Book of Rhymes (7 page)

When a rapper's flow is fully realized, it forges a distinctive rhythmic identity that is governed both by poetic and musical laws. There is a tendency to associate flow almost exclusively with the smooth, liquid rhythms of MCs like Big Daddy Kane or LL Cool J. Flow includes the idea of effortlessness, of not struggling against the beat but working within it to accentuate the rhythm in human tones. Sometimes MCs' flows can so dominate their styles that they overshadow other elements of craft. For instance, Black Thought, the prodigious lyricist for the Roots, has a powerfully rhythmic flow that marks his signature rhyme style. Set within the complex soundscapes offered up by the rest of the group, Black Thought's liquid flow at times nearly washes away his meaning.

Could it be, then, that a rapper's flow could be too smooth? Could flow potentially compromise poetic complexity in rhyme, wordplay, or other elements of style? In an insightful interview with
The Guardian,
British rapper the Streets makes a reasonable case for the potential excesses of flow. “What you find with a lot of rappers is they work out their flow—the rhythm to their words—and the better they get, the more tidy the flow becomes, until everything has to fit in, the same way it would with a poem,” he argues. “But I
tend to think that if it all gets too tidy, the words don't really stick in your mind when you hear them—the smoothness of the rhythm makes you lose concentration.” Listen to the Streets for any amount of time and it is clear that he practices what he preaches. What stands out about his flow is the way it
refuses
to flow. Like water through leaky pipes, his lyrics alternately spill out and clog up in relation to the beat. At times he defiantly sets his flow against the rhythmic direction of the rest of the song. Just when you wonder whether he's even heard the beat at all, he finds his way back in the pocket for a moment, only to jump out again.

What all of these examples tell us is that rap's poetry articulates itself in music. Flow takes its meaning from its musical context. While lyrical transcription can reveal a great deal about rap's poetic form and rhythms, it is but an intermediary step that must ultimately lead us back to the performance itself. Nowhere is this more obvious than with MCs that rely upon their delivery above all else to define their style. One such artist is Twista.

In 1991 a rapper from the west side of Chicago named Tung Twista released his debut album on Loud Records,
Runnin' Off at da Mouth.
While it was only a modest hit, it earned him mention in the
Guinness Book of World Records
as the world's fastest rapper. He would lose the title, regain it, and then lose it again, but it was clear that he was one of a rare breed of speed rappers. The fraternity of speed rappers includes artists as different from one another as Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Big Daddy Kane, and OutKast, all of whom occasionally rapped at tempos that stretched the bounds of human breath control. Few, however, were as committed to speed rapping as Tung Twista. Eventually he would lose the
“Tung,” and with it, his monomaniacal focus on speed rapping. Twista's platinum-selling 2004 album
Kamikaze
displayed an expanded array of lyrical skills, not to mention a variety of tempos for his flow.

Whether rhyming slowly or quickly, though, tempo is a defining element of rap rhythm, responsible for shaping the distinctive cadences of an MC's signature flow. Tempo is sound over time. Reflecting on his past as a speed rapper, Twista recognizes that certain necessary constraints must govern a rapper's tempo. “I think a lot of artists that rap or want to rap in that style focus more on the speed and the style than they do the clarity,” he explained to
MTV News
in 2005. “They've got it locked in their mind ‘I want to do it fast' or ‘I want to do it like this,' but with me I always go about the clarity first, and if I couldn't say it [clearly] I'm not gonna write it. . . . If I can't get it all the way out or make it sound crisp or it's not within my vocal range or something, I won't even mess with it.” An MC's cadence, then, is governed in part by the possibilities presented by sound over time. Flow is defined by rap's respect for clarity, and even the limitations of the rapper's instrument: the human voice.

When given a beat upon which to rhyme, the beats per minute present the rapper with the minimum, optimal, and maximum syllable load. As an oral idiom, rap is governed by these physical constraints of the human voice. Breath control shapes rhythmic possibilities just as much as an MC's lyrical imagination. Like singers, rappers must understand and practice effective vocal phrasing. Phrasing is all the more significant given that, more than most other forms of popular music, rap emphasizes clarity. Rappers have ways, of course, of making the language malleable and easing the challenges
of breath control. The most common of these is altered pronunciation. Sometimes an MC will say just enough of a word to make it clearly discernable before going right into the next phrase, all the while staying on beat. Other times they will employ dramatic pauses, for both artistic emphasis and practical necessity. All of these subtle but essential changes take place on rap's microscopic level: the syllable.

The English language contains thirty-five sounds and twenty-six letters. Somehow, out of all of this, rhymes are born. “If, in rap, rhythm is more significant than harmony or melody, it is rhythm dependent on language, on the ways words rhyme and syllables count,” writes Simon Frith. A syllable is the basic organizational unit for a sequence of speech sounds; it is the phonological building block of language. Sometimes a single syllable can form a word—like “cat” or “bat.” More often, it is combined with other syllables to form multisyllabic words. Syllables matter to rap for several reasons. They partly dictate rap's rhythms based upon the natural syllabic emphasis of spoken language. In literary verse, syllabic prosody relies upon the number of syllables in the poetic line without regard to stress. Haiku, for instance, follows this method. Most modern poetry in English, however, favors accentual meter—poetry that patterns itself on stressed syllables alone. Stress, as we discussed earlier, is the vocal emphasis accorded each syllable relative to the emphasis given to those around it. The English language naturally contains so many stresses that no other organizational principle for meter makes sense.

Manipulating the numbers of syllables can function quite effectively in rap. Rakim, one of rap's greatest rhyme innovators, emphasizes the importance of an MC's control of language
on the smallest possible levels. “My style of writing, I love putting a lot of words in the bars, and it's just something I started doing,” he explains. “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.” Charting the number of syllables in the lines of a given rap verse is a useful technique. By doing so, one notices patterns of repetition and difference. In the lines that follow, Eminem creates a syllabic pattern of around ten syllables, which he then disrupts by expanding the number of syllables to nearly double by the end. “Drug Ballad,” from which these lines are drawn, is a study in breath control and lyrical artistry at the microscopic level of syllable.

 

 

To perform this last line without breaking his flow, Eminem increases the tempo of his delivery and alters his prosody (his pitch, length, timbre, etc.). The contrast between
syllabic order and syllabic overflow creates an effective and pleasing structural pattern that listeners experience primarily on the level of rhythm. After listening to this track, try tapping out the natural beat of the syllables. The rhythm you'll hear is the skeleton of Eminem's flow. The difference between that tapping and what you hear when Eminem rhymes is best defined in the last elements of flow that we shall discuss, pattern and performance.

One usually does not think of nineteenth-century Jesuit poet-priests and hip hop at the same time, but English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins has something to teach us about flow. In a famous line from his journals, he describes his discovery of “sprung rhythm.” In technical terms, sprung rhythm is a variant of strong-stress meter in which each metric foot begins with a stressed syllable, which can stand alone or relate to anywhere from one to three—and even more—unstressed syllables. Hopkins demarcated this stressed syllable with an accent mark to instruct his readers to give the syllable extra emphasis. For instance, in
The Wreck of the Deutschland,
he wrote the following line: “The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share cóme.” When the line is read naturally, “come” does not get emphasis, but by imposing emphasis on it, Hopkins established an unexpected and powerful rhythm pattern in his verse.

For rap's purposes, what matters is not only Hopkins's formal innovation, but his particular account of how it came about. In a journal entry dated July 24, 1866, he recorded the following: “I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper. . . . I do not say the idea is altogether new . . . but no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of. . . . However, I had to mark the stresses . . . and a great many
more oddnesses could not but dismay an editor's eye, so that when I offered it to our magazine
The Month
. . . they dared not print it.” That rhythm can haunt us with its power is undeniable. If you doubt it, simply listen to some Brazilian samba or to Max Roach's cadence on “Valse Hot.” That rhythm can haunt us in words, however, is something else entirely, something that requires the poet's attention.

As it was for Hopkins, rhythm is often born for MCs long before the right words arrive. “Once I figure out in my mind that it's going to go ‘da da da dadada da da,'” Bun B says, “then it's kind of like filling in the blanks. . . . I take the typical words, or I pick a two-word, three-word pattern.” Like Hopkins, MCs face the challenge of communicating a felt rhythm in the medium of language. In
The Art of Emceeing,
a self-published handbook for aspiring MCs,
Stic.man
from the group dead prez writes that rappers often begin composing a rhyme by scatting, much like jazz singers—using sequences of nonsense syllables to improvise vocal rhythms over the music. This frees an MC to try out different flows for a given beat before actually writing a rhyme. Such a technique simplifies the experience of rapping by stripping it down to its most basic element: rhythm. Having generated a range of flows that work well with the beat, an MC might then go about developing the other figurative, thematic, and narrative elements of a verse. Inspiration for flows is all around the rapper who would keep an open mind and open ears.
Stic.man
even advises aspiring MCs to study the patterns of high-hat drums in Latin, jazz, and African music to find new ways of relating their voices to the beat.

Of course the haunting rhythm that compels an MC to rhyme is as individual as the given artist. In the hip-hop industry beats by a producer—9th Wonder, for instance—
might circulate to numerous rappers before they find a home. Many factors go into the selection process (market forces and trends in popularity being foremost), but one would hope that the MC's inspiration to rhyme to that particular beat would factor somewhere into the equation. Other times, the beat chooses the MC—or, more specifically, a producer tailors a beat to fit the distinctive vocal qualities and style of a given rapper. In an invaluable glimpse into the craft of producing, the RZA describes his own beat-making principles:

 

A beat at its best is a reason to rhyme. It is the “spark that makes him [or her] want to grab a mike and rip it” by insinuating a personal sense of rhythm onto the track by means of a distinctive flow. The best way of illustrating this individuated relationship between an MC and a beat is to listen to different artists rhyming on the same track.

An excellent, if underappreciated, demonstration of the rhythmic versatility that two rappers can achieve on a single beat is Ludacris's guest-performance on Cee-Lo's song “Childz Play” from his 2000 release,
Cee-Lo Green . . . Is the Soul Machine.
Cee-Lo is a former member of the Atlanta rap collective Goodie Mob and, most recently, the vocal half of Gnarls Barkley, the group responsible for the 2006 worldwide hit “Crazy.” He is also a skilled lyricist with a striking rhythmic sensibility. “Childz Play” finds both Cee-Lo and Ludacris
in excellent form. The instrumental track sounds like a kind of funkafied cartoon theme song, complete with intricate xylophone and harpsichord loops. The beat, in an unusual ¾ time signature, is a deliberately paced back-and-forth bounce with a walking bass line and a snapping snare drum, but the overall effect of the track is frenetic thanks to the blazing notes of its samples. Cee-Lo rhymes first using a highly stylized, stop-start flow that bobs and weaves as he verbally jabs the track. Even without the music, one can see in the transcription his distinctive patterning of two and three syllable phrases: