Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  If a style can be as specific as a six-block radius, then it only stands to reason that it can encompass an entire region. In hip hop’s first decade, when New York dominated, it made sense that the stylistic differences would be on the micro level—borough to borough, even block to block. But as rap started to gain ground in the West Coast, the East Coast sound started to coalesce.

  At the height of tensions in the mid-1990s, the difference between East and West Coast rap culture was so great that Dr. Dre could reasonably be shocked to discover that his album The Chronic, now recognized as one of the two or three most influential hip-hop recordings of all time, was being played just as much in New York as in L.A. Do these traditional stylistic divisions of region still matter now that hip hop has grown into a global phenomenon? Has the context for them shifted now that we can conceivably compare the rap styles of Brazil or South Africa with the United States as a whole, rather than East or West, Midwest or South? Broadly considered, rap’s center of gravity has moved from East (specifically New York) to West (specifically L.A.) to South (specifically Atlanta) over the years. This is not to say great music hasn’t come from other places, from Cleveland, for example, or from Karachi, but that rap often takes on the character of a particular locality. Perhaps it’s a matter of where you’re from and where you’re at. Regardless, it is ultimately the responsibility of individual artists to define personal styles out of a combination of their individual genius and the influences that surround them.

  As important as geography is to rap, we come to know the music through the range and versatility of individual artists. When it comes to experiencing any art form, it’s almost always like this: We long for the specific rather than the general. If we wish to read a poem, we want one by Robert Frost or Elizabeth Bishop or Pablo Neruda, not the idea of a poem in the abstract. When we go to an art museum, we’re drawn to particular periods—the impressionists, the abstract expressionists—or even particular painters, Monet, Kandinsky. The same holds true for rap. We want to hear Tupac’s prophetic baritone, or Biggie’s graveyard humor; we want Jay-Z’s understated complexity, Common’s smoothed-out delivery, or Talib Kweli’s dense lyricism. Certain MCs have a distinctive personal style, some quality of voice, of theme, of rhythm, or any combination of these that forges a distinguishable character to their lyricism. What is it that separates one from another, that makes one better than another? What is it that keeps us coming back to hear them time and time again?

  On the inner sleeve of his second solo album, 1987’s How Ya Like Me Now, Kool Moe Dee attempted to answer these questions for rap with the first-ever Rap Report Card. He evaluates twenty-four of his rap contemporaries on a ten-point scale in ten different categories, such as “vocabulary,” “articulation,” “creativity,” “voice,” “sticking to themes,” and “innovating rhythms.” Never one for humility, he awards himself an A+, a grade he shares with two other star students, hip-hop pioneers Melle Mel and Grandmaster Caz. But while his report card is marred by poetic injustices (Public Enemy rates only a B; the Beastie Boys, a C) and inaccuracies (he misspells the names of Rakim and Biz Markie, among others), it nonetheless represents something remarkable in rap’s history. Kool Moe Dee makes explicit something that rap fans often think about but rarely articulate: that an MC’s style consists of identifiable elements of form, and that we can judge an MC’s greatness using these elements.

  The report card, while enlightening and entertaining, tells only part of the story. An MC’s greatness is never simply the sum of particular formal accomplishments; listeners experience rap in the totality of its performance, as the sum of its styles. Studying style requires that we key into the most essential elements that define that particular MC’s expression. Consider, for instance, the long-standing argument among hip-hop heads over whether Tupac or the Notorious B.I.G. was the better MC. Among the many debates rap fans have over style—underground or mainstream, Dirty South or East Coast, Kanye or 50 Cent—the Pac and Big debate is among the most passionate, particularly in the years since their violent, unresolved, and untimely deaths. When MTV gathered a panel of hip-hop experts to compile, with the help of an online fan poll, a list of the greatest MCs of all time, both artists made the list: Biggie coming in third and Tupac coming in second (with Jay-Z in first). But the proximity of their ranking belies the more divided opinion held by many listeners. Few people who love Biggie’s style have the same love for Pac’s, and vice versa. They may respect the other MC, but when it comes to deciding what they want to hear, the difference is usually clear.

  I once helped a good friend, a former editor at The Source, drive a U-Haul truck from Miami to Boston. Along the way we had a lot of debates on rap, as was our custom, but none proved more heated than our Biggie/Tupac debate. He was in the Tupac camp; Biggie, he said, wouldn’t even make his top fifty MCs. Pac had that voice, that passionate delivery; he also had a more impressive diversity of themes. I was a Biggie guy, if somewhat more moderate; while I put Biggie in my top five, Pac at least made the top fifteen. Biggie had the superior flow, sharper storytelling abilities, more clever wordplay, and the greater sense of humor. I could admire Tupac’s rhymes, but I could love Biggie’s. And so as we made our way up Interstate 95, we commenced a series of fruitless attempts to convince each other by cranking out track-for-track comparisons from the tinny speakers of the moving truck. As the songs played, we’d punctuate them with our own recitation of the lyrics or glosses on the meaning and eloquence of particular lines.

  I think it was somewhere in the middle of “Hail Mary” from Tupac’s Makaveli album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, when it dawned on me that, as fun as this game was, we might just be missing the point. Our preference for one MC’s style over the other’s says at least as much about what we value as listeners as it does about the inherent accomplishment of the particular artist. My friend and I were both listening in our own terms, with our own largely unacknowledged and unexamined aesthetic values at work. This is, after all, what listeners do; this is what we call personal taste.

  But understanding style requires something different. Style asks us also to listen in the terms the artists themselves establish, to judge them in the ways their art asks to be judged. To point out the absence of Tupac’s passionate introspection in Biggie’s lyrics or the dearth of Biggie’s punning wordplay in Pac’s is to demand of those artists something neither ever intended to provide. If we listen to them on their own stylistic terms, however, we can judge them against the forms of excellence to which they aspire.

  “Technically, Tupac wasn’t a great rapper,” writes Rolling Stone music critic Anthony DeCurtis, “but he invented a compelling, brooding self in song and image that made his failings completely irrelevant. . . . The man became the music—and the words.” DeCurtis is heading in the right direction, but I would take his claim even further. Tupac was a great rapper, provided we judge his technique against the ideal it posits for itself rather than our own abstractions of taste. While there is an important place for discerning, as Kool Moe Dee once did, the constitutive elements of style that we can use to judge the value of individual MCs, there is also a vital need to work from the opposite direction: to begin with individual styles—Biggie’s, Pac’s, whomever’s—and move inductively toward an understanding of an individual style and the combination of traits upon which that style is based. And so we give extra weight to wordplay when considering Biggie’s style because his lyrics call so much attention to his arrangement of language, his imagery, and puns. When evaluating Tupac, however, wordplay plays a lesser role because it is something he seems consciously to downplay in his lyrics, perhaps not wanting to detract from the power of his direct expression—that connection between man and music that DeCurtis celebrates.

  Addressing the Biggie versus Tupac comparison, Shock-G of Digital Underground suggests that their value lies as much in the way we, the listeners, hear them as it does in their own stylistic achievements.

  Biggie’s gonna w
in hands down when you’re talking about flow. Strictly from a rhythm standpoint, Biggie is the swinger. He swings like a horn-player over jazz. . . . When people say ’Pac is the best rapper of all time, they don’t just mean he’s the best rapper, they just mean what he had to say was most potent, most relevant.

  While Biggie could deliver a dope line just by spelling his name (“B-I-G-P-O-P-P-A / No info for the DEA”), Tupac’s lyrical strength came from the passion of his performance, like a streetwise preacher working the pulpit. It is our great fortune as listeners, of course, that we don’t have to choose between the two MCs, the two styles. Understanding style requires us to hold two things in our minds at once: a sense of the full range of potential parts in lyrical expression, and the particular combination of those parts that goes into making the style of any one MC.

  Rap style consists of many elements, perhaps the most significant of which are voice, the unique timbre of an MC’s expression and the tonal range of that expression; technique, the formal elements (the most significant of which is flow) that distinguish one MC’s performance from another’s; and content, the subject matter of an MC’s lyrics. These three elements alone can go a long way toward explaining things we know intuitively: like why Biggie is so different from Tupac, why certain artists go pop and others remain in the underground, why old-school differs from new-school or East differs from West, which differs from Midwest, which differs from South.

  Some stylistic elements, of course, are easier to adopt than others. Voice may be the most difficult to replicate if only because not everyone who wants to sound like Biggie can sound like Biggie. Yet enough have tried—Shyne and Guerilla Black come to mind—that it seems that even this element of style is not beyond imitation. (For living proof, check out the YouTube clip where comedian Aries Spears freestyles live on radio while impersonating the voices of LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, DMX, and Jay-Z. It’s nothing short of amazing.) Certain MCs have staked their careers on the unique appeal of their voices, the physical instruments of their art. 50 Cent was an underground MC until a bullet lodged in his jaw transformed his vocal timbre, endowing him with his unmistakable, slightly sinister slur. DMX has patterned his style on the same guttural barks and growls of his numerous canine pets. And for all Tupac’s stylistic greatness, the thing we remember most is the voice—the rich, resonant baritone that dipped and dived with the phrasings of a country preacher or a city pimp. “A distinct voice tone is the identity and signature of the Rapper, and it adds flavor to anything being said,” KRS-One explains. “Rappers with no distinct voice tone are soon forgotten, whereas Rappers with distinct and unique voice tones are always remembered and identified by their audience.” Rap is also the music of the human voice; it is tone and timbre, combing with rhythm and, increasingly, harmony and melody, to make song.

  Technique is the element of style most open to imitation. Truly groundbreaking MCs are those who develop individual styles that can be adopted and adapted by other artists—or even an entire generation of artists. Melle Mel’s emphasizing words on the two and four, Rakim’s multisyllabic rhymes, Big Daddy Kane’s fast and slow flow, all of these innovations of technique made impacts that extended well beyond the originator’s own personal style. It is difficult to claim ownership over a technique. Unlike the sound of one’s voice, a way of saying something is easily disassociated from its originator; indeed, it almost demands to be disassociated. Rap was born out of the vernacular process of creative individuals borrowing from existing sources and adding something distinctly their own. So the question for those MCs who borrow Rakim’s rhymes or Kane’s flow is, what did you add of your own?

  Rap’s critics often claim that rap lacks thematic range, that few rappers are adding anything of their own. All MCs ever talk about is how many women they have, how much money they stack, what cars they drive, and how much better they are at everything they do than anyone else around. Those of us who listen to rap know that this just isn’t true. Rap has a broad expressive range, but who can blame those who are exposed only to hip hop’s commercial hits from drawing such limited conclusions?

  Sense follows sound in rap. Rap lyrics only rarely introduce new ideas. But rap is not alone in this. “I suspect that the freshest and most engaging poems most often don’t come from ideas at all,” observes the poet Ted Kooser of literary verse. “Ideas are orderly, rational, and to some degree logical. They come clothed in complete sentences, like ‘Overpopulation is the cause of all the problems in the world.’ Instead, poems are trigged by catchy twists of language or little glimpses of life.” When Kooser mentions “catchy twists of language” and “little glimpses of life” he might as well be speaking directly about rap. Rap achieves both of these, whether it comes clothed in Immortal Technique’s scathing political critique of George W. Bush on “Bin Laden” or Yung Joc’s playful, amoral celebration of the crack trade on “Coffee Shop.” Poetry, in other words, is value neutral, though listeners certainly are not. Rap asks that each rhyme be judged on its own terms, the terms by which it presents itself. Rap asks to be judged not simply as pure content, but as content expressed in specific, poetic language. They are inseparable. As Terry Eagleton notes, “the language of a poem is constitutive of its ideas.”

  What happens, though, when a rap artist sets out to transform the ideas that go into the music? What does this require of the poetic craft? The career of Kanye West offers a compelling case study in what happens when an artist sets out to change the game.

  Kanye burst on the scene as a rapper in 2004. By that time, he had already produced chart-topping hits, like the distinctive soul-sampled Jay-Z smashes “This Can’t Be Life” and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.).” Critics were quick to praise Kanye’s debut album, The College Dropout, for what many saw as his fresh sound and original subject matter. Here was a rapper not just rhyming about girls, cars, and clothes (although he certainly did that as well), but about organized religion, the excesses of consumerism, even folding shirts at the Gap. In an interview with the website universalurban.com just before the release of The College Dropout, Kanye reflected upon the formation of his distinctive style. His explanation speaks not only to his own process of creation but to the common challenge of all artists trying to break new stylistic ground in a medium dominated by a handful of trendsetters.

  It’s like if you wanna rap like Jay[-Z], it’s hard to rap like Jay and not rap about what Jay is rapping about. So what I did is incorporate all these different forms of rap together—like I’ll use old school [rhythm] patterns, I come up with new patterns in my head every day. Once I found out exactly how to rap about drugs and exactly how to rap about “say no to drugs,” I knew that I could fill the exact medium between that. My persona is that I’m the regular person. Just think about whatever you’ve been through in the past week, and I have a song about that on my album.

  Kanye’s comments underscore several essential truths about style in rap. Contrary to many people’s assumptions, in rap content often follows style. In other words, the stylistic models an aspiring MC imitates often dictate the content of the rhymes as well. It would be hard to imagine an MC, for instance, with 50 Cent’s style and Lauryn Hill’s content. There is something essential in 50 Cent’s style—the constitutive elements of his poetics—that lends itself to a particular set of themes: in his case, women, cars, his thug past, and exaltation of his own lyrical greatness.

  Another significant lesson to draw from Kanye’s remarks is that style is often the product of the self-conscious construction of a lyrical identity, or persona. For Kanye, that persona would be the common man—a garden-variety identity in most literary traditions, but a surprisingly underdeveloped one in a hip-hop tradition that trades upon the projection of self-aggrandizing and larger-than-life images. Of course the irony of these comments is apparent in light of Kanye’s notoriously outsized ego, and yet he does project a common persona at times in his rhymes, even if he as a person is far from it. Throughout The College Dropout and intermittently on his su
bsequent releases, Kanye extends a rap tradition of self-deprecation that, while far overshadowed by its opposite, still holds an essential place in rap’s history. As he rhymes on “All Falls Down,” perhaps his finest lyrical performance on the album, “We all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it.” This theme of vulnerability reflects itself in a style that is sometimes halting and awkward, vocal tones that he comically exaggerates, and unorthodox rhythms and rhymes that call our attention to what’s new in his lyrics. Whatever else Kanye West’s career reveals, it shows that a revolution in rap’s themes must begin with a revolution in rap’s poetics. All artists must face up to Kanye’s dilemma at some point in their development: how to craft an individual voice out of the myriad influences available. This is the definition of personal style.