by Adam Bradley
Of course, this kind of singular focus on a particular trope can sometimes go too far. One of Dipset’s youngest members, JR Writer, who calls himself the “Writer of Writers,” is considered by some to be one of New York’s up-and-coming lyricists. He is well known among rap fans for his numerous mix-tape appearances, especially his Writer’s Block series. Like the rest of Dipset, his rhyme style is characterized by his reliance on antanaclasis and other tropes of repetition. Rhymes like the following show him taking his wordplay to just this side of incomprehensibility: “I flip the flip for the flip / Call me a flip-flipper / Then flip-flop in my flip-flops / With strip-strippers.” It’s hard to imagine antanaclasis going any farther than that. Is this virtuosity or excess? As Prince once said while singing about something else entirely, there’s joy in repetition. However, repetition can be overdone, going from pleasing to grating on the ear. The challenge for MCs who craft patterns of repetition in their rhymes is to find a balance between pleasure and monotony.
Unlike some of the other rhetorical schemes in this chapter, alliteration and its cousin, assonance, rely upon oral expression to generate their full effect. Reading a succession of repeated consonants or vowels on the page is nothing like hearing them recited aloud. At least in this regard, then, rap shares something with nursery rhymes: It entertains us by satisfying our ears even before it reaches our mind. Run-DMC knew this when Run began a verse by recalling a famous nursery rhyme chant: “Now Peter Piper picked peppers but Run rock rhymes.” In this line alone, Run shows just how (through alliteration, in this case) rap reinvents patterned repetition for the hip-hop generation, claiming it as a valid technique for rap lyricism.
As a scheme for repetitive patterning, however, alliteration is only the most obvious technique. Assonance, a rhetorical scheme based upon the repetition of vowel sounds, is often upstaged on the page, even when it’s clear to the ear. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, it is intimately related to rhyme. But what if the repetition involved is not about sound but about structure?
Anaphora and epistrophe are distinct but related rhetorical schemes, both establishing patterns of repeated words. Anaphora is word repetition at the beginning of successive lines, while epistrophe is repetition at the end. If you’ve ever read Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey or the Bible, then you’ve seen these forms in action. Both of these schemes serve a particular purpose in oral expression. On a practical level, they facilitate memorization. On a stylistic one, they convey a sense of balance and order. When used in rap, they do both at once. Consider this example of anaphora from the underground Oakland, California, duo Zion I:
How many times have you watched the sun rise?
How many times have you looked deep into your lover’s eyes?
How many times have we spit phat rhymes?
How many times?
How many times?
The entire song is structured on the repetition of that opening phrase. A series of rhetorical questions illustrating the need for physical and spiritual awakening gains prophetic intensity with each repeated phrase.
Epistrophe is a trickier scheme for rap because rappers usually insist upon ending lines with different—though often rhyming—words. Of course, there are ways out of this constraint. One way is to combine epistrophe with the figurative trope antanaclasis (the use of the same word in different senses). MCs who do this usually get a pass because, though they have failed to rhyme, they have nonetheless done something poetically interesting with the verse.
Some MCs, however, have used epistrophe to great effect, creating incantatory and strongly rhythmic sounds. Ab Liva, for instance, delivers a verse on “Stay from Around Me” of the Clipse’s We Got the Remix mix-tape on which almost every line ends with “wit it”: “Yeah, I get bitter wit it / Make a wrong sign, hitter wit it / I get acquitted wit it / Waistline perfect gotta fit her wit it / I send your soul to the Lord when I fiddle wit it / Yeah, I riddle wit it.” And so on. The effect is quite powerful, creating meaning of its own in the repetition of the sound alone.
More controversial are those rappers who make seemingly random repetition an element of their style—often without the benefit of employing words with dual meanings. Repeating the same word without an identifiable pattern is called repititio—a kind of lyrical chaos theory for repetition schemes. What it lacks in balance it often makes up for in sound patterning. Juelz Santana, from the aforementioned Dipset, is well known for crafting his wordplay on this principle. These lines from “S.A.N.T.A.N.A.” offer an excellent illustration:
OKAY, I’m reloaded. OKAY, the heat’s loaded.
OKAY, now we rolling, OKAY. (Yeah.)
My .44 piece TALKING, sound oh-so-sweet TALKING
Do more, more street TALKING than Stone Cold Steve Austin.
And I bang it WELL, slang it WELL, shave it WELL.
Hell, you lookin’ at a preview of The Matrix 12.
Santana’s opening six bars contain three sets of repeated words. You may notice one rather surprising thing: with the exception of the half rhyme in the final two lines (“well” with “twelve”), none of these lines rhyme. Instead, he has substituted repetition as a way of giving the verse order. It satisfies the listener’s ear by generating some sense of sonic repetition, but without the actual presence of rhyme.
Finally, epanados works on the principle of repeating pairs of words in opposite order. When the witches who begin Shakespeare’s Macbeth utter the line “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” they are using epanados. In rap, it might look like the following verse from a 1980s DMC freestyle: “I’m DMC in the place to be / and the place to be is with DMC.” Of course, unlike repititio, which comes across as unrehearsed—even accidental—epanados can often seem overly practiced and forced. As rap continues to evolve in the direction of free forms rather than highly structured ones, it’s likely that epanados and other forms like it may go the way of Adidas with the fat laces.
Whether forcing us to think about familiar subjects from startling new perspectives, or nudging us to listen more attentively to the meanings of their intricate constructions, rappers use wordplay to jar us out of our assumptions. It means changing not only what we see, but how we see. There is more at stake in rap wordplay than a dope verse or a clever turn of phrase; rather, it just might redefine what we understand as real. Rap at its best insists upon changing the world, or at least changing how the world appears to us, by remaking it in rap’s own image. That is precisely why we keep coming back to it. It has the potential to startle us out of our imaginative lethargy to experience life again, as if for the first time. For those who don’t take the time or lack the ear to apprehend its lyrical substance, rap will undoubtedly seem like something else entirely—crass, repetitive, and unimaginative. But for those who care to look, rap rewards the effort with the beats and rhymes of new life.
Part Two
FOUR Style
LEGEND HOLDS THAT during a freestyle battle in the late 1980s an unsuspecting rap neophyte broke his own jaw trying to mimic the signature style of “the god MC,” Rakim. While it may be apocryphal, the legend testifies to an essential truth about rap: Style reigns supreme.
MCs often talk about style like it is a possession, a lyrical fingerprint distinguishing one MC from all others, even a gift bestowed upon them by a higher power. “God gave me style, God gave me grace / God put a smile on my face,” 50 Cent once rhymed. At the same time, rappers also talk about style as something to be switched up, changed up, flipped, and otherwise transformed in the name of lyrical ingenuity. That style can be both identity and diversity at the same time attests to the breadth of meaning the term carries in hip-hop circles. For MCs, style is what you do, but it is also what the people around you do, where and when you happen to live.
To put it another way, while style is a matter of the qualities of an individual artist, it is also the term we use to describe larger definitions: the sound shared by an entire crew, for instance, or the familiar forms of a region, a time peri
od, or a genre. Style has to do both with the artist’s conscious crafting of particular attributes into a sonic whole as well as with the audience’s reception—often their varying receptions—of those attributes in the music. Q-Tip once rhymed, explaining his popularity, that “ladies love the voice, brothers dig the lyrics.” He knew that his style was not just what he made of it, but what others made of it as well.
Style describes both what an artist puts into a work of art and what an audience gets out of it. It takes on different meanings when seen from within and from without the process of artistic creation. From within, style involves the way an artist produces a work of art, the sum of the choices that result in the formation of an artistic whole. From without, style involves the way an audience interprets the arrangement of language in a work of art. It defines the terms of individual artists’ styles, as well as the habits of larger stylistic groups of which that individual may belong.
The fact that styles are identifiable means that they are at least in part predictable. It is this predictability that allows us to talk meaningfully about “Jay-Z’s style” or the “hyphy sound” or the stylistic differences between Miami rap and Atlanta rap, Brooklyn style and Queens style. “We develop schemas for particular musical genres and styles;” writes the recording engineer turned neuroscientist, Daniel J. Levitin, “style is just another word for ‘repetition.’” What he means by this for our purposes is that styles—whether they belong to individuals or to groups, regions, or genres—take shape only when at least some element of them becomes predictable, when we can conceive schemas or patterns of expectation. Even if it is the predictability of the unpredictable, like in the rhymes of the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard, style defines itself through continuity. When we say that some new artist is trying to sound like Lil Wayne, or when we say that Lil Wayne doesn’t sound the same way he used to sound, we are working from a stylistic knowledge base that develops even without our conscious awareness of it.
This same principle of style as repetition holds true for rap as a whole. What must it have been like, then, to have been the first person to hear rap music? What must it have been like to have turned on the radio in 1979 and heard a fifteen-minute song with a familiar disco hook, a driving beat, and a group of male voices that weren’t quite speaking, weren’t quite singing? The majority of rap’s audience today never experienced such an epiphany. Most of us have known rap all our lives—maybe even longer.
Researchers have found that we begin to develop our musical knowledge even before we leave the womb, and by age five or six we already have a sophisticated sense of the various musical schemas that correspond to our culture. For those of us exposed to hip hop at an early age—for some of us this means even before birth—rap carries with it an unmistakable familiarity. Its stylistic conventions are apparent; quite literally, our brain is encoded on the neural level with a set of expectations for rap as a genre. We might know, for instance, that rap almost always follows a 4/4 measure with a strong kick-drum downbeat on the one and three and a snare backbeat on the two and four. We might know that this beat is the centerpiece of a rhythmic performance that also includes the MC’s voice flowing on top of the track, usually in the pocket of the beat. We might know that these dual rhythms usually predominate over any harmonies and melodies in the song. This is our equipment for listening, things we need never consciously consult that nonetheless define the contours of our relationship to the music.
For those with little or no exposure to rap, this equipment is underdeveloped or missing entirely. Of course, it is possible to learn to love rap, or any other music for which one lacks exposure, but it requires many hours of listening and conscious mental effort. By isolating the elements of style, we reinforce the very neural pathways that allow us to experience rap as pleasurable. Think of this chapter, then, as a road-construction project for your musical mind, helping you build from dirt paths to paved roads and from paved roads to expressways of musical perception.
For the MC, just as for any artist, style is the sum of rules and creativity. Inherent in this definition is the concept of genius, the capacity of particular artists to create new possibilities within the context of inherited forms. Style can describe the characteristic qualities of an individual MC, the dominant mode of a particular time period, as well as the shared aesthetic of a group or even an entire region. It is an umbrella term for a host of different things that MCs have made out of rap’s poetic form. As Adam Krims observes, style encompasses “history, geography, and genre all at once, not to mention the constant personal and commercial quest for uniqueness.”
When it comes to their styles, rappers are obsessed with novelty, ownership, and freedom. The Beastie Boys crowing “It’s the new style!” in 1986 was a declaration of their lyrical independence—ironically, at a time when Run-DMC was writing some of their lyrics. It is one of rap’s most common tropes: My style is different from yours. My style is better than yours. Another common boast is claiming innumerable styles. “I got 6 million ways to rhyme: choose one,” Common boasts on his second album, Resurrection. He also flips this clever bit of wordplay, illustrating the very stylistic freedom he claims: “My style is too developed to be arrested / It’s the free style, so now it’s out on parole.”
Conceiving of style as the product of inherited rules and individual invention connects rap with jazz and the blues, those other dominant forms of African-American musical expression that rely upon both formula and improvisation. All are products of the vernacular process, the artistic impulse to combine the invented and the borrowed, the created and the close at hand. The word vernacular comes from the Greek verna, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a slave born of his master’s house.” This is no mere etymological footnote; it has profound implications for African-American expressive culture, the only artistic tradition born in slavery. Rap, as the most recent manifestation of the vernacular process in action, extends a tradition of outlaw expression that reaches back to the dawn of the black experience in North America and beyond.
The vernacular, as Ralph Ellison defines it, is “a dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the past are continually merged with the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations which we invent in our efforts to control our environment and entertain ourselves.” In Ellison’s description “the most refined styles” and the “play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations” are of equal importance. For an art form like rap that emerged from the socio-political underground as the voice of young black and brown Americans, the cultural energy of the vernacular has proved nothing short of revolutionary.
Rap’s most profound achievement is this: it has made something—and something beautiful—out of almost nothing at all. Two turntables, a microphone, and a lyrical style define rap as the epitome of African-American vernacular culture. “Hip-hop is a beautiful culture,” Mos Def told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. “It’s inspirational, because it’s a culture of survivors. You can create beauty out of nothingness.” Rap may be the music of the street corner rather than the conservatory, but mastering its verbal art requires as much attention to craft as the most rarefied forms of artistic expression. So while rap’s spirit is unquestionably revolutionary, its form is traditional. Rap style is always balanced somewhere along this axis.
To say that rap often emerges out of nothingness, however, is not to say that it comes from nowhere. MCs tend to make a big deal about their place of birth. Anyone who’s ever been to a Mos Def concert has undoubtedly heard him shout “Where Brooklyn at?” And if you’re at a Roots show, Black Thought will tell you, more than once, that he’s representin’ Philly. While rock musicians often open concerts by telling you where you’re from (“Hello, Chattanooga!”), rappers usually start by telling you where they’re from. This is more than a matter of geography, it’s an article of faith and an element of style.
It makes sense that hip hop would be obsessed with place. Representing for your borough, or even your block, has long been
a motivating interest in rap. “I wanted to put Queens on the map,” a young LL Cool J announced. Such insistence on geography no doubt in part originated out of deep-seated rivalries across and among New York’s boroughs. It also drew from a deeper, more sustaining source: the desire to have pride in one’s community, even if—especially if—that community was denigrated by outsiders. Rappers created a self-fulfilling prophecy: by taking pride in where they were from, they gave where they’re from a reason to be proud.
At the same time, hip hop fostered from its beginning a universalist aesthetic as well. As the product of a mixed-cultural heritage, drawing from African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Latin, and even white punk-rock roots, hip hop was both a democratic and democratizing force; in other words, it made a place for the very equality it manifested in its amalgamated art. On the 1987 hip-hop classic “I Ain’t No Joke” Rakim gave voice to this inclusive sensibility:
Now if you’re from uptown, Brooklyn-bound,
The Bronx, Queens, or Long Island Sound,
Even other states come right and exact,
It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.
The inclusion that hip hop offered, as Rakim suggests, did not come free; it demanded fealty to form, a knowledge and appreciation of the culture, and a certain level of mastery. Rakim, from Long Island himself, was voicing an appeal to collective consciousness or, as George Clinton once proclaimed, to one nation under a groove. With hip hop we could all get down, and be down if we would only “come right and exact.”
Eight years later, Mobb Deep would turn Rakim’s credo on its head, reasserting the primacy of territory. Spitting his verse on “Right Back at You,” Havoc rhymes, “Fuck where you’re at, kid, it’s where you’re from / ’Cause where I’m from, niggas pack nuthin’ but the big guns.” For Havoc, hip hop had everything to do with place. “Queensbridge, that’s where I’m from,” he rhymes, “The place where stars are born and phony rappers get done / Six blocks and you might not make it through / What you gonna do when my whole crew is blazing at you?” Behind the venomous threats is an assertion of pride, in place, but also in style. “Queens rappers have a special style,” the West Coast veteran Ice-T admits. It’s hard to dispute his analysis. The six blocks of Queensbridge housing projects alone have produced dozens of rap standouts including Marley Marl, MC Shan, Roxanne Shanté, MC Butchy B, Craig G, Nas, Big Noyd, and Cormega. While they differ in talent and temperament, they undoubtedly share a certain spirit. If Queensbridge has a sound, it embodies certain qualities: dark, grimy production with rhymes to match, vividly rendered pictures of urban realities.
