Book of Rhymes (5 page)

“Rapper's Delight” was at once new to the music world, but true to the poetic tradition. It's a safe guess, however, that Wonder Mike was not counting the number of stresses in his lines, nor was he consciously modeling his verse on the ballad stanza. What the formal resemblance reminds us is that poetic form grows out of the natural habits of speech. When poets understand those forms, they are able to control with greater accuracy the effects those forms will have on their audience. When an audience understands the forms, they are better prepared to respond with sensitivity and awareness to the poet's creations.

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:

 

 

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

 

 

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:

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

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.