic-ripper, girl-stripper, the Hennysipper,” we see the MC rendering himself in epic proportions, and in the process reviving a figure of speech that peaked in popularity over a thousand years ago. The same holds true for these lines from Jean Grae's “Hater's Anthem,” a vicious battle rap: “The cancer-toker, the Mad Hatter, the Jabberwocky of rap.” Beginning with kenning, she moves to a more general form of epithet drawn from, of all things, Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland.

Kenning is related to another important rhetorical figure in rap, the
eponym
, which in Greek means “named after.” Rap eponyms usually appear when MCs exchange a particular attribute or action (in other words, an adjective or a verb) for a famous name that brings it to mind. This is a fairly rare
figure, which makes it all the more surprising that Jay-Z has not one but three of them on a single song. On “Threats” from
The Black Album
he delivers the following eponyms:

 

Jay-Z's threats take the shape of eponyms invoking famous individuals who represent danger in the characters they portray (Pesci's ruthless Tommy DeVito from
Goodfellas
), the reputations that they carry (the Rat Pack with their reported links to the Mob), and the power they wield (Bush's presidential control over America's nuclear arsenal). Using eponyms instead of similes, Jay not only fashions more unusual—and fresh—figurative language, but also makes his meaning more powerful by enlisting his listeners' minds in making apparent the meaning of the lines.

Jay-Z returns to this same rhetorical figure on 2007's
American Gangster
album, combining it with another figure,
metonymy
—the use of one word to refer to something with which it is closely associated—to deliver the following clever line on “Party Life”: “Your boy's off the wall, these other niggas is Tito.” The line works because it engages the listener in a mental process of indirect and abstract communication. It asks us to make meaning out of context; our minds might not necessarily jump to Michael Jackson from the mention of
“off the wall” alone, but with “Tito” too, Jay's line provides enough information for us to draw a strong inference. “Off the wall” is in a metonymic relationship with Michael Jackson because, as the title of his best early album, it is strongly associated with him. Tito works as an eponym because, unfair as it may be, his name is most often invoked to signal obscurity or failure. Just in case these meanings escape us, Jay glosses his own verse, speaking these lines over the hook: “Damn. Hey, baby, I said I'm off the wall, I'm like a young Michael Jackson, these other niggas is Tito. Shout out to Randy. Real talk!” It's a bravura gesture, a playful show of amazement at his own lyrical virtuosity. In its own way, it's also a kind of wordplay.

Metonymy's form of indirect but artful expression offers MCs new ways of saying familiar things. Few topics are more familiar to rap than the diss, which makes rhetorical figures like metonymy into a lyrical weapon. For instance, Nas uses metonymy in 2008's “Queens Get the Money” to deliver a coded diss at 50 Cent, who had suggested in an interview that Nas's rhyme skills had waned. Nas answers with a rhyme that delivers a blow even as it asserts his own lyrical ingenuity: “Hiding behind
8 Mile
and
The Chronic
/
Get Rich but Dies Rhymin',
this is high science.” Using album titles to stand in for the artists with whom they are associated, Nas charges 50 with hiding behind Eminem and Dr. Dre, while riffing on the title of 50's own album
Get Rich or Die Tryin'.
Through the very force of his art, Nas rebukes 50's criticisms while refreshing his own language with a poetic figure.

 

Wordplay doesn't always rely upon complex games with meaning. Some of the simplest rhetorical figures of all consist
of manipulations of sound itself. “Woop! Woop! That's the sound of da police,” KRS-One famously chants on the hook of “Sound of da Police” from 1993's
Return of the Boombap.
The unmistakable sound he makes in place of the police siren is an example of
onomatopoeia,
the trope that works by exchanging the thing itself for a linguistic representation of the sound it makes. It would seem impossible for an oral poetry like rap even to contain a concept like onomatopoeia, given that onomatopoeia is defined by the written word. If the sound remains a sound without the middle ground of the page, then onomatopoeia can't exist. So when we speak about onomatopoeia in rap, we are assuming that the lyrics exist in a book of rhymes or at least in a listener's transcription.

Eminem offers a dramatic onomatopoeic example on “Kill You”: “invented violence, you vile venomous volatile bitches / vain Vicodin, vrinnn Vrinnn, VRINNN!” That last sound, if you couldn't recognize it, is the sound of a chainsaw (excuse my transcription; I'm sure Em did it better if and when he wrote it down). By combining onomatopoeia with alliteration, he shows the natural progression of one figure to the next. The alliteration in the
v
sounds leads Eminem to surrender to the sound itself through onomatopoeia, which in turn somehow leads him back to a thing once again, the chainsaw. If this all seems rather involved—well, it is. But the brilliance of Eminem's wordplay is that we experience it as effortless lyricism rather than complex poetic negotiation.

Where onomatopoeia celebrates sound itself, two other devices use sonic similarities to play games with meaning.
Homonyms
are two words with the same sound, same spelling, but different meanings—like
fire
(as in “flame”) and
fire
(as in “terminate from employment”).
Homophones
are
two words with the same sound, different spellings, and different meanings—like
led
and
lead.
Chuck D rhymed on “Bring the Noise” that “they got me in a cell 'cause my records, they sell.” “Cell” and “sell” are homophones.

MCs have taken advantage of these types of words to fashion clever wordplay, and in turn transform meaning in the process. For example, Jay-Z's opening verse to Beyoncé's 2006 single “Déjà Vu” goes like this: “I used to run base like Juan Pierre / now I run the bass, high hat, and the snare.” Here we have a simile comparing how Jay-Z used to run drugs to how Juan Pierre, the fleet-footed centerfielder for the Dodgers, runs the base pads. This relies upon “base” as a homonym. Rather than stopping there, he follows it up with the next line that flips the homonym into a homophone by introducing “bass” as a drum. An even more ingenious example comes from “Blue Magic,” the first single off of Jay-Z's 2007
American Gangster
album:

 

It testifies to Jay-Z's lyrical ingenuity that even though we fully experience these poetic lines by ear rather than by eye, looking at them on the page calls attention to their individual effects, not just their cumulative impact. Equally as impressive as the homonym is that he delivers it while making a fairly complicated point, all while rhyming four lines together. Lil Wayne achieves a similar effect on his ubiquitous 2008 hit “Lollipop (Remix)” when he rhymes these lines:

 

 

While these are not perfect homophones, they become so through Lil Wayne's performance of the lines. These are a virtuoso's lines, ones that Weezy himself seems to appreciate as he chuckles after delivering them. However, in both Jay-Z and Lil Wayne's rhymes, as complex as the wordplay becomes, the lyrical effect remains one of absolute effortlessness.

Some MCs have taken this same technique and made it not just the basis of a hot line, but the foundation of an entire rhyme style. Rarely is it that a single rhetorical form can essentially define the poetics of not just one MC but of an entire clique. Such is the case with the Diplomats and the figurative trope of antanaclasis. Antanaclasis is when a single word is repeated multiple times, but each time with a different meaning. For the Diplomats, the popularity of it likely began with Cam'ron, the leading member of Dipset, who started his career rapping alongside Mase. Consider the following lines off one of his mix-tape releases: “I flip China White, / my dishes white china / from China.” Playing with just two words, he renders them in several distinct permutations.
China White
is a particular variety of heroin.
White china
is a generic term for dishware, and he then goes on to specify that his dishware actually is from China. What might sound like nonsense or repetition for the sake of sound alone soon reveals itself as a rhetorical figure in action.

Of course, this kind of singular focus on a particular trope can sometimes go too far. One of Dipset's youngest members, JR Writer, who calls himself the “Writer of Writers,”
is considered by some to be one of New York's up-and-coming lyricists. He is well known among rap fans for his numerous mix-tape appearances, especially his Writer's Block series. Like the rest of Dipset, his rhyme style is characterized by his reliance on antanaclasis and other tropes of repetition. Rhymes like the following show him taking his wordplay to just this side of incomprehensibility: “I flip the flip for the flip / Call me a flip-flipper / Then flip-flop in my flip-flops / With strip-strippers.” It's hard to imagine antanaclasis going any farther than that. Is this virtuosity or excess? As Prince once said while singing about something else entirely, there's joy in repetition. However, repetition can be overdone, going from pleasing to grating on the ear. The challenge for MCs who craft patterns of repetition in their rhymes is to find a balance between pleasure and monotony.

Unlike some of the other rhetorical schemes in this chapter, alliteration and its cousin, assonance, rely upon oral expression to generate their full effect. Reading a succession of repeated consonants or vowels on the page is nothing like hearing them recited aloud. At least in this regard, then, rap shares something with nursery rhymes: It entertains us by satisfying our ears even before it reaches our mind. Run-DMC knew this when Run began a verse by recalling a famous nursery rhyme chant: “Now Peter Piper picked peppers but Run rock rhymes.” In this line alone, Run shows just how (through
alliteration,
in this case) rap reinvents patterned repetition for the hip-hop generation, claiming it as a valid technique for rap lyricism.

As a scheme for repetitive patterning, however, alliteration is only the most obvious technique.
Assonance,
a rhetorical scheme based upon the repetition of vowel sounds, is
often upstaged on the page, even when it's clear to the ear. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, it is intimately related to rhyme. But what if the repetition involved is not about sound but about structure?

Anaphora
and
epistrophe
are distinct but related rhetorical schemes, both establishing patterns of repeated words. Anaphora is word repetition at the beginning of successive lines, while epistrophe is repetition at the end. If you've ever read Homer's
Iliad
or
Odyssey
or the Bible, then you've seen these forms in action. Both of these schemes serve a particular purpose in oral expression. On a practical level, they facilitate memorization. On a stylistic one, they convey a sense of balance and order. When used in rap, they do both at once. Consider this example of anaphora from the underground Oakland, California, duo Zion I:

 

 

The entire song is structured on the repetition of that opening phrase. A series of rhetorical questions illustrating the need for physical and spiritual awakening gains prophetic intensity with each repeated phrase.

Epistrophe is a trickier scheme for rap because rappers usually insist upon ending lines with different—though often rhyming—words. Of course, there are ways out of this constraint. One way is to combine epistrophe with the figurative trope antanaclasis (the use of the same word in different
senses). MCs who do this usually get a pass because, though they have failed to rhyme, they have nonetheless done something poetically interesting with the verse.