by Adam Bradley
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.
Can I hit it in the morning
without giving you half of my dough
and even worse if I was broke would you want me?
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:
Can I hit it in the MORning
without giving you half of my dough
and even worse if I was broke would you WANT me?
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.
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.
Back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark, (9 syllables)
this is how we used to make the party start. (11)
We used to . . . mix in with Bacardi Dark (10)
and when it . . . kicks in you can hardly talk (10)
and by the . . . sixth gin you gon’ probably crawl (10)
and you’ll be . . . sick then and you’ll probably barf (10)
and my pre . . . diction is you gon’ probably fall (11)
either somewhere in the lobby or the hallway wall (13)
and every . . . thing’s spinnin’ you’re beginning to think
women (14)
are swimmin’ in pink linen again in the sink (12)
then in a couple of minutes that bottle of Guinness is
finished . . . (17)
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 po
et 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.
