by Adam Bradley
I once taught a student who said he liked to rhyme. He knew that I was writing this book, so he offered me a CD with several of his songs. I played it on my drive home. What I heard, though it surprised me at the time, shouldn’t have been at all unexpected: I heard 50 Cent—well, not exactly 50 Cent, but my student’s very best impersonation of 50’s signature flow and familiar gun talk. His alias probably should have tipped me off; I won’t reveal it here, but it was something very nearly like “Half a Dollar” or “48 Cent.” In ways both conscious and not, my student had patterned his style so closely upon 50’s that even his ad libs seemed straight off of “Candy Shop” or “I Get Money.” He actually wasn’t doing a bad job of it, either; the production value of his homemade tracks was respectable; and his flow, though not exactly his own, embodied that same sense of offhanded swagger that is 50’s greatest strength as a rapper.
Part of me, however, couldn’t help but think it was a little absurd for this college sophomore, a good student attending a predominantly white suburban liberal-arts college in sunny Southern California, to be spitting bars more at home in a hardscrabble neighborhood of South Queens. Then again, I suppose it’s no more absurd than 50 spitting these same lines today from the tony Connecticut compound where he currently resides. Driving back to campus the next morning, I played the tracks again. This time, instead of just hearing the imitation, I heard something else: the birth of a young artist’s style.
Style often starts as a form of jealousy. Someone does something that you want to do, but don’t know how to do and it motivates you to figure it out. You begin to build this body of influences until you have a particular blend that is distinctly your own. Style is amalgamation.
No style is completely original. Certainly there’s a sliding scale of originality that stretches from the completely copied to the wholly original. Most artists reside in between, shifting along the axis at different points in their careers—even at different points in particular rhymes. This is most evident with young artists still searching for their voices. A necessary part of the process of development includes imitation. Out of that imitation, innovation is often born. It only makes sense that aspiring MCs will want to model their style upon the most successful artists of the moment. My student’s choosing 50 Cent made intuitive sense, given that 50 is one of the best-selling rap artists of all time. Certainly this choice came at a cost to the variety of my student’s themes and the authenticity of his voice, but it made sense from a poetic standpoint. Keats began by modeling himself after Shakespeare. Hughes modeled himself after Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. This is what we mean by tradition.
50 Cent himself had to learn how to rhyme from someone, too. Despite his claims, it seems it wasn’t God that gave him style, but a humbler source, the late Jam Master Jay of the legendary Run-DMC. In his memoir, From Pieces to Weight, 50 relates the story of his MC education, a revealing record of style in the making.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never written a rhyme. But I looked at it like it was my chance to get out of the drug game, so I hopped on it. I wrote to the CD [Jam Master Jay had given him], rapping from the time the beat started to the time the beat ended. I went back to Jay’s studio a few days later and played him what I had done. When he heard it, he started laughing. He liked the rhyme, but he said that he had to teach me song format—how to count bars, build verses, everything. On the CD I had given him, I was just rambling, talking about all kinds of shit. There was no structure, no concept, nothing. But the talent was there.
Talent is critical, but alone it falls short of producing art. Style begins with the basics, with the formal rules of the genre as much as with inspiration or excellence. 50’s story is a rather common coming-of-age tale for rap. Snoop Dogg recalls a similar moment of stylistic realization. “I wasn’t a good writer, but in a battle I could beat anybody,” he recalls. “But as far as songwriting, I didn’t know how to write. Then once I got with Dr. Dre he showed me how to turn my 52 bar raps into 16 bar raps.” In both these cases it is curious to note that these lyricists didn’t learn rap form from other lyricists but from producers, suggesting an essential link between lyrical and musical forms in rap.
When Eminem released his independent debut album, Infinite, in 1996, the few critics who heard it (the original release was a little over a thousand copies—all on vinyl and cassette) accused him of biting the styles of other artists, most notably Nas. Eminem admits as much, and looks back upon the album as a crucial step in his stylistic development. “Obviously, I was young and influenced by other artists,” he recalls, “and I got a lot of feedback saying that I sounded like Nas and AZ. Infinite was me trying to figure out how I wanted my rap style to be, how I wanted to sound on the mic and present myself. It was a growing stage.” Eminem’s remarks key into the essential elements of style: the qualities of voice or, as he puts it, “how I wanted to sound on the mic”; and the formation of persona, or how he wanted to “present himself.”
Eminem, like 50, Snoop, and my former student, made a conscious effort to define the elements of his personal style. For those critics who consider rap unsophisticated and formless, even for those rap fans who give little thought to how the music is made, it will undoubtedly come as a surprise to learn that MCs most often pursue their craft with such a conscious awareness of form. While many MCs have no formal musical training, they nonetheless have learned the necessary terminology or created a vocabulary of their own to describe the elements of their craft.
Rakim brought formal musical training as a jazz saxophonist to his rhyme style. It certainly informed his phrasing and his rhythmic sensibilities. He also brought a keen awareness of language and its relation to these musical elements. “My style of writing, I love putting a lot of words in the bars, and it’s just something I started doing,” he explained to the Village Voice in 2006. “Now it’s stuck with me. I like being read. The way you do that is by having a lot of words, a lot of syllables, different types of words.” This is a remarkable statement coming from one of rap’s standard bearers: I like being read. Rakim is claiming for himself, and by extension for rap as a genre, a fundamental poetic identity, a necessary linguistic style to accompany the musical one.
Another MC who uses his voice as an instrument, developing a style conscious of both the linguistic and the musical identities, is Ludacris. In a revealing interview he makes a case for what makes his rap style distinctive.
But as far as what makes me unique when it comes to verses and things of that nature, I would definitely say that when it comes to doing sixteen bars, whether I am featured on somebody else’s song or whether I am doing it myself, I am just not afraid to take it to the next level—doing something that I know no other artists would do—even with styling, metaphors or whatever. Because if there is anything . . . I want to be known as the most versatile MC out there. Whether it is who raps the best with other artists; or who kicks the best metaphors; or who raps slow, or over any kind of beat—whatever. That’s me! I think that is what separates me from the rest.
Rap styles are far from static. Though an MC may become known, like Ludacris, for a signature style, it is still possible to innovate within those terms. Some artists evolve quite dramatically, expanding their stylistic identities in ways broad and deep. Lil Wayne’s remarkable emergence as a respected lyricist over the past several years came as a result of dramatic stylistic growth. Similarly, Busta Rhymes has transformed over the years from what was essentially a novelty rapper, good as a guest artist or on a hook, to a multifaceted rhymer capable of carrying an entire album.
A very few artists, however, seem to have emerged on the scene full-grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Jay-Z was as good on the first track from his debut, Reasonable Doubt, as he has ever been since, which is to say that he was something like a legend from the start. Only Jay-Z himself, perhaps, could look back on his early days in rap and see a stylistic transformation. In a revealing interview with Kelefa Sanneh published in the N
ew York Times he offered this self-assessment: “I was speeding,” he said. “I was saying a hundred words a minute. There were no catchphrases, there were no hooks within the verses. I was very wordy. . . . I don’t know that I’ve gotten better. I think that I’ve definitely gotten more rounded.”
Rap style, however, is not simply about counting bars or building verses. It’s not even about ill metaphors and dope rhymes. It is more than the sum of its forms. In addition to the conscious level of craft, it contains an ineffable quality of art. “I honestly never sat down and said ‘OK, here’s my style,’ because my whole thing was knowing everyone’s style,” explains Bun B, half of southeast Texas’s legendary UGK. “Everything I’ve ever written has bits and pieces of everything I’ve ever heard. Any rapper who tells you different is a liar. You can’t write a book if you’ve never read a book. . . . So the more rap I learned, the more I was able to bring to rap when I decided to rap. But this was all subconscious.” Rap, explains Bun B, is an amalgamated art. It relies upon the vernacular exercise of the individual artist working through the influences close at hand to create something new. The fact that this often occurs subconsciously is part of the mystery of poetic creation.
Poets and songwriters of all types often speak of a zone they reach during the process of composition, a mental state that approximates that of a trance. William Butler Yeats described it this way, echoing Bun B’s words across three-quarters of a century, “Style is almost unconscious. I know what I have tried to do, little what I have done.” Yeats suggests a difference between artistic aims (“what I tried to do”) and artistic achievement (“what I have done”) that mirrors the relation between creation and consumption, the artists and the audience.
The poet Frances Mayes offers a more concrete definition, defining poetic style as consisting of “characteristic words and images, prevalent concerns, tone of voice, pattern of syntax, and form. When we read enough of an author, we begin to know the kind of power he has over language and the resources of language at his disposal. What makes us recognize the author, even if a poem is not identified, is style.” Style is therefore something that the artist constructs, though often in an “unconscious” state, that the audience can ultimately identify.
Rappers, like anyone else, are subject to popular taste. When a rapper introduces a truly distinctive style—like Melle Mel or Big Daddy Kane, and more recently, like Eminem or Andre 3000—they are bound to have imitators. And while cynics might suggest that these imitators are simply trying to cash in on the popularity of a new sound, they might simply be trying to master rap’s difficult form. Every artist in every genre goes through an early phase of imitation. But where a painter or a jazz pianist will likely be able to hone their crafts and develop their personal styles away from the attention of a mass audience, rappers are more likely to be scooped up and packaged for sale well before they’ve finished their artistic maturation. This is partly because rap is dominated by men who debut at a young age, from their teens into their twenties, and only rarely after thirty. And, yes, it is also a result of a revenue model in which A&Rs are constantly on the lookout for young talent that fits a certain preestablished (and profitable) artistic profile.
Rap’s growing commercialization risks stunting the music’s stylistic diversity. “Today we take rhyme styles for granted,” hip-hop legend KRS-One said. “On Criminal Minded those rhyme styles you hear were original. They hadn’t been heard before. The album had originality and we lack so much of that today. It seems that if one rapper comes out with a style, twenty others come after him. Hip hop now, what it has become, is just not what we intended it to be. When Criminal Minded came out, Big Daddy Kane had his own style, Rakim still has his own style, Kool G Rap, Biz Markie. We’ve lost cultural continuity because hip-hop has gone from being a culture to being a product.”
The product-oriented approach to hip hop that KRS-ONE talks about creates a stylistic tension, resulting in a host of rappers who sound alike in an art form that celebrates originality and shuns imitation. Among rap’s many paradoxes is this one: It is an art form based upon borrowing, and yet it punishes stealing like no other. Rap is a vernacular art, which is to say it takes its shape from a fusion of individual innovation and preexisting forms. Think of Missy Elliott borrowing the chorus from Frankie Smith’s “Double Dutch Bus,” but flipping it into a funky hook on “Gossip Folks.” Or DJ Premier sampling Chuck D’s counting for Notorious B.I.G.’s classic “Ten Crack Commandments.”
Rap is nothing if not an amalgamated art, comprising bits and pieces, loose ends reordered and reconceived in ways that both announce their debt and assert their creative independence from their sources. If the case for the musical virtuosity of the DJ hasn’t yet been made, then it should. Wynton Marsalis couldn’t build a track with as much rhythmic variety and sonic layering as the RZA or Hi-Tek or Just Blaze. These men are musicians, even if their instruments are two turntables, a mixing board, and ProTools. It is the ultimate postmodern musical form. Born of pastiche, rap instrumentals often assemble something new out of the discarded fragments of other songs, shaping order out of chaos.
The same process of repetition and re-creation holds for the MC’s lyrics as well. Think of how many MCs have started their rhymes off, à la Rakim, “It’s been a long time. . . .” Rap relies on shared knowledge, a common musical and lyrical vocabulary accessible to all. At the same time, few charges are as damning to an MC as being called a biter. Biting, or co-opting another person’s style or even specific lines, qualifies as a high crime in hip hop’s code of ethics and aesthetics. Rap polices the boundary between borrowing and theft in ways that at times seems arbitrary.
In early 2005 a mix started circulating through hip-hop radio that featured a litany of Jay-Z lines preceded by their source in other MC’s lyrics. Depending on where you stood, “I’m Not a Writer, I’m a Biter” was either proof positive that Jigga was bringing nothing original to rap or, to the contrary, further evidence of his greatness—his ability to be original while still referencing some of the classic lines in hip-hop history. Jay drew his inspiration most often from the Notorious B.I.G., sometimes repeating his lyrics word for word, albeit in the new context of his own verse. The fact that Jay-Z, regarded by many as one of the greatest if not the greatest MC of all time, would so often resort to such lyrical allusions (and that he would also be the source of other artists’ borrowing) testifies to one of the foundational truths about rap. Rap is an art born, in part, of imitation.
Imitation, however, is not always biting, though the line of demarcation is sometimes blurry. Biting suggests a flagrant disregard for the integrity of another’s art, a lazy practice of passing off someone else’s creativity as your own. Imitation in an artistic context means charging another’s words with your own creativity and, in the process, creating something that is at once neither his nor yours, and yet somehow both. Art through the ages has followed this same creative practice of free exchange. Shakespeare drew many of his plots, including classics like Hamlet, from Holinshed’s Chronicles. T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land riffs on everything from ragtime lyrics to sacred Sanskrit texts.
What happens, though, when such artistic freedom meets rap’s culture of commerce? Rappers and their fans often talk in a language of ownership, as if something as illusory as style can come with a deed. Sometimes this protection is simply a reflex, a habit of being perhaps drawn from what KRS-One called the “reality of lack” that many rappers experienced growing up in poor communities. If you have something that’s valuable, hold on to it so that everyone knows that it’s yours. Add to that the fact that signature styles, even signature lines, can be the stuff of significant wealth in today’s rap marketplace and the stakes of what might otherwise have been an aesthetic tussle become much, much greater.
While one can certainly make a reasonable claim to a limited kind of ownership, the natural state of any art form is freedom. Culture is a commodity, not simply in a capitalistic system, but in any human societ
y. Artists learn from other artists. Artists “steal” from other artists—and it is not simply the inferior artists who do so. “If there is something to steal, I steal it!” Pablo Picasso once said. The concept of theft in art is complex. While we should resist any effort to misrepresent the history of culture, we also must resist attempts to restrict its free exchange. The moment an MC records a rap—in fact, the moment that MC spits a verse in front of someone other than his own reflection—is the moment culture liberates itself from context.
Speaking about black American culture as a whole, Ralph Ellison once noted that despite our reasonable desires to protect it from outside influence, the fact of the matter is that all cultural creations become common property in a way when presented to the public. “I wish there could be some control of it,” Ellison said in a 1973 interview, “but there cannot be control over it, except in this way: through those of us who write and who create using what is there to use in a most eloquent and transcendent way.” The individual artist’s eloquence and transcendence confer stylistic originality upon shared cultural sources. “I’m not a separatist,” Ellison explains earlier in the interview. “The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new—by putting something else with what you’ve got.” Here Ellison is defining the vernacular process, the act of “putting something else with what you’ve got.” Rap may be the best contemporary example of this principle in action.
Lil Wayne provides a perfect illustration of how conscious imitation can also achieve lyrical innovation on “Dr. Carter,” where he not only repeats another artist’s line, but does so in celebration of its excellence and in defiance of the risks of being labeled a biter. “Dr. Carter” is a conceptual song in which Weezy takes on the role of a rap physician, diagnosing and treating various rap illnesses like lack of concepts, failure of originality, and wack flow. He spits the following lines on the second verse:
