by Adam Bradley
Run-of-the-mill rappers often find themselves overwhelmed by rhyme’s dual challenges of sound and sense. Instead, they relinquish control of their rhymes to one or the other. The results can be disastrous. A rapper insistent on expressing a particular meaning in particular terms may find it almost impossible to rhyme at all. Much more common, however, are those rappers so insistent on how their rhymes sound that they lose control over what they are actually saying. They spend so much time making sure that one line rhymes with the next that they fail to develop metaphors or tell stories or make observations. Often they’ll resort to rhymes so soiled with use that they almost cease to register as rhymes at all, so bereft are they of that essential quality of surprise. The result is not simply rhymes that sound the same, but rhymes that say the same things.
Some rap critics, and a fair number of rap fans, have bemoaned the limited thematic range in mainstream rap in recent years. The culprit they most commonly blame is big business—the record labels, radio conglomerates, and other commercial forces that treat rap as product rather than poetry. Undoubtedly, rap’s growing commodification plays a significant role in limiting the variety of lyrics we hear, and yet another answer lies in rap’s rhymes themselves. When MCs settle into familiar pairs of rhyme words, they also tend to settle into familiar themes and attitudes. Someone who sets out to sound like 50 Cent will likely use many of the same rhyme words that 50 employs and, as a consequence, end up rapping about the same topics.
It’s easy to spot rap’s true lyrical innovators because not only will they likely be rapping about different things from everyone else, they’ll be using different words to do it. Eminem, for instance, had to conceive a bunch of new rhyming words to describe the experiences of a working-class white kid from a trailer park in Detroit who rises to superstardom. Who else would think to rhyme “public housing systems” with “victim of Munchausen syndrome”? Similarly, as Andre 3000 has grown throughout his career—from southern playa to ATLien to whatever his present incarnation happens to be—the words he rhymes have grown along with him. He’s gone from “pimpin’ hos and slammin’ Cadillac do’s” to rhyming “Whole Foods” with “those fools.” And who could imagine that an MC would ever associate a Hebrew language with origins in tenth-century Germany, a green leafy vegetable, and an imaginary sport from a children’s book, as Asher Roth does when he rhymes “Yiddish,” “spinach,” and “Quidditch” on his 2008 mix tape The Greenhouse Effect? The point is that rhyme is not simply about the relationship of two or more words, two or more sounds—it is also about rhythm and image, storytelling, and, above all, meaning. With new rhymes come possibilities for new expressions, new ideas, and new styles that point the direction toward the future of rap’s poetry.
In the hands of unskilled poets and MCs alike, rhyme can be an impediment, an awkward thing that leads to unnatural sounds and unintended meanings. But rhyme well used makes for powerful expression; it at once taps into the most primal pleasure centers of the human brain, those of sound patterning, and maintains an elevated, ceremonial distance from regular speech.
Rap rhymes are often characterized as simplistic, but nothing could be further from the truth. Over the years, rap has undergone profound shifts in the range and variety of rhymes that MCs create. Rhyme comes in numerous varieties, each with a distinct function in sound and sense. Perfect rhyme, also known as full rhyme or true rhyme, is rhyme where words contain the same vowel sounds (usually accented) followed by identical consonant sounds (as in “all” and “ball”). Slant rhyme (or imperfect rhyme) is rhyme that usually involves shared final-consonant sounds, but different vowel sounds (as in “all” and “bowl”). Rap uses both. Kurupt offered author James G. Spady this fascinating insider’s look into the craft of rhyming, worth quoting at length:
Perfection of the rhymes. Like Perfection. Selection.
Interjection. Election. Dedication. Creation. Domination. Devastation. World domination. Totally, with no Hesitation, you know what I mean? These are perfect rhymes. . . . Really. Silly. Philly, you know.
These are perfected rhymes. Where you could take a word [sic] like we will and you connect that with a full word like rebuild, you know what I mean? You got two words in we will. One word in rebuild. But perfect rhyme connection is the key to writing when you write your rhyme. And meaning too.
When you’re saying something that makes sense. Them are the keys to writing a rhyme. Perfect rhyme connection. And style.
While perfect rhymes satisfy our rhyming mind, slant rhymes tease us a little, denying us the satisfaction of completion. The result is often a creative tension. Literary verse from the nineteenth century until today has witnessed the rise of slant rhyme from an occasional variation of form to a form in itself. Emily Dickinson is the poet most often associated with slant rhyme, but she is not alone. Poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Wilfred Owen have made slant rhyme an accepted part of modern poetic practice. This speaks to the growing influence of conversational style in literary poetry, something it shares with rap.
Slant rhymes are common in rap, just as they are in other poetic forms found in the oral tradition. “Some artists use line after line of slant rhyme, but because of their flow and the way they pronounce the words, you don’t even hear the words as being slant rhymes,” observe Emcee Escher and Alex Rappaport, the authors of The Rapper’s Handbook. Slant rhymes are in obvious display in these lines from the prodigious Michigan MC One Be Lo:
I rock their minds like the sling shot of David do
Liver than pay-per-view
You couch potatoes don’t believe me? Call the cable crew
Every time I bus’ kids think they on their way to school
This grown man ain’t got no time to play with you
Theresa didn’t raise a fool . . .
One Be Lo augments the perfect rhymes in his lines (“do,” “crew,” “you,” and “school,” “fool”) with slant rhymes (“view” and “fool”), and all are equally satisfying. Oral expression is generally more forgiving of sonic difference, offering a wider definition of what constitutes rhyme. Rap celebrates both perfect and imperfect rhymes, often using them together to achieve subtle effects of sound and sense.
Some purists, however, are dismissive of rap’s practice of employing partial or slant rhymes. Slant rhymes, they suggest, testify to a lack of discipline and originality on the part of the artist. Such criticisms, however, ignore the fact that oral poetry has always been more liberal than written verse when it comes to what constitutes rhyme. Rap, like oral poetry through the ages, goes by the ear rather than by the book.
Rap rhyme took a formal leap with the popularizing of multisyllabic rhymes. While rap’s pioneers occasionally included a multi in their arsenal, no MC has made it a signature element of style quite like Big Daddy Kane. For Kane, the multisyllabic rhyme is a versatile tool, a way of doing things with words. He often employs it to connect a single multisyllabic word with a balanced multisyllabic phrase. He then strings together lines, sometimes in couplets, sometimes in fierce runs of the same rhyme. Compared to conventional monosyllabic rhymes, multis not only provide a broader range of possible complimentary words, but also achieve a sonic effect of speed and virtuosity.
Multis are also sometimes associated with more-complex and thus potentially less-commercial lyricism. The fear is that if the rhyme calls too much attention to itself, it will leave too little attention to the beat, or the hook, or the other elements of a song that tend to ensure mass appeal. This seems to be precisely what Lupe Fiasco is addressing on “Dumb It Down” from his 2007 album, The Cool. While the hook sardonically warns “You goin’ over niggas’ heads Lu (Dumb it down) / They tellin’ me that they don’t feel you (Dumb it down) / We ain’t graduate from school, nigga (Dumb it down) / Them big words ain’t cool, nigga (Dumb it down),” Lupe’s verse defiantly demonstrates the very lyrical complexity the hook warns against:
I’m FEARLESS, now HEAR THIS, I’m EARLESS
(less) and I’m PEERLESS (less), which means I’m EYELESS which means I’m TEARLESS, which means MY IRIS resides where my EARS IS, which means I’m blinded
Lupe relies on multis to render the kind of abstract rhymes that flout the warnings of the hook. In four lines he delivers eight multis—some perfect, some slant; some individual words, some two-word phrases.
For range and quality of multisyllabic rhymes, one contemporary artist comes to mind: Pharoahe Monch. On the standout track “Simon Says” from his solo debut, Pharoahe spits this series of multis:
You all up in the Range and shit INEBRIATED
Phased from your original plan, you DEVIATED
I ALLEVIATED the pain, with a long-term GOAL
Took my underground loot, without the GOLD
He begins by rhyming three words likely never before rhymed in the history of rap, “inebriated,” “deviated,” and “alleviated,” then caps it off with a slant rhyme, “goal” and “gold,” for good measure. He does all of this without sacrificing meaning or getting forced into unintended expressions.
Some of the most formally sophisticated rhymes often escape notice, in large part because they work so well. After all, the reason MCs conceive elaborate rhymes in the first place is not to show how clever they are, but to put words together in such a way that they do something to the listener. One of the most reliable ways, therefore, to uncover poetically innovative lyrics is to pay close attention to those lines that stick in your head, that just sound right. Like any rap fan, I have many such lines stored in my mental catalog. They’ll come to me at all times during the day—while I’m at the gym or out to dinner, sometimes even while I’m lecturing in class. As students of rap’s poetry, we do well to listen to this intuitive part of our critical intelligence; it is often a truer guide than our more intellectualized thought process. That intuitive sense brought me to these lines from Pharoahe Monch, part of another virtuosic verse from his first album:
The LAST BATTER to HIT, BLAST, SHATTERed your HIP
Smash any SPLITter or FASTball, that’ll be IT
Condensed within these sonically packed two lines, Pharoahe Monch constructs a rich texture of sound variations. The verse as a whole is dominated by this same energy of insistent repetition—from perfect rhymes to assonance and consonance—delivering on the promise he makes in the song’s hook of presenting “the next millennium rap.” In the above lines, he employs a rhyme variation called apocopated rhyme, where a one-syllable word rhymes with the stressed portion of a multisyllabic word (like “dance” and “romancing”). In this case, he matches the first line’s monosyllabic internal rhymes, “last” and “blast,” with an apocopated rhyme, “fastball,” on the next line. He does the same thing in reverse with another rhyme sound as well, using “hit” to form an apocopated rhyme with “splitter” and a perfect rhyme with “it.” This creates a formal structure of rhyme that binds the two lines together. Add to that the slant rhyme of “hip,” the assonance on the long a sound (“last,” “batter,” “blast,” “shattered,” “smash,” “fast,” “that”) and the consonance on the t sound, and you have a couplet where almost every word is doing some kind of rhyme work.
Not surprisingly, the rhymes in these lines also shape the rhythm, with a pattern of stress carrying over from phrase to phrase (“batter to hit” with “shattered your hip” and “that’ll be it”). Notice how the lines retain structure even when the words themselves are removed:
Duh Da DA-DA DUH DA, Da DA-DA DUH DA
Da Duh-duh da da duh da-da, DA-DA DUH DA
In these lines rhyme not only functions as adornment, but as a guide for Pharoahe’s flow. Such syllabic patterning, using rhyme to fashion a rhythm, has become increasingly common in rap over the years, with artists as different from one another as Cam’ron and Eminem taking full advantage of its effects.
Pharoahe Monch’s verse is the work of a poetic technician, to be sure, but what makes it also the work of a virtuoso is that the lyrics are completely unburdened by the potentially ponderous weight of this intricate structure. On the page and, even more, in the performance, the lines gain an effortless, almost offhanded eloquence that liberates the listener to enjoy the line in the sound alone. Looking behind the rhymes takes none of that pleasure away. What it does instead is add a measure of respect to the craft of fitting rhymes to beats.
MCs inevitably run up against the boundaries of expressive possibility through rhyming two words together. In response, they often employ rhyme techniques that cross the limits of word pairs to fashion rhyme groupings made up of several words that relate to one another in rhyme. The Notorious B.I.G. does this on “Who Shot Ya”: “Saw me in the drop, three and a quarter / Slaughter, electrical tape around your daughter.” Blending end rhyme and internal rhyme, Biggie creates an aural sensation that emphasizes the key words in the lines.
By contrast, broken rhyme, or split rhyme, involves rhyming a single multisyllabic word with several monosyllabic words. In the Western poetic tradition, such a technique is most often employed for comic effect, as it is in these famous lines from Canto XXII of Lord Byron’s Don Juan: “But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, / Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?” As the punch line for the canto, Byron’s playful rhyme underscores the humor of the lines. In contrast to the more conventional perfect rhymes in the lines that precede it (“wed,” “bred,” and “head”), the broken rhyme delights the ear.
But where broken rhymes were nearly always played for comic purposes in literary verse, rap has made them a commonplace element of its poetics. Rap has given broken rhymes a new and larger life. Like multis, broken rhymes have becomes more pervasive and versatile as rap poetics has developed. So while we might hear a broken rhyme like this from Melle Mel on “White Lines,” “Ticket to ride a white line highway / Tell all your friends that they can go my way,” we get a more inventive use of the technique when the Notorious B.I.G. boasts on “Hypnotize,” “escargot, my car go one-sixty, swiftly.” The difference is that Melle Mel’s example is intuitive, even obvious, while Biggie’s is unexpected and fresh. Not surprisingly Big Daddy Kane, the master of the multi, was also fond of broken rhymes. On “Wrath of Kane,” he unleashes a swarm:
’Cause I never let ’em ON TOP OF ME
I play ’em out like a game of MONOPOLY
Let us beat around the ball like an ASTRO
Then send ’em to jail for tryin to PASS GO
Shakin’ ’em up, breakin’ ’em up, takin’ no stuff,
But it still ain’t loud enough . . .
In both Biggie’s and Kane’s rhymes, the intended effect is far from comic. Certainly there’s an unmistakable playfulness in Biggie’s enumeration of his riches—the fancy snails contrasting with the fast and fancy cars—but the broken rhyme is less about comic relief than it is about evincing a self-aware rhyme virtuosity. The same holds for Kane. In a verse where he is extolling his lyrical excellence, the broken rhymes manifest that very excellence with audible evidence.
A host of effects accompany rhyme, all relying upon the echo of sound across poetic lines. Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sound. It is older even than rhyme itself. In the following lines from Piers Plowman, written in the fourteenth century, alliteration works to underscore the music of language itself:
A feir feld ful of folk fold I ther bi-twene,
Of alle maner of men, the men and the riche . . .
Repetition has reached almost to the point of parody here; indeed, in a contemporary piece of writing, it would be difficult to read these lines as anything else. Such sonic effects can come in subtler forms as well. When alliteration occurs at different places within words rather than simply at the beginning, we call it consonance. These lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost show alliteration (the h sound) and consonance (the d and the g sounds) working together to achieve a common effect:
Heaven opened wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
The sonic repetitions in Milton’s lines are at once unobtrusive yet inescapable; they underscore a unity of thought and expression. Consonance such as this is quite often employed in rap, whether to underscore rhyme or to offer a kind of rhyme substitute. Lauryn Hill’s lines from the Fugees’ “Zealots” show consonance at work alongside rhyme:
Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile
Whether Jew or Gentile, I rank top percentile
Many styles, more powerful than gamma rays
My grammar pays like Carlos Santana plays
Consonance with one sound (“eck”) shifts to multisyllabic rhymes with another sound (“projectile,” “Gentile,” “percentile”) and then another (“gamma rays,” “grammar pays,” “Santana plays”). The result is as intricate as it is effortless.
A related linguistic technique is assonance, which relies upon the replication of unaccented vowel sounds. Its purpose in oral expression is to delight the ear, but also to center the listener’s attention on a given set of lines. Often the exercise of assonance is imperceptible, though its subconscious effect is almost always pronounced, helping to generate a subtle mood or tone. Consider the effect assonance has on these lines from John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn (1820): “Thou still unravished bride of quietness, / Thou foster child of silence and slow time.” Its long i sound extenuates the sound of the line beyond its actual bounds, adding an unmistakable languorous quality.
