by Adam Bradley
“That’s the part of hip-hop that’s missing,” says Pusha T, one-half of the Clipse, bemoaning what he sees as the diminishing importance of wordplay in today’s hip hop. For a group known for their gritty tales of the drug game, wordplay might seem the furthest thing from their minds. In fact, the opposite is the case. Wordplay matters to them because it enables them to create art that transcends their subject matter, the so-called cocaine rap for which they’re known. “It’s one thing to say ‘I sell bricks, I sell bricks,’” he continues, “But when you saying ‘Trunk like Aspen / Looking like a million muthafuckin’ crushed aspirins,’ dog, we getting back to the colors. A lot of dudes is working with the eight crayons in the box. They do not have the sixty-four box, yo. They don’t got ‘Burnt Sienna.’ They got red, yellow, blue. . . . ” Wordplay gives color and texture to rap’s poetry, allowing MCs to craft subtle shades of meaning and feeling instead of paint-by-numbers lines. Wordplay creates possibility out of limitation.
Wordplay may be the most revolutionary way that rap refashions the language. Rap’s wordplay creates surprising figures of speech and thought that bind words and ideas in unexpected ways. Few would ever listen to someone talking over a beat, and yet millions listen to MCs rapping over one. Understanding this difference has important implications for rap, both as a poetic form and as a cultural phenomenon. Wordplay is the common term to describe the array of techniques MCs have developed over the years to do things with words. These include everything from common figures like simile and metaphor to more obscure figures like chiasmus and antanaclasis. Whether transferring, exchanging, or transforming meaning from one word to another, the figures and forms of rap wordplay comprise the most varied element of rap’s poetics.
Rap’s wordplay comes in dozens of varieties, each with an explicit function in language and thought. Together they serve an essential purpose for the rap poet, empowering them to fashion new connections between familiar words and ideas. “All poetry implies the destruction of the relationship between things that seems obvious to us in favor of particular relationships imposed by the poet,” writes André Malraux. MCs do precisely this by rendering the familiar unfamiliar, and thus defining attitudes and emotions in ways that more direct speech cannot. Whether they explain or obscure, pattern or disrupt, the best MCs play with language to create unexpected moments of insight and feeling. Common put it best when he rhymed, “My imagery talks, metaphors and similes stalk.”
Rap defines itself as something other, something more, than conventional speech. Like other art forms, it tailors the world to fit its own conception. As a result, rap relies upon adornment, with figurative language being hip hop’s lyrical haute couture. As Kool G Rap once rhymed, using an extended metaphor, “Lyrics are fabrics, beat is the lining / My passion for rhyming is fashion designing.” Consider the simile the most accessible and versatile way that MCs can dress up their words.
A simile is a direct comparison between two distinctly different things, usually using like or as to connect them. In their simplest form, similes offer direct comparisons for the purpose of revealing the unexpected similarity of disparate things. William Shakespeare’s sonnet 60 begins with this simile: “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore / so do our minutes hasten to their end.” In these two lines he asks us to reimagine time as something other than a clock on the wall; through simile, time instead becomes the continuous sequence of waves that break against the shore. Andre 3000 boasting that he’s “cooler than a polar bear’s toenails” turns the simile to yet another purpose, using a completely unexpected comparison to define his state of being. Both show the power of figurative language to remake the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Similes, though they are often confused with metaphors, are the most common figure of speech in rap. By contrast, a metaphor is when one thing is said to be another without the use of like or as. Shakespeare composed a famous one when he wrote these lines in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players.” By making positive assertions of identity (the world is a stage, not like a stage), metaphors ask us to make a direct connection between two distinct things. Both metaphor and simile work on the same principle: They transfer meaning from one thing to another. The only difference is the means of that transfer—the vehicle, if you will. Think of the metaphor as the express train on the subway: It gets you between two points fast using the most direct route. The simile can be thought of as the bus: It takes its sweet time getting you from one place to another, and leaves you free to look out the window to see exactly how you got where you’re going.
The difference between simile and metaphor is not merely technical. After all, there has to be some reason why similes so outnumber metaphors in rap. My hypothesis is this: Metaphor is a more implicit form, thus leaving itself open to misunderstanding and potentially detracting from its subject—which is usually the “I” of the MC. When Nas boasts that “I’m like a whole lotta loot, I’m like new money,” the simile underscores his greatness. If he’d rhymed instead, “I’m a whole lot of loot, I’m new money,” our first response would likely be, “What does that mean?” The last thing an MC wants to do with wordplay is cause confusion. Similes shine the spotlight on their subject more directly than do metaphors. They announce their artifice from the beginning, leaving little room for confusion. On a more practical note, similes are more immediately comprehensible to listeners, a virtue in rap’s rapid-fire lyricism.
Not all similes, however, are created equal. Rap offers a variety unrivaled in contemporary literature. The two rap similes I quote on the next page demonstrate the range of potential difference. The first is a classic old-school example from Rakim. The second comes from Souls of Mischief’s Tajai, recorded during rap’s golden age in the early 1990s. Of course, this comparison is no reflection on the relative skill of these two MCs—this isn’t a battle—but it will, I hope, demonstrate just how rap similes are made and how they can differ from one another. First, here are a few lines from Rakim’s classic “I Ain’t No Joke” (the simile is in bold, and I’ve provided a few extra lines for context):
I GOT A QUESTION, IT’S SERIOUS AS CANCER:
Who can keep the average rap dancer
hyper as a heart attack, nobody smiling,
’cause you’re expressing the rhyme that I’m styling.
Every simile contains one thing that is being compared to another: The item being compared, in this case Rakim’s “question,” is known as the tenor. The item to which the tenor is compared (here it’s “cancer”) is known as the vehicle because it delivers meaning to the tenor—it’s the “bus,” to use my previous analogy. Normally, similes are comparisons between the same parts of speech (nouns to nouns, verbs to verbs). In this example, we have two nouns, and the vehicle is loaded with the adjective “serious.” Here, then, is how Rakim’s simile works in our minds: Cancer is a serious ailment—it’s a leading cause of death in the United States—so Rakim’s question must be serious too, because it borrows its gravity from the disease. Notably, Rakim chooses not to use the more commonplace—and cliché—“serious as a heart attack”; by using a new and unfamiliar comparison, he makes his simile that much more powerful.
Sometimes rap similes compare not what something is like but how something is done, as with Tajai’s simile from “Disseshowedo”:
In battles I rip it and it gets hectic after
I FLIP THE SCRIPT LIKE A DYSLEXIC ACTOR
You’re no factor . . .
The tenor is “I” and the vehicle is “dyslexic actor.” The vehicle is loaded with a verb—really a verbal phrase—“flip the script.” This is a slightly more ambitious simile than Rakim’s because it functions with a double meaning: Flipping the script is a popular phrase that can mean “changing up the subject matter,” and one need not explain how an actor with dyslexia might jumble up his lines. The meaning communicated here is as much about the cleverness of the wordplay as it is about the force of the sim
ile itself. The simile’s expressive function stops when it has communicated its meaning; in this instance, when it communicates that Tajai flips the script in the sense that a dyslexic actor would. But the real richness of the wordplay is mostly conveyed in the unexpected wit of Tajai’s punning comparison.
Conventionally understood, the most effective similes are those that ask us to conceive connections between words that seem far removed from one another. The simile at once reveals hidden similarities even as it affirms obvious differences; both elements are essential for the simile to work.
Most rap similes follow the model of Tajai, where not only is one thing “like” another, but the thing to which something is compared also has a double meaning. This is commonly achieved by combining similes with puns. Puns thrive in the ambiguity of meaning that similes create. They play on the different senses of the same word and the similar senses of different ones. Puns often serve as coded forms of communication, speaking to a select group of initiates with a shared set of cultural knowledge and assumptions. At their most obscure, they can act as inside jokes intended for a relative few; these are invisible to the average reader or listener. At their broadest, they are immediately discernable to nearly everyone, in which case they demand little of the audience and offer little in return. But there is a middle ground between the obscure and the obvious in which the pun has the capacity to do something to language and demand something of the audience. In poetry where a premium is put upon verbal economy, any technique that has the capacity of expanding the meaning of a single word is valuable. When artfully rendered, puns do just that: opening a range of associations that the poet/MC can exploit for the purposes of original expression.
In the literary tradition, puns have often been derided as an inferior species of expression, good for little more than a cheap laugh. And yet the world’s greatest literature employs them for a host of purposes, from the comic to the tragic and even to the sacred. The Bible itself is not above the pun. Matthew 16:18 reads, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” This is a pun in the Greek source upon “Peter” (Petros) and “rock” (petra), homonyms for stone. To the initiate, puns have a sophisticated range of uses, well beyond the limits of humor.
Puns have an important place in the Western poetic heritage as well. Shakespeare used puns throughout his plays and sonnets, often for the purpose of blunt sexual humor. The very title of his great comedy Much Ado About Nothing turns a pun on its last word, which was slang in Elizabethan times for vagina. One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the poet John Donne, also explored the expressive capacity of puns. A Hymn to God the Father puns on Donne’s last name, as well as the last name of his wife, Ann More: “When Thou has done, Thou hast not done, / For I have more.” Similarly, in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning Donne crafts an extended pun that plays upon sex for a second level of meaning. These are meanings above and beyond the functional meanings of the lines as read on the surface.
Puns elicit an equal range of responses in rap. When well executed, they announce the MC’s lyrical virtuosity and cognitive ingenuity. When combined with similes, puns become a powerful expressive tool for the rap poet. Conventional similes, as discussed earlier, rely upon the transfer of meaning from one thing to another. If I say, “I’m cold as ice,” the essence of ice’s coldness is transferred to me. When rappers add puns to their similes, the possible number of transferable meanings increases exponentially. So instead of saying, “I’m cold as ice,” Lil Wayne says something like this: “And I’m so cold like Keisha’s family.” Read as a conventional simile, the statement is nonsensical. Read as simile-pun hybrid, it comes alive. The simile awakens our comprehension of the pun, and visa versa. This figure relies upon the fact that Lil Wayne pronounces “cold” like “coal,” or rather, like “Cole,” the surname of the R&B singer Keisha Cole. For the simile to function, we must first catch the pun on the family name, then reflect the strength of the comparison (Cole equals Keisha’s family) back upon Lil Wayne himself (his style is just as cold as Keisha’s family is Cole). This is a poetic freedom rappers didn’t inherit; they created it for themselves out of the need for expressive range and the desire for verbal ingenuity.
Punning similes are now the norm in rap, displaying a versatility of tone and intention from the comic to the serious. When Juelz Santana drops this line on “I Am Crack,” he’s not cracking a joke, he’s flexing his mic skills: “I’m more amazing than Grace is when I say shit / You should say ‘Amen’ after my name, kid.” Kanye West, however, delivers this punning simile from “The Good Life” with a wink and a smile: “The good life, so keep it comin’ with the bottles / ’Til she feel booze like she bombed at Apollo.” This bit of wordplay relies upon the pun on “booze/boos,” the kind you drink and the kind that lets you know when it’s time to leave the stage. The simile only makes sense after we’ve made the mental adjustment to the double meaning, and it is complete only after we reinterpret the first part of the simile in light of the second. Those crowds at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre are notorious for booing poor performers off stage (they even booed a young Luther Vandross), so we know through the simile that Kanye’s female companion is in for quite a hangover.
Most rappers use similes to convey meaning from one thing to another. This is a simple enough thing to do. Rap’s recognized masters of wordplay distinguish themselves by crafting inventive comparisons and surprising turns of phrase. Some are comedians, using similes to deliver punch lines. Others are more self-consciously dramatic, underscoring meaning with similes that force us to consider two unlikely subjects in the same terms. In other words, while all similes follow the same basic structure, the meanings they create can range from the witty to the whimsical, the sorrowful to the sublime.
One MC who has earned a reputation for his highly crafted similes and metaphors is Immortal Technique. His rhymes are densely layered with figurative language, particularly punning similes. They serve both as weapons and as wake-up calls to jar his listeners to attention. One of the best examples of his wordplay in action is the opening eight bars of “Industrial Revolution.” His lyrics offer a series of examples that display a multiplicity of effective similes in action.
The bling-bling era was cute but it’s about to be done,
I leave you full of clips like the moon blockin’ the sun.
My metaphors are dirty like herpes but harder to catch.
Like an escape tunnel in prison, I started from scratch
And now these parasites want a piece of my ASCAP,
trying to control perspective like an acid flashback;
but here’s a quotable for every single record exec:
Get your fuckin’ hands out my pocket, nigga, like Malcolm X.
These lines include five similes, each structured in a different way from the next. The first, “I leave you full of clips like the moon blockin’ the sun,” relies on oral expression—when he raps the line “full of clips” it also sounds like “full eclipse.” It shows the range of possibility open to an MC that is closed for the most part to a literary poet. Another complex simile is “like an escape tunnel in prison, I started from scratch.” In this case, “I” is the tenor and “escape tunnel in prison” is the vehicle. The vehicle transfers the phrase “started from scratch,” which has a dual meaning—both literal and figurative. We hear it as both “starting with nothing but the raw materials” and as “starting by scratching away at a wall placed squarely in your way.” By literalizing this common—even cliché—figure of speech, Immortal Technique creates an unusually potent simile.
Finally, the last line, “Get your fuckin’ hands out my pocket, nigga, like Malcolm X,” demonstrates some of the ambiguities in interpreting similes. The overall meaning of what he’s saying couldn’t be any clearer: record executives need to stop taking money away from him for his music. However, the simile isn’t nearly as clear. For one, it doesn’t respond well to the way we’ve been breaking the previous similes down. What i
s the tenor? “Your hands”? And the vehicle? Certainly it’s “Malcolm X,” but does he mean the man or the Spike Lee film? (The line that follows—“but this ain’t a movie”—favors the latter.) Whatever the vehicle, the meaning it conveys is “Get your hands out my pocket,” the phrase that one of Malcolm X’s assassins yelled to cause a distraction when Malcolm was gunned down on February 21, 1965, while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom. However, this only makes sense with the movie in a general way; that line, or its near equivalent, is in the film. Suffice it to say that this simile, though it doesn’t quite work in the strict formal sense, nonetheless does the job, and does it well on the level of feeling. It is effective because it is emphatic, surprising, and historically grounded. Rap doesn’t always play by the book.
Eminem is another master of the simile; he seems to revel in the ways that he can break and reshape the laws of the language. Unfortunately for those with sensitive ears, his rhymes must be considered required reading (not to mention listening) for anyone seriously interested in rap wordplay. One of the best examples of Eminem’s creative expansion of simile comes from the opening lines of “The Real Slim Shady” where Eminem unleashes a single simile that takes up four full lines:
Y’all act like you’ve never seen a white person before,
jaws all on the floor like Pam, like Tommy just burst in the door
and started whoopin’ her ass worse than before
