Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  In rap, one of the masters of these techniques of sonic identity is Eminem. Eminem’s style favors both assonance and alliteration; he has elevated them to an art. In the following lines, a guest verse on “Renegade,” a track Eminem produced for Jay-Z’s The Blueprint (2001), Eminem demonstrates a virtuoso’s control of sound and sense.

  Now who’s the king of these rude ludicrous lucrative lyrics

  Who could inherit the title, put the youth in hysterics

  Using his music to steer it, sharing his views and his merits

  But there’s a huge interference—they’re saying you shouldn’t

  hear it

  Rhyme, at least full rhyme, is almost absent from this verse, replaced instead by the concordance of sound. Assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds, is the governing structure here; he packs no fewer than thirty-seven instances of it into the full verse’s twenty lines (the u sound predominates). When he does employ rhyme, it is most often slant. Perhaps the most striking instance of this is the chain of interlocking slant rhymes, both internal and end rhymes, that spans the lines quoted above (“lyrics,” “inherit,” “hysterics,” “steer it,” “merits,” “interference,” “hear it”). Those who doubt the conscious artistry exercised by rap’s greatest MCs need look no further than these lines for evidence of its vitality.

  When rhyme and all of its allied forms are at work in a single performance, the effect is often unforgettable. In 1995, shortly after leaving prison, Tupac Shakur released what would become perhaps his best-known song, “California Love.” It reached number one on the Billboard charts, and Rolling Stone included it as Tupac’s sole entry in its 2004 list of the five hundred greatest songs of all time. Produced by Dr. Dre, who also spits the first verse, the song is driven by an infectious piano riff and a catchy hook performed by Roger Troutman of Zapp and Roger. All of this would likely have made it a hit; Tupac made it a classic. His opening lines are among the most unmistakable in all of rap:

  Out on BAIL fresh outta JAIL, California DREAMIN’ Soon as I stepped on the scene, I’m hearin’ hoochies SCREAMIN’

  In just two lines, Tupac combines rhyme (both end and internal), assonance, and alliteration to create a feeling of tension and energy. The first line includes three rhyme elements: a monosyllabic internal rhyme (“bail” and “jail”) and the first part of a multisyllabic rhyme (“dreamin’,” which he rhymes in the next line with “screamin’”). Along with this, he includes alliteration with the s and h sounds. Almost every word is somehow sonically connected with some other word in the lines. Hip-hop fans often talk about an MC sounding “hungry,” the necessity with which they’re driven to express themselves. These may be the hungriest two lines in rap history.

  Rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and consonance combined often produce tongue-twisting linguistics. Big Punisher’s “Twinz” includes this couplet, as inspired in its way as Tupac’s lines. “Dead in the middle of little Italy / Little did we know that we riddled a middle man who didn’t know diddly.” Like a jazz sax run or a scat riff, Pun’s lyrical delivery balances sound with sense, using the full array of rhyme techniques to underscore the rhythm of his flow. Keying in on a single sound, he runs a staggering series of rhyme variations (“middle,” “little,” “riddled,” “middle,” “diddly”), which he further builds upon with consonance (d) and assonance (i) and alliteration (d and l). This is what happens when a poet is in complete control of his or her rhymes.

  Sometimes, however, rhyme can take control, leading the poet to unintended and unwanted expressions. This is what John Milton feared when he spoke of rhyme as “a constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have exprest them.” Not surprisingly, he includes not a single end rhyme in Paradise Lost. A generation before Milton, the English poet Thomas Campion warned in 1602 that the “popularitie of Rime creates as many Poets as a hot summer flies.” Rhyme, he argued, could actually impede good poetry.

  All rhyme, after all, is a kind of coercion: The poet forces the audience to connect disparate words and reconcile them, both in sound and meaning. Of course, as mentioned before, this accounts for a great deal of the pleasure to be had in rhyme: that process of recognition and differentiation and the balance achieved between them. But what happens when poets are overwhelmed by rhyme’s coercive force—when, either for the purposes of sound or sense, poets find themselves with few rhyming options for a given word? Maybe the MC uses a word, like “pizza” or “olive,” that doesn’t have a perfect rhyme to fit it. Or maybe the problem is that the perfect rhyme comes too easily, and too obviously.

  There was a time when Lexus was the car of choice in hip hop; it seemed like every MC was rhyming “Lexus” with “Texas”—for no other reason than it is one of the few words that rhyme with “Lexus.” Whether Lexus became less popular among rappers or the rhyme became too predictable (or both), you rarely hear this pairing nowadays. But it demonstrates an important tension in rhyme: the problem of overdetermination.

  Overdetermined rhymes are those that the MC or poet chooses not out of conscious design but out of desperate necessity or lackadaisical passivity. Overdetermined rhymes are in effect forced upon the poet by the limits of language itself rather than emerging out of the imaginative use of language as a tool. They signal the loss of poetic control.

  For an MC and literary poet alike, it is almost always a bad thing if the audience can complete your rhyme. This suggests that your rhyme lacks freshness, which is essential to powerful communication. Artists in any genre that employs rhyme face a similar challenge. One lyricist who has given a tremendous amount of thought to the process of rhyme composition is Bob Dylan. Dylan alongside rappers may be an unlikely combination, but it is fitting. Like the best MCs, Dylan revels in the ingenuity of his rhymes. He offers a striking insight into the mind of a rhyming lyricist, in the midst of the “unconscious frame of mind” necessary for the artistic process:

  Staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.

  For Dylan and for rap’s rhyme animals, the process of lyrical composition is fundamentally a process of rhyming. “It gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before,” Dylan told an interviewer. “But then again, people have taken rhyming now, it doesn’t have to be exact anymore. Nobody’s going to care if you rhyme ‘represent’ with ‘ferment,’ you know. Nobody’s gonna care.” Dylan’s remarks point the way towards rap’s rhyme revolution, its expansion of rhyme’s formal possibilities in the face of overdetermination and the loss of meaning.

  MCs have found many ways around rhyme’s restrictions. While perfect (or full) rhymes still play an important role in rap’s poetics, they increasingly exist in the context of a host of other rhyme strategies. We’ve already looked at slant, multisyllabic, and broken rhymes, but another category is intentionally forced rhymes, what I’ll term transformative rhymes. Transformative rhymes start with words that only partially rhyme or don’t rhyme at all and alter the pronunciation to fashion perfect rhymes. For an example outside of rap, think of these famous lyrics from Arlo Guthrie’s “Coming into Los Angeles,” once heard at Woodstock: “Coming into Los Angeles / bringing in a couple of keys / Don’t touch my bags if you please / Mister Customs Man.” Guthrie fashions a transformative rhyme when he playfully alters the emphasis and pronunciation of “Los Angeleez” to forge perfect rhymes with the words that follow, “keys” and “please.”

  Rap often takes these transformations of pronunciation to the extreme. On “So Many Tears” Tupac delivers the following lines: “My life is in denial, and when I die / Baptized in eternal fire.” They look straightforward enough on the page, but in the performance he makes “fire�
�� rhyme with “denial” by essentially pronouncing it “file.” The transformation achieves a pleasing echo of sound across the lines without sacrificing comprehension. Similarly, the Notorious B.I.G. artfully demonstrates this technique by refashioning language through rhyme on “Juicy”:

  We used to fuss when the landlord DISSED US

  No heat, wonder why CHRISTMAS MISSED US.

  BIRTHDAYS was the WORST DAYS

  Now we sip champagne when we THIRST-AY

  In the course of four lines, he offers two sets of multisyllabic rhymes; first, “dissed us,” “Christmas,” and “missed us,” and next “birthdays,” “worst days,” and “thirst-ay.” It is with this last rhyme that he demonstrates the creative capacity to use rhyme’s restrictions in his poetic favor, adding flavor to the verse by forcing “thirsty” just this side of its breaking point to rhyme with the two words before it.

  Kanye West has made such forced rhymes an important part of his poetic style. In ways that are playful and sometimes mischievous, he uses rhyme to reshape words themselves—taking two words that do not naturally rhyme and bending one of them, sometimes nearly to the breaking point, until it fits the other. For instance, on “Gold Digger,” one of his biggest commercial hits to date, he rhymes the following names: “Serena,” “Trina,” “Jennifer.” It’s obvious which one of these doesn’t belong, but Kanye makes “Jennifer” rhyme with the others by transforming it into “Gina-fa.” The rhyme is forced to the point of not being forced at all. Quite the opposite, it appears by design, just another way to do something with language. Here’s another example from Kanye’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” (2007):

  Don’t ever fix your lips like collagen

  To say something when you’re gon’ end up apolagin’

  “Collagen” is a word with absolutely no perfect rhymes. Rather than avoid the word entirely, Kanye instead uses the word’s intractability to rhyme as a tool to reshape another word. We immediately understand what he means when he says “apolagin’,” so he has not sacrificed meaning. Or take this rhyme from “Barry Bonds”: “I don’t need writers I might bounce ideas.” He somehow makes “writers” rhyme with “ideas” by transforming the former into “wry-tears.” What he has done in each of these cases is distorted sound for the sake of style, the poetic equivalent of Jimi Hendrix using his amp’s feedback in his solo. Certainly many other artists have forced words to rhyme—often awkwardly, in a desperate attempt to make it fit—but few have forced them with such purpose and such measured understanding of the desired effect.

  Where MCs rhyme their words has become just as important to rap’s poetics as how they rhyme them. Rap is often presumed to rely heavily upon rhyming couplets. Most rap parodies are nothing more than a series of rigid couplets. But real MCs are rarely bounded by such limitations. While end rhymes, and particularly couplets, remain the foundation of rap’s rhyme scheme, they are far from the only rhyme scheme in rap.

  Over the years rap has undergone an internal rhyme revolution. Internal rhymes broaden rap’s expressive range, enabling MCs to satisfy their listeners’ lust for rhyme even as they claim greater freedom of motion to express complex ideas beyond the bounds of end rhyme. Unlike literary poets, who also wished to liberate themselves from the restrictions of end rhyme, MCs have done so while still satisfying their audience’s desire for lines rich in rhyme. The explanation for this lies in rap’s orality. Because rap is meant to be heard rather than read, it matters less where exactly the rhymes fall in the line. Two rhymes in the same line, while not the same as two lines with end rhymes, still have a pleasing effect on the ear. Notice how Posdnuos from De La Soul uses this technique on “The Bizness”:

  While others EXPLORE to make it HARDCORE

  I make it HARD FOR wack MCs to even step inSIDE THE DOOR

  ’Cause these kids is RHYMING, SOME-TIMING

  And when we get to racing on the mic, they line up to see

  The lyrical KILLING, with stained egos on the CEILING

  He begins with four rhymes in the first two lines, follows that with an internal rhyme in the third, no rhyme in the fourth, returning to an internal rhyme in the fifth. You would not have been likely to find that unrhymed line in rap’s early years. Andre 3000 is a master of using internal rhymes to create opportunities for unrhymed lines, often eschewing end rhymes for a complex pattern of internal ones. Consider these lines from his guest verse on the R&B singer Lloyd’s 2007 song “I Want You (Remix)”:

  I said, “What time you get off?” She said,

  “When you get me off.” I kinda laughed but it turned into

  a cough

  ’Cause I swallowed down the wrong pipe.

  Whatever that mean, you know old people say it so it

  sounds right.

  These four lines include no end rhymes, and yet they more than satisfy our desire for rhyme. He achieves this by including internal rhyme, a phonic echo that fuses lines one and two (“off,” “off,” “cough”).

  Heading in the direction opposite to that of MCs like Andre 3000, who often eschew end rhyme entirely, a host of MCs have embraced a rhyme style that extends the repetition of a particular rhyme sound even beyond the couplet. Embracing the restriction of rhyme repetition, they seek to accentuate rhyme’s pure effect. Many southern rappers, from Gorilla Zoe to Plies, follow this model. It would be a mistake to dismiss their styles as pedestrian. Instead, it might be useful to interpret them as aspiring to a different aesthetic from those MCs with more complicated rhyme styles. The fact that Jeezy, for instance, ends every line of “I Luv It” with a straightforward rhyme doesn’t get in the way of his rhyme style, it defines it.

  We might think of these extended end-rhyme riffs as links that form a rhyme chain. Chain rhyme is a technique whereby a poet carries a single rhyme over a succession of lines. The effect is often incantatory, lulling the listener into an almost trancelike state. Rhyme takes on a kind of rhythmic function here, underscoring specific patterns of sound to achieve its desired effect. While chain rhyming is now common in rap, rap was certainly not the first genre to use it. We can trace chain rhyming at least as far back as the fifteenth-century English poet John Skelton, who composed these lines:

  Tell you I chyll,

  If that ye wyll

  A whyle be styll,

  Of a comely gyll

  That dwelt on a hyll:

  But she is not gryll,

  For she is somewhat sage

  And well worne in age;

  For her visage

  It would aswage

  A mannes courage.

  Skelton’s lines consist of two and sometimes three stressed syllables connected by rhyme “leashes”—extended runs of the same end rhyme. The style is known as Skeltonics. In the above example, Skelton rhymes six short lines with “yll” and another five with “age,” creating bursts of sound, a quickened pace, and an aggressive assertion of pattern. It comes as little surprise, then, that Skelton often used such a style when delivering, as he does in the above example, comic insults. Like a fifteenth-century battle rapper, Skelton uses rhyme chains to underscore his energy, aggression, and—to use a very twenty-first-century word for it—swagger.

  Fast forward from Skelton to the present day and we can witness numerous hip-hop artists extending the spirit, if not the explicit form, of his rhyme style. While the nature of rap beats won’t allow for Skeltonics’ strict adherence to two- and three-syllable lines, it leaves ample room for chain rhyming.

  Among the increasing number of rappers who use the chain-rhyming style is Fabolous. Since his debut in 2001, Fab has been known for delivering two distinct and even contradictory themes in his rhymes: crafty punch-line disses and plaintive love laments. Regardless of the theme, however, he employs the same rhyme-rich style. On his 2001 hit “Trade It All” he spits these lines in chain rhyme:

  You’re the one, baby girl, I’ve never been so SURE

  Your skin’s so PURE, the type men go FOR

  Th
e type I drive the Benz slow FOR

  The type I be beepin’ the horn, rollin’ down the windows FOR

  Using identity (the repetition of the same end word in successive lines, like “for” and “for”), and rhyming internally as well as at the end of his lines, Fabolous delivers a verse dominated by the ebb and flow of his repetition. Such repetition is the hallmark of his style, as we can see when comparing the above lines to his more recent hit, 2007’s “Baby Don’t Go”:

  Through the time I been ALONE, time I spent on PHONES

  Know you ain’t lettin them climb up in my THRONE

  Now, baby, that lime with that PATRÓN

  Have me talkin’ crazy, it’s time to come on HOME

  Now, I talk with someone ABOVE

  It’s okay to lose your PRIDE over someone you LOVE

  Don’t lose someone you LOVE though over your PRIDE

  Stick wit’cha entree and get over your SIDE

  Like “Trade It All,” “Baby Don’t Go” is dominated by Fab’s run of rhymes. But his style seems to show some development in the direction of variety and versatility. Instead of rhyming on a single sound, he weaves together three distinct rhymes, interlacing the last two (“pride” and “love”) through chiasmus (a rhetorical figure in which two clauses are related to each other through reversal of structure or terms). The rhythmic effect is just as strong as it was in the earlier example, but he has added to it a more varied range of poetic effects, of thought as well as sound. Rap poetics as a whole has undergone a similar rhyme expansion and built upon its foundation to explore novel innovations in sound.