by Adam Bradley
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:
In early hip-hop a lot of the beats were made by a producer with his idea of what a beat is, not an MC’s idea. So musically it might sound good, but it doesn’t inspire that feeling in an MC, that spark that makes him want to grab a mike and rip it. I felt that, when you’re producing hip-hop, you want the vocals to be the instrument. Get out of the way.
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:
Well, hello. Howdy do? How are you? That’s good.
Who me? I’m still hot, I still got, you got me?
I’m here, I’m there, ’cause I’m raw, ’cause I’m rare.
I can spit on anything, got plenty game, authentic.
My pen’s sick, forensic, defends it, he wins it
Again and a, again and a, again and a, again and a
In the above lines and throughout the verse, Cee-Lo revises the pattern he establishes by both emphasizing the discrete rhythmic units through repetition and distinguishing them by juxtaposing phrases and single words that share the same number of syllables in polysyllabic rhymes—“authentic” and “my pen’s sick,” for example. While most of the rhythm units are two and three syllables long, he includes a pair of four syllable phrases (“on anything” and “got plenty game”) and then concludes with a four-syllable phrase repeated four times. The overall effect of his flow is to emphasize the speed of the track, making the beat seem as if it is faster than it actually is.
Compare Cee-Lo’s flow with Ludacris’s opening lines from the next verse, keeping in mind that the tempo of the beat remains exactly the same:
. . . Who the only little nigga
that you know with bout fifty flows, do about fifty shows
in a week but creep on the track with my tippy toes
Shhh! Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to work.
Ah forget it, I’m going berserk.
’Cause I stack my change, and I’m back to claim
my reign on top, so pack your things.
I’ve racked your brain like crack cocaine.
My fame won’t stop or I’ll jack your chain.
In contrast to Cee-Lo’s opening, Ludacris begins halfway through a measure, spilling directly into the next (as rendered above by the ellipses and the enjambment of the first and second lines). Where Cee-Lo chops up ordinary speech patterns in unusual syllabic units, Ludacris runs his syllables together by emphasizing—and accelerating—normal speech patterns. The producer underscores Ludacris’s distinct rhythmic approach by dropping out the musical loops to leave only voice, drums, and bass line. The combined effect is that the tempo, which Cee-Lo’s stop-start flow had rendered so fast, now seems to have slowed to a saunter. What has changed is not the tempo of the beat, however, only the rhythm of the rapper’s flow. By the fifth line, Ludacris begins employing stronger accents (“I’m going ber-zerk”). His flow even begins to resemble Cee-Lo’s cadence. The rhythm is now ordered not by natural speech stresses but by creative pairings of syllables. Look at these lines again with the stressed syllables marked:
’Cause I STACK my change, and I’m BACK to claim
my reign on top, so PACK your things.
I’ve WRACKED your brain like CRACK cocaine.
My fame won’t stop or I’ll JACK your chain.
Ludacris patterns this section of his verse on an economy of stressed syllables, no more than three and usually two per line. In addition to the naturally accented syllables (“reign” and “top,” for instance), Ludacris uses overaccented syllables—all rhyming the same sound (“ack”). All of these fall in relation to the beat so as to create a rhythmic balance alongside the snare’s accentuation of the one and three. What results is a playful flow that emphasizes the back-and-forth momentum of the track even as it creates its own rhythmic logic through its patterns of emphasis. Within a span of only a handful of lines, Ludacris shows us at least two of his “fifty flows,” and demonstrates the possibilities each beat opens up for an imaginative MC.
Whenever they perform rappers make a series of complex poetic decisions—not the least of which involves rhythm. “Crafting a good flow is like doing a puzzle,” Stic.man explains. “In a rap lyric the syllables, pauses, pronunciation, wit, energy of our performance and tempo, all determine the parameters of what is a ‘good’ flow or not.” Both Cee-Lo and Ludacris demonstrate “good” flows, as different as they may be from one another. The point is, while a beat may set the boundaries of a rap’s rhythm, rappers still have tremendous freedom to find a place for themselves in the groove. Once there, they are far from finished; they must then attend to the linguistic purpose of hip-hop poetry: the rhyme itself.
TWO Rhyme
RHYME IS THE music MCs make with their mouths. When T. J. Swan sings the title line on Biz Markie’s “Make the Music with Your Mouth, Biz,” he’s not just telling Biz to beatbox, he’s invit
ing him to rock the mic with rhymes. While some MCs are also known for singing with melody and harmony—Mos Def and Lauryn Hill come to mind—most rappers don’t sing at all. What they do instead is rhyme in a cadence. Rhyming words gives rap its song, underscoring the small but startling music of language itself.
Everyone knows rhyme when they hear it, but few stop to examine it. Rhyme is the concordance of sound. It works by establishing a habit of expectation in listeners’ minds, conditioning them to identify patterns of sound, to connect words the mind instinctively recognizes as related yet distinct. All rhyme relies on the innate human impulse to recognize patterns and to anticipate what will follow. A skillfully rendered rhyme strikes a balance between expectation and novelty.
It might be useful to think of rap rhyme on a sliding scale of listener expectation, with one end representing unwavering rhyme regularity and the other no rhyme at all. Either extreme leads to collapse, but between them is a wide range of possibilities that satisfy the listener’s desire for rhyme. Free-verse rap, rap that does not rhyme at all, is rare, if not nonexistent. At the same time, rap that rhymes incessantly and perfectly soon grows tiresome.
The most common rap rhymes are end rhymes, those rhymes that fall on the last beat of the musical measure, signaling the end of the poetic line. Two lines in succession with end rhymes comprise a couplet, the most common rhyme scheme in old-school rap. In addition to defining the line, rhyme serves a secondary purpose of organizing rhythm by dividing sound into recognizable units. “Along with word choice and sound patterns, the sound effects of rhyme and repetition help create the rhythm of a poem,” notes Frances Mayes. “Recurrence of a sound is itself a music. Like the chorus in a song, a refrain or rhyming pattern, once set up, rewards our anticipation.”
Rhyme is the reason we can begin to hear a rhythm just by reading these lines from 50 Cent’s 2007 hit “I Get Money”: “Get a tan? I’m already black. Rich? I’m already that / Gangsta, get a gat, hit a head in a hat / Call that a riddle rap. . . .” The first line establishes a pattern of stressed syllables in successive phrases (“already black, already that”) that he carries over into the next two lines (“get a gat, hit a head, in a hat, riddle rap”). Three of these four phrases end in rhymes, one a perfect rhyme (“gat” and “hat”) and the third a slant rhyme (“rap”). The overall effect of the performance rewards our anticipation by balancing expectation and surprise in its sounds.
Rhyming renders familiar words unexpected and fresh. Whether falling at the end of lines or cropping up somewhere in the middle, rhymes result in heightened, artificial, almost ceremonial remixes of everyday speech. Rap’s rhymes rely heavily on the oral tradition, inscribing patterns that may appear quixotic on the page but build unmistakable sonic structures when performed. For instance, chain rhymes—extended runs of the same rhyme sound over a series of lines, often with both end and internal rhymes—have become increasingly popular among MCs in recent years. As rap has evolved, the range of rhyme patterns has expanded to include a host of strategies that fulfill the listener’s expectation for rhyme even as they explore new expressive possibilities. Without melody, with rhythm alone, rap organizes words into forms that are strange yet familiar to the ear.
Rap’s reliance on rhyme distinguishes it from almost every other form of contemporary music and from most contemporary literary poetry. Many other genres of popular lyric can take rhyme or leave it. And in recent years, literary poetry has seemingly neglected rhyme or, if not neglected it, subsumed it more fully into its form, eschewing discernable patterns of end rhymes for subtler arrangements of internal ones.
Rap celebrates rhyme like nothing else, hearkening back to a time when literary poetry still unabashedly embraced the simple pleasure and musicality of verse. Rap rhymes so much and with such variety that it is now the largest and richest contemporary archive of rhymed words. It has done more than any other art form in recent history to expand rhyme’s formal range and expressive possibilities.
Rhyme consists of the repetition of the last stressed vowel sound and all the sounds following that vowel—such as in the words “demonstrate” and “exonerate.” Rhyme is the echo of sound from one word to another, an echo that simultaneously announces similarity and difference. To put it another way, rhyming words begin different but end the same. This balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar is the very spirit of rhyme. As Alfred Corn explains, “Where there is no similarity, there is no rhyme. Where the similarity is too great, boredom sets in. Skillful rhyming involves finding a balance between identity and difference.”
In its most basic sense, rhyme is a sonic balance between identity (or replication) and difference that relies upon the ear’s capacity to draw connections between two distinct but related sounds. When identity is absolute, MCs are “rhyming” the same word—a practice that is generally frowned upon in rap circles, but has nonetheless been employed to good effect by certain artists. On the other hand, when the difference between words is too great, no rhyme registers at all. Broadly understood, rhyme also includes a host of other linguistic strategies that rely upon the echo of sound across words. Alliteration, once called head rhyme, is older even than rhyme itself. It consists of the repetition of initial consonants, as in “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” Similarly, assonance is the rhyming of vowel sounds alone (“How now, brown cow?”), and consonance is the duplication of consonant sounds within words, rather than necessarily at the beginning of them.
The simplest rhymes are monosyllabic, like “cat” and “bat.” Disyllabic rhymes achieve a different effect, like “jelly” and “belly.” Multisyllabic rhymes may be found between two words, like “vacation” and “relation”; between two equal phrases, like “stayed with us” and “played with us”; or in some combination of phrases (called a broken rhyme), like “basketball” and “took a fall.” Poets may rhyme different parts of speech or the same, words with close semantic relations and those at a remove from one another. Rhymes can be perfect, or they can be imperfect (also called slant or near), like “port” and “chart” or “justice” and “hostess.” Rhymes can also fall at different points and in different relations to one another along the line, from end rhymes to internal rhymes to a host of specific rhyme patterns.
Most of us were first exposed to rhyme as children through nursery rhymes or childhood songs that emphasize patterns of sound. Rhyme appeals to adults for many of the same reasons it appeals to kids, most notably because it is a source of pleasure tied to a purpose. We don’t even need to be consciously aware of rhyme’s purpose for it to work on us, but stopping to contemplate rhyme’s reason brings many rewards.
Rhyme is no mere adornment in rap. It isn’t simply a mnemonic device or a singsongy trifle. It is rap’s most obvious way of remaking language, of refashioning not simply sound, but meaning as well. Rhyme works on the brain as well as the ear. A new rhyme forges a mental pathway between distinct but sonically related words and carries with it both linguistic and cognitive meaning. It invites the listener to tease out the semantic threads embedded within the sonic fabric of the words. What emerges is a simple but seismic truth: MCs don’t just rhyme sounds, they rhyme ideas.
In a classic verse from 1989’s “Fight the Power,” Public Enemy’s Chuck D spits something like a working definition of rhyme’s reason: “As the rhythm’s designed to bounce / What counts is that the rhyme’s / Designed to fill your mind.” He is, of course, speaking of “rhyme” here both as the practice of patterning sounds and as another name for the verse as a whole. In both meanings, rap’s rhymes have filled our minds with many things, not all of them useful. But it is more than a matter of content—be it women and cars or prisons with bars—it is also a question of poetic form. Rhyme exercises its sound in the construction of meaning. Saying something in rhyme doesn’t simply sound different from saying the same thing without rhyme, it fundamentally transforms the meaning of the expression. As the critic Alfred Corn explains, “The coincidence
of sound in a pair of rhymes is a recommendation to the reader to consider the rhyming words in tandem, to see what meaning emerges from their juxtaposition. The meaning will emerge as one of affinity and opposition.” Within this tension between similarity and difference, rap’s expressive potential is born.
Rhyme accounts for a large part of what makes great rap great. We value rap largely according to its ingenuity: the MC’s skill in saying something unexpected within a given set of formal limitations. “MCing, to me,” Common once said by way of describing Eminem’s lyrical excellence, “is when you hear a dude say something and you tell your homie, ‘You heard what he said?’” Such virtuosity is as much about constraint as it is about creativity. Creativity without constraint is unmoored, a wandering thing that never quite settles into shape. As the poet Steve Kowit observes, “The search for a rhyme-word forces the mind out of its familiar track and onto more adventurous and unfamiliar paths. . . . End-rhyme, then, is not only a delight to the ear of the reader when used well, but a spur to the imagination of the writer.”
For MCs, rhyme, along with the beat, provides the necessary formal constraints on their potentially unfettered poetic freedom. If you can say anything in any way you choose, chances are you might not say anything at all, or at least anything worth remembering. It’s possible, in other words, for an artist to be too free. “The imagination wants its limits and delights in its limits,” Nobel laureate Derek Walcott explains. “It finds its freedom in the definition of those limits.” What can you do in the space between the line’s opening and its ending in rhymed relation to the line before it, or after it, or both? How do you say what you want to say but in a way that maintains that necessary association of sound that your listeners expect? Exceptional MCs, like skilled literary poets, balance sound with sense in their rhymes.
