Book of Rhymes (18 page)

Rap's critics often claim that rap lacks thematic range, that few rappers are adding anything of their own. All MCs ever talk about is how many women they have, how much money they stack, what cars they drive, and how much better they are at everything they do than anyone else around.
Those of us who listen to rap know that this just isn't true. Rap has a broad expressive range, but who can blame those who are exposed only to hip hop's commercial hits from drawing such limited conclusions?

Sense follows sound in rap. Rap lyrics only rarely introduce new ideas. But rap is not alone in this. “I suspect that the freshest and most engaging poems most often don't come from
ideas
at all,” observes the poet Ted Kooser of literary verse. “Ideas are orderly, rational, and to some degree logical. They come clothed in complete sentences, like ‘Overpopulation is the cause of all the problems in the world.' Instead, poems are trigged by catchy twists of language or little glimpses of life.” When Kooser mentions “catchy twists of language” and “little glimpses of life” he might as well be speaking directly about rap. Rap achieves both of these, whether it comes clothed in Immortal Technique's scathing political critique of George W. Bush on “Bin Laden” or Yung Joc's playful, amoral celebration of the crack trade on “Coffee Shop.” Poetry, in other words, is value neutral, though listeners certainly are not. Rap asks that each rhyme be judged on its own terms, the terms by which it presents itself. Rap asks to be judged not simply as pure content, but as content expressed in specific, poetic language. They are inseparable. As Terry Eagleton notes, “the language of a poem is
constitutive
of its ideas.”

What happens, though, when a rap artist sets out to transform the ideas that go into the music? What does this require of the poetic craft? The career of Kanye West offers a compelling case study in what happens when an artist sets out to change the game.

Kanye burst on the scene as a rapper in 2004. By that time, he had already produced chart-topping hits, like the distinctive soul-sampled Jay-Z smashes “This Can't Be Life” and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.).” Critics were quick to praise Kanye's debut album,
The College Dropout,
for what many saw as his fresh sound and original subject matter. Here was a rapper not just rhyming about girls, cars, and clothes (although he certainly did that as well), but about organized religion, the excesses of consumerism, even folding shirts at the Gap. In an interview with the website
universalurban.com
just before the release of
The College Dropout,
Kanye reflected upon the formation of his distinctive style. His explanation speaks not only to his own process of creation but to the common challenge of all artists trying to break new stylistic ground in a medium dominated by a handful of trendsetters.

 

 

 

Kanye's comments underscore several essential truths about style in rap. Contrary to many people's assumptions, in rap content often follows style. In other words, the stylistic models an aspiring MC imitates often dictate the content of the rhymes as well. It would be hard to imagine an MC, for
instance, with 50 Cent's style and Lauryn Hill's content. There is something essential in 50 Cent's style—the constitutive elements of his poetics—that lends itself to a particular set of themes: in his case, women, cars, his thug past, and exaltation of his own lyrical greatness.

Another significant lesson to draw from Kanye's remarks is that style is often the product of the self-conscious construction of a lyrical identity, or persona. For Kanye, that persona would be the common man—a garden-variety identity in most literary traditions, but a surprisingly underdeveloped one in a hip-hop tradition that trades upon the projection of self-aggrandizing and larger-than-life images. Of course the irony of these comments is apparent in light of Kanye's notoriously outsized ego, and yet he does project a common
persona
at times in his rhymes, even if he as a
person
is far from it. Throughout
The College Dropout
and intermittently on his subsequent releases, Kanye extends a rap tradition of self-deprecation that, while far overshadowed by its opposite, still holds an essential place in rap's history. As he rhymes on “All Falls Down,” perhaps his finest lyrical performance on the album, “We all self-conscious, I'm just the first to admit it.” This theme of vulnerability reflects itself in a style that is sometimes halting and awkward, vocal tones that he comically exaggerates, and unorthodox rhythms and rhymes that call our attention to what's new in his lyrics. Whatever else Kanye West's career reveals, it shows that a revolution in rap's themes must begin with a revolution in rap's poetics. All artists must face up to Kanye's dilemma at some point in their development: how to craft an individual voice out of the myriad influences available. This is the definition of personal style.

I once taught a student who said he liked to rhyme. He knew that I was writing this book, so he offered me a CD with several of his songs. I played it on my drive home. What I heard, though it surprised me at the time, shouldn't have been at all unexpected: I heard 50 Cent—well, not exactly 50 Cent, but my student's very best impersonation of 50's signature flow and familiar gun talk. His alias probably should have tipped me off; I won't reveal it here, but it was something very nearly like “Half a Dollar” or “48 Cent.” In ways both conscious and not, my student had patterned his style so closely upon 50's that even his ad libs seemed straight off of “Candy Shop” or “I Get Money.” He actually wasn't doing a bad job of it, either; the production value of his homemade tracks was respectable; and his flow, though not exactly his own, embodied that same sense of offhanded swagger that is 50's greatest strength as a rapper.

Part of me, however, couldn't help but think it was a little absurd for this college sophomore, a good student attending a predominantly white suburban liberal-arts college in sunny Southern California, to be spitting bars more at home in a hardscrabble neighborhood of South Queens. Then again, I suppose it's no more absurd than 50 spitting these same lines today from the tony Connecticut compound where he currently resides. Driving back to campus the next morning, I played the tracks again. This time, instead of just hearing the imitation, I heard something else: the birth of a young artist's style.

Style often starts as a form of jealousy. Someone does something that you want to do, but don't know how to do and it motivates you to figure it out. You begin to build this
body of influences until you have a particular blend that is distinctly your own. Style is amalgamation.

No style is completely original. Certainly there's a sliding scale of originality that stretches from the completely copied to the wholly original. Most artists reside in between, shifting along the axis at different points in their careers—even at different points in particular rhymes. This is most evident with young artists still searching for their voices. A necessary part of the process of development includes imitation. Out of that imitation, innovation is often born. It only makes sense that aspiring MCs will want to model their style upon the most successful artists of the moment. My student's choosing 50 Cent made intuitive sense, given that 50 is one of the best-selling rap artists of all time. Certainly this choice came at a cost to the variety of my student's themes and the authenticity of his voice, but it made sense from a poetic standpoint. Keats began by modeling himself after Shakespeare. Hughes modeled himself after Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. This is what we mean by
tradition.

50 Cent himself had to learn how to rhyme from someone, too. Despite his claims, it seems it wasn't God that gave him style, but a humbler source, the late Jam Master Jay of the legendary Run-DMC. In his memoir,
From Pieces to Weight,
50 relates the story of his MC education, a revealing record of style in the making.

 

Talent is critical, but alone it falls short of producing art. Style begins with the basics, with the formal rules of the genre as much as with inspiration or excellence. 50's story is a rather common coming-of-age tale for rap. Snoop Dogg recalls a similar moment of stylistic realization. “I wasn't a good writer, but in a battle I could beat anybody,” he recalls. “But as far as songwriting, I didn't know how to write. Then once I got with Dr. Dre he showed me how to turn my 52 bar raps into 16 bar raps.” In both these cases it is curious to note that these lyricists didn't learn rap form from other lyricists but from producers, suggesting an essential link between lyrical and musical forms in rap.

When Eminem released his independent debut album,
Infinite,
in 1996, the few critics who heard it (the original release was a little over a thousand copies—all on vinyl and cassette) accused him of biting the styles of other artists, most notably Nas. Eminem admits as much, and looks back upon the album as a crucial step in his stylistic development. “Obviously, I was young and influenced by other artists,” he recalls, “and I got a lot of feedback saying that I sounded like Nas and AZ.
Infinite
was me trying to figure out how I wanted my rap style to be, how I wanted to sound on the mic and present myself. It was a growing stage.” Eminem's remarks key into the essential elements of style: the qualities of voice or, as he puts it, “how I wanted to sound on the mic”; and the formation of persona, or how he wanted to “present himself.”

Eminem, like 50, Snoop, and my former student, made a conscious effort to define the elements of his personal style. For those critics who consider rap unsophisticated and formless, even for those rap fans who give little thought to how the music is made, it will undoubtedly come as a surprise to learn that MCs most often pursue their craft with such a conscious awareness of form. While many MCs have no formal musical training, they nonetheless have learned the necessary terminology or created a vocabulary of their own to describe the elements of their craft.

Rakim brought formal musical training as a jazz saxophonist to his rhyme style. It certainly informed his phrasing and his rhythmic sensibilities. He also brought a keen awareness of language and its relation to these musical elements. “My style of writing, I love putting a lot of words in the bars, and it's just something I started doing,” he explained to the
Village Voice
in 2006. “Now it's stuck with me. I like being read. The way you do that is by having a lot of words, a lot of syllables, different types of words.” This is a remarkable statement coming from one of rap's standard bearers:
I like being read.
Rakim is claiming for himself, and by extension for rap as a genre, a fundamental poetic identity, a necessary linguistic style to accompany the musical one.

Another MC who uses his voice as an instrument, developing a style conscious of both the linguistic and the musical identities, is Ludacris. In a revealing interview he makes a case for what makes his rap style distinctive.

 

 

Rap styles are far from static. Though an MC may become known, like Ludacris, for a signature style, it is still possible to innovate within those terms. Some artists evolve quite dramatically, expanding their stylistic identities in ways broad and deep. Lil Wayne's remarkable emergence as a respected lyricist over the past several years came as a result of dramatic stylistic growth. Similarly, Busta Rhymes has transformed over the years from what was essentially a novelty rapper, good as a guest artist or on a hook, to a multifaceted rhymer capable of carrying an entire album.

A very few artists, however, seem to have emerged on the scene full-grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Jay-Z was as good on the first track from his debut,
Reasonable Doubt,
as he has ever been since, which is to say that he was something like a legend from the start. Only Jay-Z himself, perhaps, could look back on his early days in rap and see a stylistic transformation. In a revealing interview with Kelefa Sanneh published in the
New York Times
he offered this self-assessment: “I was speeding,” he said. “I was saying a hundred words a minute. There were no catchphrases, there were no hooks within the verses. I was very wordy. . . . I don't know that I've gotten better. I think that I've definitely gotten more rounded.”