Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  Understanding accentual meter means understanding how sounds join together to make sense. English, more than most other languages, relies on stressed syllables to convey meaning. Linguists recognize four or even more different weights that syllables can carry in English, and true adherents to metrical analysis have devised any number of notations to account for the subtle valences of stress in a given line of verse. For our purposes, however, it is most useful to distinguish between syllables that an MC accords significant stress and those delivered with less inflection. As a general rule, the more significant the word (or part of a word), the more stress it receives. Of course no two people will read the same sentence in exactly the same way. Any arrangement of words embodies a range of potential accentual interpretations that can change depending on anything from tone to the speaker’s accent to his or her emotion. The heightened prominence of one syllable in relation to others can be rendered by any number of means, from volume to pitch to length of stress. Depending on the meaning the speaker wishes to convey, stress alone can make a world of difference.

  Patterns of accent form the ground upon which rap’s poetry and music meet in shared sound. It is particularly fitting that the word accent derives from the Latin term accentus, which means “song added to speech,” for it is precisely the arrangement of accents that gives language its music. For rap lyricists, then, the stresses they put on syllables are the means by which they arrange the music of the human voice. This is another definition of flow: the song the rapper’s speech sings. Take these lines from a rap song even people who hate rap probably know: “Now, this is a story all about how / My life got flipped, turned upside down.” Without hearing the track or Will Smith’s (aka the Fresh Prince’s) flow, we can already glean a wealth of rhythmic information from the words themselves and their arrangement across the lines. We hear the enjambment (or break in the syntactic unit) between “how” and “my”; we note the unresolved tension of the slant rhyme (“how” and “down”) as it plays itself out in the rhythm. Reading alone, however, has its limitations. If we wish to understand rhythm in rap’s poetry, we must begin with the beat.

  Beat is something we talk about in both rap and literary verse, but in strikingly different ways. Chuck D breaks it down like this: “Poetry makes the beat come to it, and rap pretty much is subservient to the beat.” This subservience, of course, is not absolute, yet even the most rhythmically daring MCs—Busta Rhymes, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, E-40—pledge allegiance to the beat. Unlike the rhythms of literary poetry, then, the rhythms of rap are governed by something outside of the MC’s own literary conceptions. Rap’s beat serves an analogous purpose for the MC that meter does for the literary poet: Namely, it sets out the terms of a rhythmic ideal. One might even consider hip hop’s beat as poetic meter rendered audible, clarifying the relationship between metrical perfection and rhythmic innovation.

  Rap flaunts its metric perfection even as it allows for rhythmic invention. The beat’s integrity, however, is not absolute. While hip hop usually employs 4/4 time—meaning that it has four beats per measure—not every measure is composed of quarter notes. Measures can consist of eighth notes, sixteenth notes, half notes, whole notes, held notes, etc. Though drum machines and digital sequencing make it possible to achieve superhuman perfection, most producers embrace the slight flaws found in sampled live instrumental performance. Rhythmic variety, therefore, exists even in the beat itself. Still, the beat’s relative predictability compared to human voice clears a space for the MC to stray from expectation even as the overall performance satisfies it. Rap has succeeded where most contemporary literary poetry has not; it has retained its popular appeal for predictability while still liberating the MC to explore the formal possibilities of rhythm.

  The story of rap’s dual rhythmic revolution begins, as so many stories do in hip hop, with two turntables and a microphone. In the mid-1970s, New York DJs looking for new ways to rock the party started improvising chants in between songs. Sometimes they would loop the hottest part of the record, capturing a drum sequence called a break, then talk over that. They would shout out their own names or the name of their crews, they would tell the crowds what to do—it didn’t really matter, as long as they said something over the break. Audiences couldn’t get enough.

  DJ Kool Herc was one of the first to do it. He had emigrated with his family from Jamaica to the South Bronx in 1967, bringing with him the sound of his native island and a love of American soul music. By the mid-seventies he began throwing neighborhood block parties with his massive sound system banging out percussive funk, soul, and reggae. “Just to hear the bass was like everything,” Sha-Rock, one of the earliest female MCs, recalls. “To hear the bass. You know? . . . The music. James Brown . . . all these different types of music that you could breakdance to. Herc, he’ll get on there and say like one or two words. . . . Herc wasn’t like a rapper or anything like that; it was just a sound, his music, his system. The music that he played was like no other.” Soon rapping would develop into something more, as the rhymes started to emerge on their own as distinct from, yet still on, the beat. This was the birth of the MC.

  The DJ spun the records and the MC played a supporting role as master of ceremonies, offering up a chant or a few lyrical lines to punctuate the music. The rhymes were often as basic as hip-hop pioneer DJ Hollywood’s signature call: “Hollywood, I’m doing good, and I hope you’re feeling fine.” All it took were words rhyming in rhythm. In rap’s early years the lyrics often read like nursery rhymes. This is no disrespect to hip hop’s pioneers. Rather, it is a testament to the way that rap tapped into that most basic human need for rhythm that poetry was created to satisfy.

  Melvin “Melle Mel” Glover, whom many regard as the father of the modern MC, was only a teenager when he partnered with two other rappers—his brother Nathaniel Glover, aka Kid Creole, and Keith Wiggins, aka Cowboy—and joined with the now legendary DJ Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Saddler). Together, they built on Herc’s model. “The Kool Herc style at the time was basically freelance talking,” Grandmaster Flash explains, “not necessarily syncopated to the beat. The three of them—Cowboy, Creole, and Mel—came up with this style called the back and forth, where they would be MC-ing to the beat that I would play. I’ll take a sentence that hopefully the whole world knows: ‘Eeeny, meeny, miny mo, catch a piggy by the toe.’ So they devised it where Cowboy might say ‘Eeeny meeny,’ and then Creole would say, ‘Miny,’ and then Mel would say, ‘Mo.’ So they would kind of bounce it around.” The essential difference between a DJ motivating the crowd on the mic and an MC rapping to a beat was twofold: syncopation and sound, rhythm and rhyme.

  Rap as we know it was born only after words started bending to the beat. It was founded on that dual rhythmic relationship. Those who trace rap back to earlier forms of black oral expression often overlook this distinguishing difference. Though folk practices like the dozens (a game of ritual insult) and the toasts (long narrative poems, often with explicit subject matter) resemble modern-day rap in the way they play with words, they lack the fundamental dual rhythmic relationship that characterizes rap. For all Muhammad Ali’s brilliant rhyme and wordplay, he never said his lines over a beat. For all their smoothed-out love patter, soul crooners like Barry White did it as singers rather than as rhymers. Rap’s most striking contribution to the black American oral tradition—indeed, to American culture as a whole—is this rhythmic sophistication, rap’s outward manifestation of the meter and rhythm of literary verse.

  Considering rap’s development from its early years to its golden age, Marcus Reeves keenly observes that “MCs were elevating the art of rhyme, utilizing the layered intricacy of sampled rhythms to enhance the meter of their poetry, approaching the delivery of their words like musicians and poets. With labyrinthine flows and off-rhyming techniques, this new breed of MC laced his/her lyrics with complex wordplay, titillating the ear and imagination of listeners much the way bebop pioneers intensified the riffs, solos, and chord changes
of their swinging forefathers.” As both musicians and poets, rappers faced the boon and the burden of fitting language to the shape of their lyrical impulses and their grandest conceptions.

  While the recordings of rap’s earliest innovators seem simplistic when set beside a verse from Talib Kweli or Immortal Technique, those earlier artists had to invent the basic rules of the form even as they wrote their rhymes. “Every subsequent generation of MCs had a whole genealogy of artists to define themselves against,” historian William Jelani Cobb explains. “Melle Mel had a pen, a pad and an idea.” Great art is defined by both invention and refinement. Rap’s early hits show hip-hop poetry in the process of invention, still defining its form even as it kept moving the crowd. A good place to observe this process is in rap’s first crossover hit, the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”

  For anyone listening to music in 1979, at least for anyone outside of New York City, it is almost certain that the first rap song they ever heard was the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” For anyone born later on—ten or more years after the song first appeared—at least some of its lyrics will be familiar. “I said a-hip hop, the-hippy / the-hippy to the hip hip-hop you don’t stop!” Most people are aware that “Rapper’s Delight” was rap’s first mainstream radio hit. Some are aware of its controversial history—how Sylvia Robinson, the founder of Sugar Hill Records, assembled a group of pizza-delivery boys and bouncers to record the song; how most of the lyrics were allegedly stolen from the true MCs who wrote them; how the song does not reflect the authentic spirit of rap as defined by the people who were creating it at that very moment. And while all of this is a vital part of the song’s history, it does not erase the indisputable truth that “Rapper’s Delight” marks a kind of beginning for rap in the public imagination. The 12-inch version of “Rapper’s Delight” was nearly fifteen minutes long, an eternity when most radio-ready singles were clocking in at under four minutes. In spite of this, the song climbed the charts in the fall of 1979, reaching #4 on the R&B charts and even cracking the top 40 (at #36) on the disco-dominated pop charts.

  The first noticeable thing about the song isn’t the rap at all, but the bass line—an unmistakable riff lifted from Chic’s disco hit of that same year, “Good Times.” The second is the drums, a wicked kick and a snare accented by hand claps. It is clear that this is a party anthem even before the rappers grab the mic. When Wonder Mike comes in, rhyming that unmistakable bit of hip-hop gibberish, whoever was listening could immediately hear that rap was something new. Here were voices that were not singing, not speaking, but somehow doing a little of both at the same time. For a generation of listeners, this was the rebirth of cool.

  In a striking 2006 article for the Washington Post entitled “Why I Gave Up on Hip-Hop,” Lonnae O’Neal Parker recalls her own conflicted relationship with the music—a relationship that began when she fell in love with “Rapper’s Delight.” It was more than a song, she explains; for her, and other young black kids like her, it helped shape both her sense of art and her sense of self. “I was 12,” she recalls, “the same age my oldest daughter is now, when hip-hop began to shape my politics and perceptions and aesthetics. It gave me a meter for my thoughts and bent my mind toward metaphor and rhyme. I couldn’t sing a lick, but didn’t hip-hop give me the beginnings of a voice.”

  The beginnings of a voice, a distinctly black voice, reveal the essential confluence of politics and poetics in rap. Granted, “Rapper’s Delight” is an unlikely political anthem, and certainly it is as far removed as you can imagine from the social critique of a later recording like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” and yet despite its particular subject matter, it embodied a radical political sensibility in the sheer exuberance and spirit of its voices. The very act of expression, even in the admittedly flawed and conflicted reality of the song’s origins, even in the seeming vacuity of its good-times subject matter, marks a kind of revolution in black aesthetics.

  It also marked a surprising poetic development as well. “Rapper’s Delight” stands as an example of rap at its most basic. Its rhymes always fall at the end of lines. Its rhythms are almost completely dominated by the beat rather than the MC’s distinctive flow. To ears accustomed to the verbal acrobatics of Eminem or the understated complexity of Jay-Z, these lyrics seem almost embarrassingly rudimentary. But even here, with rap at its most basic, subtle poetics are in practice. Rap’s revolution in poetic rhythm has already begun.

  The poetic revolution in “Rapper’s Delight” is rooted, oddly enough, in the old poetic tradition of the ballad. Ballad meter, also called common measure, dates from at least as early as the thirteenth century, when the oldest extant ballad, Judas, was recorded in manuscript form. Ballad form fits the structure of song, lending itself to memorization and musical performance. With some variation, it has emerged through the centuries more or less intact in the form of four-line stanzas or quatrains consisting alternately of four and three stresses apiece, rhyming abcb (and occasionally abab). The rhythm achieved by the ballad stanza is immediately recognizable even when left unidentified. It is one of the basic rhythms of our culture.

  Now WHAT you HEAR is NOT a TEST

  I’m RAPpin’ TO the BEAT.

  And ME, the GROOVE, AND my FRIENDS

  are gonna TRY to MOVE your FEET.

  Wonder Mike need not have set out to deliver his rhyme in ballad stanzas, he need only to have come of age in a culture where, regardless of race, class, or circumstance, he would be exposed to the rhythms and rhymes of this elemental form. Whether through an advertising jingle or a gospel hymn, a television theme or a classic literary verse, the ballad form asserts itself upon the consciousness of all around it, regardless of race, class, or any other distinction.

  Wonder Mike’s likely unwitting use of ballad stanzas underscores two essential facts about rap poetics. Rap was created by black Americans. Rap is a Western poetic form. These are not contradictory assertions. “Blacks alone didn’t invent poetics any more than they invented the American language,” Ralph Ellison once argued when asked about the “black aesthetic.” “And the necessary mixture of cultural influences that goes into creating an individual poetic style defies the neat over-simplifications of racist ideologies.” The revolutionary nature of rap, in these early days all the way to the present, lies in the constant defiance of racist assumptions about the cultural fluency of black artists. The caricature of the artistically and intellectually impoverished street thug so often put forward by critics of so-called gangsta rap fails to account for the linguistic virtuosity and cultural literacy required to rap effectively to a beat.

  It is no mere coincidence, then, that rap lyrics respond so well to the classical tools of poetic analysis. The opening lines of “Rapper’s Delight” approximate the meter of the iambic foot, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. The first two lines of the verse follow strict iambic meter, and the third line seems to be doing the same until something happens in the middle—two stressed syllables in a row (“groove and”). Further complicating matters, the next line begins with three unstressed syllables in a row (“are gonna”) before returning to a regular iambic meter. These irregularities do not signal a flaw in the rhyme, nor do they suggest an error in our method of analysis. Rather, they prove the point that rap’s rhythm is not governed by strict metrics alone but by the beat of the drums and the individual creativity of the lyricist.

  If we now go back and listen to the track, we’ll notice a couple important things. First, Wonder Mike is rapping securely in the pocket of the beat. Hand claps punctuate the twos and the fours, lending extra emphasis to the words he stresses; for instance, “hear” falls on the two and “test” falls on the four. Second, his flow actually gives the doubled-up stresses in the third line room to breath by including a slight pause between “groove” and “and” that the written words on the page do not suggest. Similarly, he lessens the effect of the three unstressed syllables by furthe
r truncating his pronunciation of “gonna.” The resulting rhythm is unmistakably related to iambic meter, yet loose enough to sound unforced and natural.

  Almost two centuries before “Rapper’s Delight,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner employed the ballad form for many of the same reasons. He chose the form for its musicality, and also for its efficacy as a storytelling medium. The poem’s opening lines, like the opening lines of “Rapper’s Delight,” set the rhythm as well as the story.

  It is an Ancient Mariner,

  And he stoppeth one of three.

  By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

  Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

  Beyond the similarity of form, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Rapper’s Delight” share a common purpose in storytelling. The ballad stanza harkens back to literary poetry’s oral tradition when rhythm and rhyme served as mnemonic devices enabling the poet or speaker to recall long narrative passages. Perhaps the best-known example of the ballad stanza in pop culture is the theme from Gilligan’s Island; for one of the least likely mash-ups in history try singing the tune using the Sugar Hill Gang or Coleridge’s words. What the Sugar Hill Gang, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and whoever wrote the “Gilligan’s Island” theme understood—either explicitly or intuitively—was that the ballad form creates pleasing rhythms that approximate natural speech patterns in English, helping to tell a story.

  “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.