Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  The way rappers rhyme has changed dramatically over time. Part of why old-school rap sounds old to our ears when compared to more recent rhymes is that it tends to employ simple end rhymes. The difference between the sound of old-school and new-school rap is largely attributable to the delivery and the position of the rhymes. Old-school rappers tended to employ end-stopped lines with rhymes falling at the end of lines, often in couplets. Their styles generally sound more effusive, dramatic, and artificial. Today you are more likely to hear conversational flows and natural rhymes, both internal and end rhymes, delivered in something closer to the rapper’s natural voice. Rap rhymes in recent years have increased in variety and frequency. Layered patterns of internal rhymes and rhyme chains are now as important as end-rhymed lines.

  To say that rap has developed, however, is not always to say it has improved. No rapper has ever improved upon the best rhymes of Rakim, or KRS-One, or Melle Mel. Distinguishing the ways rap’s poetics have expanded in the years since these great MCs first recorded is not to discredit them, but rather to celebrate them anew for fashioning excellence with fewer poetic tools from which to choose.

  Rap’s rhyme revolution has not come in degrees, but in fits and starts—individual artists introducing new ways of rhyming, often going against the established practices of the era. Rap’s development has also been responsive, new rhymes born to fit the increasingly complex and melodic rhythms in its instrumental production. New beats demand new rhymes.

  The earliest rhymes in rap were basic, improvised, almost coincidental, recalls Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers, one of hip hop’s originators. “When I started out as a DJ, MC-in’ as an art hadn’t been formulated yet,” he says. “The microphone was just used for makin’ announcements, like when the next party was gonna be, or people’s moms would come to the party lookin’ for them.” The MC was born out of necessity. Caz’s description of how he came to rhyme reads something like a rap creation story:

  So different DJs started embellishing what they were sayin’. Instead of just sayin’, “We’ll be at the P.A.L. next week, October this and that,” they’d say, “You know next week we gonna be at the P.A.L. where we rock well, and we want to see your face in the place,” little things like that. . . . I would make an announcement this way, and somebody would hear me, and then they’d go to their party and they add a little twist to it. Then somebody would hear that and they add a little bit to it. I’d hear it again and take it a little step further ’til it turned from lines to sentences to paragraphs to verses to rhymes.

  Somewhere in that space between lines and rhymes, rap was born. Caz himself would prove one of the pivotal figures in rap’s development. It was Caz’s book of rhymes that ended up in the hands of a pizzeria employee by the name of Henry Jackson, aka Big Bank Hank, and it would be Caz’s rhymes that would soon appear in Hank’s verse from rap’s first mainstream hit, “Rapper’s Delight.” Caz would never receive compensation.

  But his influence, and that of rap’s other MC pioneers—Coke La Rock, Clark Kent, Cowboy, Melle Mel, and others—would shape the structure of rap’s poetics. Rap’s first several years were dominated by the DJ; even the first rhymes were delivered from behind the turntables. In the late 1970s, however, the MC began to emerge as a coequal partner in hip-hop music. Around the same time, rap’s center of gravity began its gradual move from clubs, basements, and block parties to the recording studio.

  Rhyme, and the music it makes, has always had a cherished place in African-American expressive culture. From the ring shouts of the slaves to the singsong rhymes of children playing double dutch, from the verbal duels of the dozens to the ribald toasts told in barbershops and on street corners, black voices have found in rhyme a potent means of recreation and release. Muhammad Ali reveled in rhyme; a recent book, simply called Ali Rap, even called him “the first heavyweight champion of rap.” But never before in black oral culture had an art form so relied upon rhyme to define itself. Rap takes rhyme farther than it had ever gone before.

  The first rap song to hit the charts was “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” by the funk-disco collective the Fatback Band; it was released in late 1979, just before the Sugar Hill Gang officially inaugurated hip hop’s commercial arrival with “Rapper’s Delight.” Listening to these songs now, in the era of lyrical wordsmiths like Andre 3000, Jay-Z, and Lil Wayne, it’s a wonder that all of this music can go by the same name, so different is the oldest of the old-school from the new-school lyrics of today. The rhymes in “King Tim III” have a kind of innocent simplicity to them, a directness and predictability that sounds quaint to an ear attuned to slant rhymes and layered patterns of rhyming words. To understand the revolutionary nature of “King Tim III” and “Rapper’s Delight” one must imagine a time when, save for a select group of young New Yorkers, no one had ever heard a voice doing what these voices were doing to the beat.

  Just clap your hands and stomp your feet

  ’Cause you’re listenin’ to the sound of the sure-shot beat

  K-I-N-G the T-I-M

  King Tim the third and I am him

  Just me, Fatback, and the groove

  Are doing it all just for you

  Strong as an ox and tall as a tree

  I can rock it so viciously

  The rhymes are simple, monosyllabic, and mostly perfect, rhymed in playful couplets that settle comfortably into the pocket of the beat. The tone is lighthearted, befitting a party spirit. These are good-times rhymes, uncomplicated by image or wordplay. And yet they embody a rhyme revolution; no other musical genre would so foreground the effects of language itself, its sound as well as its meaning. No other music would demand to be understood as both speech and song, poetry and music all at once.

  This first generation of MCs made up the rules as it went along. By necessity, they drew from every source available to inform the way they put their words together. The rhymes nearest at hand were often those for advertising jingles or play-ground chants, even nursery rhymes. The language they fashioned was at once innovative and traditional.

  That lines like King Tim’s—so contrived, so simplistic to us today—were not only accepted but celebrated shows just how new the form actually was. By the 1970s, mainstream literary poets had mostly cut themselves off from rhyme, especially end rhyme. The few sources where one could still hear it were often aimed at children. Rap stepped in to fill a cultural void, to provide the pleasure of rhyme in terms that adults could appreciate.

  One MC above all others is responsible for consolidating and codifying the dominant rhyme style of the old school: Melle Mel. As mentioned before, Melle Mel emerged as perhaps the most talented MC of his era. As part of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Four (later the Furious Five), he pioneered, along with his brother Kid Creole, Cowboy, and Scorpio, the modern style of the MC. Beginning with “Super-rappin’” in 1979 and continuing through a range of hip-hop classics like “The Message,” “White Lines,” “Beat Street,” and more, Melle Mel stands as the dominant poetic voice of rap’s early years.

  Melle Mel’s rhyme style began rather humbly. Kid Creole explains it like this: “When we first started rhyming, Flash would have guys on the microphone who’d just get on there and say his name, haphazard, no real talent being displayed. And my brother . . . I don’t know, somehow or another he got in his head that he was going to try to make up his own rhymes, and that’s what he did.” The style of rhyming Melle Mel developed relied upon both regularity and occasional surprise. His verses establish patterns of end and internal rhymes, fusing both sonically and thematically his lines into verses. This method is in evidence in the opening bars from “White Lines (Don’t Do It)”:

  Ticket to ride, white-line HIGHWAY

  Tell all your friends, they can go MY WAY

  Pay your TOLL, sell your SOUL

  Pound for pound costs more than GOLD

  The longer you STAY the more you PAY

  My white lines go a long WAY

 
Either up your nose or through your VEIN

  With nothing to GAIN except killin’ your BRAIN

  Melle Mel begins the verse with a compound multisyllabic broken rhyme (“highway” and “my way”), then follows it up with three sets of couplets, each containing three rhymes on the same sound—two end and one internal. The result is a verse rich in rhyme and textured in sound.

  In the years since Melle Mel and rap’s other rhyme innovators, MCs have refined a range of rhyme techniques, extending both the rap tradition and the poetic tradition as a whole. Rap started a revolution of sense as well as sound, expanding the capacity of language to express the human experience in all its diversity.

  THREE Word play

  YEARS AGO A friend of mine asked me to defend rap. We were driving back to campus after a basketball game, and I was playing a new disc for her, Ready to Die, from an emerging Brooklyn rapper named the Notorious B.I.G. It was just beginning to dawn on me, as it was on many hip-hop heads, that we were witnessing lyrical greatness with Biggie. By late 1994 he was a star, by 1995 he was an icon, and by his untimely death in 1997 he was a legend. Some still consider him the most skilled lyricist of all time. Almost everyone ranks him among the most influential MCs in hip-hop history. In that moment, however, I was dealing with something more tangible: the capacity of words—specific words—to do harm.

  “Why do you like this, Adam? I expect more from you,” my friend said, as we idled at a stoplight listening to the percussive assault of “Machine Gun Funk.” Her eyes demanded a response.

  For a moment I was silent. I knew she was talking about Biggie’s almost manic repetition of “nigga” and “bitch,” not to mention his offhanded use of garden-variety curse words—“shit,” “damn,” “muthafucka.” Biggie wasn’t helping my case very much, either, rhyming this profane but indelible simile just as I was about to speak: “That’s why I pack a nina, fuck a misdemeanor / beating muthafuckas like Ike beat Tina.” When I finally responded, I had a hard time even convincing myself.

  “It’s not what he’s saying, it’s how he’s saying it,” I said. “And, besides, they’re just words!”

  Just words. It is rap’s perennial problem. Most hip-hop fans find themselves at one time or another in the position of defending the indefensible, of making the case to excuse the coarse language and the misogynistic messages behind some of rap’s best-known lyrics. Such instances of offense present a particular problem for a book that advocates reading rap lyrics on the page as poetry. Things that might escape attention in performance become all the more explicit when viewed in black-and-white in an MC’s book of rhymes.

  So in some ways I find myself today in the same position I found myself in more than a decade ago while listening to Biggie. How do you explain without apologizing? How do you resist without rejecting? To understand hip hop as a cultural movement we must explore the roots and the reasons for its explicit nature. Rap often specifically intends to offend polite sensibilities. After all, it is an art form born on the street corner, speaking a language of the corner as well. It has evolved, to borrow hip-hop historian William Jelani Cobb’s phrase, from the “shunned expressions of disposable people.” In that way, it is no different from a host of earlier expressive traditions that came from the bottom of the social spectrum. “Each poet creates his own language from that which he finds around him,” Ralph Ellison explained to an interviewer in 1958, speaking about the distinctive language of black American poets. “Thus if these [vernacular] poets find the language of Shakespeare or Racine inadequate to reach their own peoples, then the other choice is to re-create their original language to the point where they may express their complex emotions.” Hip hop’s first generation did exactly this, forging a language responsive to the needs of its creators, reflecting their own complex emotions.

  Rap’s revolutionary spirit lies in the force of necessity behind so much of its expression. “When I was young,” recalls the pioneering female rapper MC Lyte, “I was like, how else can a young black girl of my age be heard all around the world? I gotta rap.” The rapper Common echoes Lyte’s assertion of rap’s necessity. “Hip hop has so much power,” he explains. “The government can’t stop it. The devil can’t stop it. It’s music, it’s art, it’s the voice of the people. And it’s being spoken all around the world and the world is appreciating it. And it is helping to change things. . . . It’s definitely uplifting the ghetto and giving the ghetto a chance for its voice to be heard.”

  Rap’s profanity at least in part responds to this unmet need. Harsh words are sometimes required to describe harsh realities. Again, Ellison is instructive. “The great body of Negro slang—that unorthodox language—exists precisely because Negroes need words which will communicate, which will designate the objects, processes, manners and subtleties of their urban experience with the least amount of distortion from the outside,” Ellison wrote. He was describing school-children in 1950s Harlem, but he might as well have been writing about rappers. The origins of rap as an artistic protest partly explain rap’s continuing profanity.

  Equally important is rap’s identity as an outlaw expression, a form that doesn’t mind using the words that people actually say, words that describe the sometimes unseemly reality of our modern life. “A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey,” James Baldwin wrote in an editorial for the New York Times entitled “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” published in 1979, just around the time of rap’s public emergence. Baldwin saw in black English in general what he might have seen in rap in particular, the workings of a vital new form of linguistic expression.

  Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan suggests Baldwin’s understanding of language’s birth in brutal necessity when offering this profound—and profane—reflection upon rap’s explicit, poetic language. “People may look at it like, ‘Some of them talk about violence,’ whatever—but first say the nigga’s a poet,” he says. “To flow—that shit is not easy. You can never get it no fresher, comin’ up out of the projects, twenty years old, and you start rhymin’, and that’s how you make your money—by speaking your lingo. Rap, to me, is slang poetry. It answers your questions: why young kids is doin’ bad, why they turn to drugs to get away from their misery. This is the shit we talk about—and how to escape it.” Any language with such salvific power must not be ignored.

  There is no defense for the sexism, homophobia, and violence found in certain rap lyrics. These elements remain a troubling reality of rap’s expression, and a part—one must unfortunately add—of a larger culture that sanctions such beliefs in ways both big and small.

  But rap at its best retains meaning that extends well beyond its sometimes offensive surface. It is a complex linguistic art where words are constantly in flux, changing meanings and intentions, texture and sound. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that the primary function of figurative language was to render the familiar unfamiliar. In other words, similes and metaphors have the capacity to reshape our vision of the world. More than any other contemporary form of linguistic expression, rap plays with words in ways that jar us from our settled sense of reality, opening up new ways of seeing and even feeling. This, too, makes it poetry.

  Our culture, however, usually treats rap as if it were transparent, as if its poetry were nothing more than the clear cellophane wrapper around its “literal” meaning. Both rap’s greatest advocates and its loudest detractors each tend to interpret rap as direct speech. For many of its fans, rap is the word from the street, or as Chuck D is said to have remarked, it is CNN for black people. For its critics, rap is a megaphone spewing hate speech, a purveyor of violence, sexism, and homophobia. These opposing extremes each contain a certain truth: rap has undoubtedly given voice to those who might not otherwise have been heard; at the same time, it has helped popularize the flagrant denigration of women and gays in the broader culture. These tensions remain unresolved in rap
culture.

  One might be tempted to ask, as CNN did in a 2007 special report: “Hip-Hop: Art or Poison?” But this is a false choice. To focus solely on rap’s perceived ends, whether beneficial or toxic, is to misunderstand the central role of its expressive means. Rap cannot be distilled into pure meaning. No matter how profound or offensive or funny rappers’ messages may be, their words are inextricably bound up in the way that MCs deliver them: through rhythm, rhyme, imagery, tone of voice. “Rather than being about experience, think of a poem as an experience—sometimes with memorable insights, sometimes not.” So explains the poet Frances Mayes in words that seem particularly relevant to rap. To define rap as poetry is not necessarily to defend it as always good for us. But a mature audience can understand rap in context and measure its value not simply in the quantity of its curse words, but in the variety and sophistication of its poetic forms.

  Like all poetry, rap is necessarily communication. It relies upon repetition and artful departures from that repetition, both in its percussive instrumentals and in its rhythm- and rhyme-rich lyrics. It fashions itself as a ritualized language, heightening sound, establishing patterns of expectation and innovation, and crafting images that engage the audience in an implicit but powerful process of communication. “It’s just a vehicle,” explains the West Coast rhymer Ras Kass, “At its purest form, that’s what hip hop is. It’s communication.”

  The way rap communicates is what makes it such a powerful poetic form. Rap does what the poet Edward Hirsch claims the lyric poem does: it “defamiliarizes words, it wrenches them from familiar or habitual contexts, it puts a spell on them.” It does all of this with rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay. As we have seen, rhythm establishes aural relations among words that one does not find in conventional speech and rhyme compels the MC to conceive connections between previously disconnected words and ideas. For all the controversy about rap’s use of profanity, a simple truth remains: Rap is finally less about those words whose meanings are obvious and more about those words whose meanings are not readily apparent.