Book of Rhymes (6 page)

 

 

Putting aside the bitter irony of the lyrics, given FEMA's dreadful lack of preparation for disaster and failure to act
in the aftermath of Katrina, the most noticeable thing about the verse is its rudimentary rhythm. You can see the writer—and this is undoubtedly a rhyme of the page, not of the voice—straining to establish his flow. The ellipses in the first line and the dash in the fourth are visual manifestations of rhythmic exhaustion. By isolating “disaster” from the rest of the first line he disrupts his flow even before it has a chance to begin. Part of the problem is that the writer has stranded each line from the ones that surround it, meaning that the rhythm screeches to halt no fewer than ten times in the ten-line verse. Notice the way the sixth line struggles to match the rhythm of the fifth by cramming in too many syllables. Rhythmic difficulties like this lead to forced rhymes (like “responsibility” and “our agency”) or unimaginative ones (like “'quake” and “break”). With no rhythmic development, no flow at all, it bears no more than a surface relation to the rap it emulates.

Skilled MCs know the rhythmic weight of their words. Syllables can be light or heavy, long or short. An effective rap verse balances its linguistic weight in such a way that it can be performed without awkward pauses, gasps for breath, or other infelicities. Rap has made rhythm into a science, a point Paul D. Miller (better known as DJ Spooky) makes in his multimedia text,
Rhythm Science.
“Rhythm science,” he explains, “is not so much a new language as a new way of pronouncing the ancient syntaxes that we inherit from history and evolution, a new way of enunciating the basic primal languages that slip through the fabric of rational thought and infect our psyche at another, deeper level.” He is speaking here primarily about the language of sound on the level of music and the protolinguistic, but it undoubtedly relates to the lyrical side of rap's dual rhythmic relationship. “Give me
two turntables,” he boasts, “and I'll make you a universe.” The right rap lyrics can do the same thing.

In the decades since “Rapper's Delight,” and in the distance from unskilled attempts like the FEMA rap, hip hop has undergone a rhythmic revolution. Some of the best-known lyricists, from Nas to Talib Kweli, not to mention MCs in hip hop's thriving underground, have liberated their flows from the restrictions of rigid metrical patterns in favor of more expansive rhythmic vocabularies that include techniques like piling up stressed and unstressed syllables, playing against the beat, and altering normal pronunciation of words in favor of newly accented ones. We now live in a time when rap can mean any number of things, depending on the place of its origin, the style of its production, and the particular sensibility of its lyricist. Exploring rap rhythm today requires a close attention to the specific rhythmic innovations of individual artists.

 

Flow is an MC's lyrical fingerprint. We remember rap lyrics in their specific vocal contexts because of the MC's flow. Think of “99 Problems” and you'll distinctly hear Jay-Z's voice rhyming, “If you're havin' girl problems, I feel bad for you, son.” Think of “Lose Yourself” and you'll hear Eminem's rapping, “Snap back to reality, oh, there goes gravity.” No other voices could utter these words with the same style; imagining Eminem reciting Jay-Z's lines or visa versa just doesn't make sense. Pitch, intonation, accent, cadence, all flood our remembrance of the lyrics, setting the words in specific musical and poetic contexts. These contexts are not always coterminous—the musical concerns harmony and melody in instrumental accompaniment, the poetic concerns
rhetorical figures and lyrical forms—but they overlap in their joint expression in rhythm.

It is here, in rhythm, that rap's relationship to lyric poetry most distinguishes itself from that of other pop music genres. This is not a distinction of kind, but rather of degree. Rock music and soul music and country and western music all, like rap, relate to poetry through rhythm. It is what music and poetry share in common. Poetry on the page has no melody or harmony; it is pure rhythm. Rap, though it frequently includes samples and choruses that employ memorable melodies and harmonies, expresses itself most powerfully in the dual rhythmic relationship between the beat of the drums and the flow of the voice.

MCs face a particular challenge, distinct from those faced by literary poets and song lyricists. Literary poets concern themselves with the rhythms in the language of their lines. They balance stressed syllables and select specific rhythm patterns to govern their compositions. They work with implied beats. The song lyricist, on the other hand, must contend with audible rhythms in addition to harmony and melody. Writing for a singing voice, they construct a melodic line that fits within the musical accompaniment. The MC's task embodies elements of both, combined with a particular set of concerns unique to rap. Unlike a literary poet, an MC's flow is not governed solely by the rhythmic structure of the poet's words, but by the audible rhythms of the track. Unlike song lyricists, MCs are concerned almost exclusively with rhythm. This specialization opens rap up to its most obvious criticism from musicians in other genres: Rap is not music, they say, because it doesn't care about harmony and melody. Rap, in other words, is nothing more than
an extended drum solo, the rapper nothing more than another kick drum or snare.

This rhythmic preoccupation should not obscure the wide range of aesthetic decisions an MC has to make in every rhyme. When presented with a beat, the first question for the lyricist is this: How will you rhyme to it? Fast or slow? Monotone or animated? A little bit ahead, a little bit behind, or right in the pocket? The answer is as varied as the number of individuals willing to pick up the mic and spit. You'll notice that nowhere in these questions is, “What will you talk about?” Perhaps there are some MCs who begin this way; undoubtedly almost every MC has begun with that question at one time or another. But I would contend that the question of lyrical content almost always comes second to the more immediate concern of sound.

Like a jazz singer scatting to some big-band swing, the MC's most pressing lyrical challenge is in patterning sound rather than making meaning. If this were reversed, if a rapper's primary concern had to be sense before anything else, then it might likely lead to those good-intentioned efforts at conscious rap that cram political slogans into the rhymes with little concern for how it sounds. Very few listeners will have the patience for that. In rap you must convince people that they should hear you even before they know what you're saying. That doesn't mean that content can't be the most powerful part of a rhyme; often it is. But it is not the first thing to consider, and it's rarely the indispensable part.

The first thing a listener usually hears in rap is the MC's flow. Flow, as you'll recall, is the distinctive rhythm cadence a rapper's voice follows to a beat. It is rhythm over time. As historian William Jelani Cobb describes it, flow is “an individual
time signature, the rapper's own idiosyncratic approach to the use of time.” Controlling tempo, juxtaposing silence with sound, patterning words in clusters of syllables, all are ways of playing with rhythm over time. In addition to its use of time, flow also works by arranging stressed and unstressed syllables in interesting ways. In this regard, flow relates to meter in literary poetry in that both rely on the poet's artful manipulation of vocal emphasis. Just as classical composers score music, poets “score” words, using the embedded rhythms of vocal stress.

Every poem provides the reader with implicit instructions on how to read it. Give ten able readers a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's
Annabel Lee
and, except for variations of vocal tone and small matters of personal choice, the poem should sound just about the same in each instance. “It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee.” As long as the readers haven't willfully disregarded the rhythmic clues Poe has set down in his arrangement of words and vocal stress, his distinctive voice should emerge from the mouth of whoever is reading the poem.

Now try the same experiment with a rap verse, a verse that is comparably as sophisticated in its genre as Poe's is in his, and something altogether different occurs. Give those same ten people Nas's “One Mic.” Let's assume that none of them have ever heard the song. Let's also assume that they've been given nothing but the lyrics. “All I need is one life, one try, one breath, I'm one man / What I stand for speaks for itself, they don't understand.” Without hearing Nas's distinctive performance—the way his voice rises from a whisper to a shout—and without even the benefit of listening to the
instrumental track, chances are they will recite it in ten different ways. Some will read it flat, with almost no added inflection at all. Others might catch a hint of Nas's syncopation, or see a cluster of syllables, or emphasize a particular stress pattern. Certainly none of them would rap it like Nas does. This begs the obvious question: What does Poe's poem have that Nas's does not, or to frame it more broadly, what does a literary verse reveal about its rhythm that a rap verse does not and why?

To answer this, it's necessary to return to rap's dual rhythmic relationship. The rhythm of rap's poetry, you'll recall, is defined by that fundamental relationship between the regularity of the beat and the liberated irregularity of the rapper's flow. Literary verse, by contrast, concerns itself with rhythm and meter. It goes without saying that when composing
Annabel Lee
the only beat Poe worked with was the particular metric ideal he had in mind. It was contingent, then, upon Poe to represent on the page both his idiosyncratic rhythm and the vestiges of the ideal meter from which it came. To put it another way, Poe has to be both the rapper and his own beatbox all at once.

Nas, on the other hand, knows that we will likely only hear his rhymes in the particular context of the “One Mic” beat. That means that while, like Poe, he composes his lines with a regular meter in mind, his lyrics need not carry the burden of representing that meter—the beat of the instrumental track does that for him. On a practical level, this means that the range of Nas's rhythmic freedom is potentially broader than Poe's, which must stay closer to his chosen meter so that his reader never loses the beat. This doesn't
mean that Nas and rappers like him have complete rhythmic autonomy. Quite the contrary, because rappers are conscious of how their lyrics function as both poetry and song, they will stay close to the rhythm laid down by the beat—the rapper's version of poetic meter.

So now give our ten readers Nas's lyrics again, but this time play them the beat, and you'll likely see a marked improvement in their reading's resemblance to Nas's performance and an increase in their similarity to one another. Given a sense of the rhythmic order against which Nas composed and performed his lines, it is easier to fit the lyrics to the beat. Indeed, it may be hard to fit them anywhere besides where Nas put them. Of course, for the nonrapper it still presents quite a challenge to rap someone else's lyrics to a beat. As an oral idiom, rap's rhythm only partly exists on the page; it requires the beat and the distinctive rhythmic sensibility of the lyricist to make it whole.

A lyrical transcription rarely provides all the information needed to reconstruct a rapper's flow. Without the benefit of the beat, we are left to guess at how the words fit together and upon what syllables the stresses fall. If we try to read a rhyme in the same way we would a literary verse—that is, with our minds attuned to the metrical clues imbedded in the lines themselves—we are likely only to approximate the MC's actual performance; rappers, far more frequently than literary poets, accentuate unusual syllables in their verses. Consider the following example from the opening lines of Jay-Z's 1998 hit “Can I Get A. . . .” Keep in mind that Jay-Z is generally considered to have a conversational flow, one that falls comfortably into conventional speech rhythms.
However, when presented with a beat that challenges his natural cadence, Jay-Z responds by crafting a flow that emulates the track's pulsating tempo.

 

 

Without having heard the beat or Jay-Z's idiosyncratic flow, one would be hopelessly lost in discerning the precise pattern of accented syllables. One likely could not, for instance, discern the following unusual stresses that Jay-Z gives to his performance:

 

 

By exaggerating the penultimate syllables in the first and third lines, he not only achieves a distinctive rhythm but actually creates the illusion of a
rhyme
where no rhyme exists (“morning” and “want me”). This is only possible in oral expression; it depends upon the interrelatedness of two spoken words and the relation of that same pair of words to the beat. For a rapper whose style is normally distinguished by its conversational quality, such self-conscious artifice is a testament to his rhythmic versatility—or, as Jigga himself might say, to his ability to switch up his flow.

It is worth emphasizing again that both a rapper's ability to fashion a rhythm pattern
and
to depart from that pattern are equally important to a rapper's flow. Both of these factors
are ultimately conditioned by the beat's tempo and the variety of musical elements on the track. This is the reason that rap songs are almost always produced with a rapper writing rhymes to a beat rather than with a producer making a beat to a rapper's lyrics. The rhythm of the human voice is adaptable in ways the beat is not; a slight slip-up in the voice is usually of little consequence, while in the beat the results can be disastrous.