Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  One TWO Three FOUR

  Standing on the front stoop, hangin’ out the window,

  watching all the cars go by, roaring as the breezes blow.

  Notice how the naturally emphasized words (“standing,” “front,” “hangin’,” “window,” etc.) fall on the strong beats. These are two fairly regular lines, hence the near uniformity of the pair and the strong-beat accents on particular words. The words are in lockstep with the beat. Mark the beginning of each poetic line on the one and the end of the line on the four.

  Not all lines, however, are so easily transcribed; many complications can occur in the process of transcription. Consider the famous opening lines from this very same song:

  One TWO Three FOUR

  Broken glass everywhere,

  people pissin’ on the stairs, you know they just don’t care.

  Looking at the two lines on the page, one might think that they had been incorrectly transcribed. The only thing that suggests they belong together is the end rhyme (“everywhere” and “care”). How can each of these lines—the first half as long as the second, and with fewer than half the total syllables—take up the same four-beat measure? The answer has everything to do with performance. Melle Mel delivers the first line with a combination of dramatic pause and exaggerated emphasis. He begins rhyming a little behind the beat, includes a caesura (a strong phrasal pause within the line) between “glass” and “everywhere,” and then dramatically extenuates the pronunciation of “everywhere.” Were it not for an accurate transcription, these poetic effects would be lost.

  Sometimes rap poets devise intricate structures that give logical shape to their creations. Using patterns of rhyme, rhythm, and line, these structures reinforce an individual verse’s fusion of form and meaning. While literary poetry often follows highly regularized forms—a sonnet, a villanelle, a ballad stanza—rap is rarely so formally explicit, favoring instead those structures drawn naturally from oral expression. Upon occasion, however, rap takes on more formal structures, either by happenstance or by conscious design. For instance, Long Beach’s Crooked I begins the second verse of “What That Mean” by inserting an alternating quatrain, switching up the song’s established pattern of rhyming consecutive lines.

  Shorty saw him comin’ in a glare

  I pass by like a giant blur

  What she really saw was Tim Duncan in the air

  Wasn’t nothin’ but a Flyin’ Spur

  By rhyming two pairs of perfect rhymes abab (“glare” with “air” and “blur” with “spur”), Crooked I fashions a duality of sound that underscores the two perspectives he describes: that of the woman onlooker and that of the MC in his speeding car. By temporarily denying the listener’s expectation of rhyme, he creates a sense of heightened anticipation and increased attention. Using this new rhyme pattern shines a spotlight on the playful metaphor at the center of the verse: what the woman saw was the San Antonio Spurs’ MVP Tim Duncan in the air, otherwise known as a flying Spur, otherwise known as his luxury automobile, a Bentley Continental Flying Spur. The mental process of deciphering the metaphor, nearly instantaneous for those familiar with the reference and likely indecipherable for anyone else, is facilitated by the rhyming structure of the verse. Rhyme and wordplay work together to create a sense of poetic satisfaction.

  Rap’s poetry is best exemplified in these small moments that reveal conscious artistry at work in places we might least expect. It is this sense of craft that connects the best poetry of the past with the best rap of today. Consider the following two verses side by side: on the left is Langston Hughes’s “Sylvester’s Dying Bed,” written in 1931; on the right is a transcription of Ice-T’s “6 ’N the Mornin’,” released in 1987. Though distanced by time, these lyrics are joined by form.

  Hughes’s form relies upon splitting the conventional four-beat line in half, a pattern I have followed with Ice-T’s verse for the purposes of comparison; I might just as easily have rewritten Hughes’s lines as two sets of rhyming couplets. This adjustment aside, the two lyrics are nearly identical in form. Each employs a two-beat line (or a four-beat line cut in two) with an abcb rhyme pattern. They even share the same syntactical units, with end stops (a grammatical pause for punctuation at the end of a line of verse) on lines two, four, six, and eight. Both draw upon the rhythms of the vernacular, the language as actually spoken. This formal echo, reaching across more than a half century of black poetic expression, suggests a natural affinity of forms.

  I woke up this mornin’ Six in the mornin’

  ‘Bout half past three. Police at my door.

  All the womens in town Fresh Adidas squeak

  Was gathered round me. Across my bathroom floor.

  Sweet gals was a-moanin’, Out my back window,

  “Sylvester’s gonna die!” I made my escape.

  And a hundred pretty mamas Don’t even get a chance

  Bowed their heads to cry. To grab my old school tape.

  Rap lyrics properly transcribed reveal themselves in ways not possible when listening to rap alone. Seeing rap on the page, we understand it for what it is: a small machine of words. We distinguish end rhymes from internal rhymes, end-stopped lines from enjambed ones, patterns from disruptions. Of course, nothing can replace the listening experience, whether in your headphones or at a show. Rather than replacing the music, reading rap as poetry heightens both enjoyment and understanding. Looking at rhymes on the page slows things down, allowing listeners—now readers—to discover familiar rhymes as if for the first time.

  Walt Whitman once proclaimed that “great poets need great audiences.” For over thirty years, rap has produced more than its share of great poets. Now it is our turn to become a great audience, repaying their efforts with the kind of close attention to language that rap’s poetry deserves.

  Part One

  ONE Rhythm

  RHYTHM IS RAP’S reason for being. I realized this several years ago in an unlikely place, a beach in a small seaside town outside of Rio de Janeiro. Unable to speak Portuguese, I had been making do by resorting to the traveler’s Esperanto of smiles and hand gestures, but I hungered for familiar words. One afternoon as I walked along the beach, I contented myself by idly reciting rap verses that came to mind. I was in the midst of Inspectah Deck’s opening lines from the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Triumph” (“I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies / and hypotheses can’t define how I be dropping these / mockeries”) when I heard the first words uttered by another person that I had clearly understood in days.

  “Wu-Tang Clan!”

  I glanced behind me, half expecting to see some spectral projection of my linguistically isolated mind. Instead I saw a brown-skinned kid of about fourteen who seemed to have emerged from out of nowhere on the otherwise-abandoned beach. Not wanting to miss the chance to converse with someone in English, I asked him which MCs he liked best. He smiled broadly but said nothing. He’d exhausted his English, as I had my Portuguese. We parted ways, but I wondered, What was it about those rhymes that spoke to him when the words could not? It must have been the rhythm.

  Rhythm is rap’s basic element. Whatever else it is, rap is patterned verbal expression. It is the offspring of a voice and a beat. The beat, of course, is the most obvious rhythm we hear. It is the kick drum, the high hat, the snare. It is sampled or digitized, beatboxed, or even tapped out on a tabletop. The MC’s voice has rhythm as well, playing off and on the beat in antagonistic cooperation. For most rap listeners, even for those with a full grasp of the language of the lyrics, rhythm has a way of overshadowing meaning. Feminist women sometimes hit the dance floor when the rhythm is right, misogynist lyrics be damned. And even true hip-hop heads have been known to “walk it out” or crank that Soulja Boy on occasion. The rhythm can make you do strange things. Rap, after all, is more than the sum of its sense; rhythm has a meaning all its own.

  So what does rap mean when we aren’t paying close attention or can’t comprehend the words? “I can go to Japan, not spea
k the language or communicate whatsoever, but a beat will come on, and we’ll all move our heads the same way,” remarks Evidence of Dilated Peoples. “It lets me know that there’s something bigger than just making rap songs.” Less obvious but equally significant is that rap’s poetic language also finds meaning in pure rhythmic expression. “Poetic forms are like that,” literary critic Paul Fussell explains. “They tend to say things even if words are not at the moment fitted to their patterns.”

  Poetry was born in rhythm rather than in words. The first poem might well have been a cry uttered by one of our ancient ancestors long before modern language emerged. As poet and critic Robert Penn Warren once noted, from a groan to a sonnet is a straight line. In its simplest terms, then, a poem is a reproduction of the living tones of speech, regardless of meaning.

  When the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats observed that poetry is “an elaboration of the rhythms of common speech and their association with profound feeling,” he understood what I had only begun to comprehend on that beach in Brazil. Part of rap’s appeal comes from its proximity to conversation; the rest lies in its necessary distance. Rap insists upon being understood. At least for those initiated into the culture, rap talks directly to us in a language we understand. But even plainspoken MCs—perhaps especially them, because they flow so low to the ground—rely upon those essential qualities that elevate rap beyond everyday expression. No matter how conversational an MC’s lyrics may sound, their rhythm makes them poetry.

  Rap is what results when MCs take the natural rhythms of everyday speech and reshape them to a beat. The drumbeat is rap’s heartbeat; its metronomic regularity gives rap its driving energy and inspires the lyricist’s creativity. “Music only needs a pulse,” the RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan explains. “Even a hum, with a bass and snare—it’ll force a pulse, a beat. It makes order out of noise.” Robert Frost put it even more plainly: “The beat of the heart seems to be basic in all making of poetry in all languages.” In rap, whether delivered in English or Portuguese, Korean or Farsi, we hear two and sometimes many more rhythms layered on top of one another. The central rhythmic relationship, though, is always between the beat and the voice. As the RZA explains, the beat should “inspire that feeling in an MC, that spark that makes him want to grab a mic and rip it.”

  Rappers have a word for what they do when the rhythm sparks them; they call it flow. Simply put, flow is an MC’s distinctive lyrical cadence, usually in relation to a beat. It is rhythm over time. In a compelling twist of etymology, the word rhythm is derived from the Greek rheo, meaning “flow.” Flow is where poetry and music communicate in a common language of rhythm. It relies on tempo, timing, and the constitutive elements of linguistic prosody: accent, pitch, timbre, and intonation.

  Like jazz musicians, MCs boast about staying in the pocket of the beat, finding the place where their voices are rhythmically in sync with the drums. When Kanye West raps on “Get ’Em High” that “my rhyme’s in the pocket like wallets / I got the bounce like hydraulics,” he is bragging about his flow. An effective rap lyricist must satisfy the listener’s innate desire for order by rapping, for the most part, in the pocket. This doesn’t mean simply flowing in lockstep with the track at all times; that can sound dull after only a few bars. Instead, a talented MC creates moments of calculated rhythmic surprise. Good rappers combine the expected metrical scheme with altered or exaggerated speech intonations to create a distinctive sense of rhythm, a flow all their own. They know when to switch up their flows to fit a new beat or a new lyrical mood. They know how to deliver variety without violating the integrity of the rhythm.

  Part of the synergy of beats and rhymes is that they protect each other from their own potential excesses. Beats without voices soon become monotonous. Rhymes in isolation expose the frailty of the human voice and the fallibility of the rapper’s vocal rhythms. Together, however, beats and rhymes find strength: The voice gives the beat humanity and variety; the beat gives the rhyme a reason for being and a margin for error. This essential relationship is rap’s greatest contribution to the rhythm of poetry: the dual rhythmic relationship.

  Rap’s dual rhythmic relationship liberates the MC to pursue innovations of syncopation and stress that might otherwise sound chaotic were it not for the reassuring regularity of the beat. The beat and the MC’s flow work together to satisfy the audience’s musical and poetic expectations of rhythm: that it establish and maintain distinct patterns while creatively disrupting those patterns, through syncopation and other pleasing forms of rhythmic surprise. The rapper Q-Tip remembers the moment when he first realized this dual rhythmic relationship for himself. “Well, initially, [I would] probably just [write] my rhymes, spitting over the beat and making it fit,” he recalls. “Then I realized that my voice was an instrument, and, slowly but surely, I started to get into rhythms, cadences, and becoming another instrument along with what was already there.” When beats and rhymes work together, they achieve an organic unity of rhythm that is more powerful than most literary verses can likely achieve. To hear lyrics set to the beat for which they were written is to experience an epiphany of sound.

  Rap is poetry’s greatest throwback to rhythm. Even new-school rap is old-school poetry. At the same time, rap has advanced the metrical tradition in startling ways by crafting a dual rhythmic voice that both maintains an old-school allegiance to meter even as it engages in a new-school exploration of rhythm. This does not mean that MCs write their lyrics in iambic pentameter and trochaic trimeter; rap’s lyrical relation to poetic meter is more informal and improvisational than that. Rather, rap’s meter is the drumbeat and its rhythm is the MC’s flow on top of the beat.

  Among the many things that distinguish hip-hop lyricism from literary poetry, rap’s dual rhythmic voice is the most essential. Rap makes audible a rhythmic relationship that is only theoretical in conventional verse. In literary poetry, the difference between meter and rhythm is the difference between the ideal and the actual rhythms of a given poetic line. Poetic meter, in other words, is structured rhythm; it defines the ideal pattern of a given sequence of stressed and unstressed (also known as accented and unaccented) syllables. To quote Paul Fussell, meter is “what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance.”

  Poetic rhythm, on the other hand, is the natural pattern of speech in relation to a given meter. Along with rhyme, it is the music of words. Where meter is ideal, rhythm is real. In poetry the only rhythm that is “audible,” either in the reader’s head or in the speaker’s voice reciting the poem, is the imperfect rhythm, not the perfect meter. A literary poet creates variety by working with and against a silent and implicit metrical perfection. Stray too far from the meter and the poem can lose all rhythmic order, stay too close and it begins to sound like a singsong parody of itself.

  Scansion is the technique by which we identify a poem’s meter by marking the stresses (or accents) and determining the overall rhythm pattern of the verse. A stress is nothing more than the vocal emphasis naturally given to a particular syllable when spoken compared to the emphasis given to those around it. Anything written can be scanned, from an individual multisyllabic word to the sentence you are reading now. Scansion is most useful, however, when the poet has patterned his or her language to follow an established metrical order of accented and unaccented syllables organized into repeating units, or feet.

  Scanning a poem often requires as much art as science, because we must read the verse with possible metrical patterns in mind, but also with an overall sense of the natural rhythms at work in the lines. To take an obvious example, we identify the meter of Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate”) as iambic pentameter not because it is perfectly composed of five sets of unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables per line but because the verse as
a whole approaches this ideal. Even Shakespeare—especially Shakespeare—wrote lines with irregular scansion, both out of measured poetic effect and the inevitable rhythmic imprecision of the English language itself. Shakespeare’s rhythm is born of the creative tension between an established metrical pattern and its natural intonation when spoken by a human voice. He fashioned a rhythm that is both recognizable as iambic pentameter and distinguishable enough from that metrical ideal to give his sonnet a human voice.

  Historically, Western poetry has favored such regular metrics. However, contemporary verse has shifted decidedly toward less-predictable accentual rhythm patterns. “Today,” writes poet Timothy Steele, “one almost hesitates to say that most poets write unmetrically; such a statement suggests that they know what meter is, which does not appear to be the case. Rather, it seems that versification, as it has been understood for millennia, is for the majority of contemporary poets an irrelevant matter.” This may be putting it a bit too strongly; many free-verse poets are still concerned with rhythm, creating smaller rhythmic motifs in their verse. But by rejecting regular metrical patterns and often rhyme as well, literary poetry has lost a good share of its popular appeal.

  If you ask most people to describe a poem, they’ll tell you that it rhymes and that it has discernable rhythm. That so many modern literary poets have chosen not to fulfill these expectations in favor of experimenting with a broader range of formal possibilities undoubtedly accounts for some of literary poetry’s greatest innovations in craft but also for its decline as a popular medium in our time.