Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  Now hey, kid—plural, I graduated

  “’Cause you could get through anything if Magic made it.”

  And that was called recycling, r.e., reciting

  Something ’cause you just like it so you say it just like it.

  Some say it’s biting but I say it’s enlightening.

  Besides, Dr. Kanye West is one of the brightest.

  Riffing off Kanye’s familiar line from “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” (“No, I already graduated / And you can live through anything if Magic made it”), Wayne pays tribute even as he displays his own poetic artistry with rhyme (“recycling,” “reciting,” “biting,” “enlightening”) and repetition (of “re” as well as the dual meanings of “just like it”). What separates “biting” and “enlightening” is the difference between mere repetition and repetition with a difference. It comes down to a question of ownership, a fraught concept when it concerns something like art.

  An equally compelling circumstance of art and ownership concerns the commerce conducted behind the scenes between writers who don’t perform their lyrics and performers who don’t write their own. The ghostwriter is perhaps the most shadowy figure in rap, cloaked in controversy and obscured out of necessity to protect the credibility of the performer. Ghostwriting, or one artist supplying lyrics to be delivered by another artist, usually for a fee, has been around since rap’s birth. While few rappers will admit to using one, many rappers have boasted about being one. “I’m a ghostwriter, I’m the cat that you don’t see / I write hits for rappers you like and charge ’em a fee,” Mad Skillz rhymes on “Ghostwriter.” Or, “Check the credits, S. Carter, ghostwriter / and for the right price, I can even make yo’ shit tighter,” Jay-Z spits on “Ride or Die.”

  As a consequence of this close association between writer and performer, rap has traditionally made little room for something like a cover tune. With the exception of groups like the Roots who sometimes perform other artists’ songs during their concerts as tributes and as demonstrations of their musical virtuosity, rap has relatively few instances of MCs rhyming the lyrics of another song in its entirety. Certainly rap has relied heavily on lyrical samples from past rhymes, or from allusive references to them, but rarely has an entire verse, much less a song, been repeated by another artist. Hip hop, it would seem, has no room for standards. This is true for an entire song, but many artists borrow the structure of a verse, including an entire line or set of lines, from previous songs. And reproduction on the levels of theme, image, and expression is common—even to the point of limiting the expressive range of artists to a handful of tried and true themes.

  Yet as long as rap has been around, so has the ghostwriter. Sometimes the transaction between performer and ghostwriter has been behind the scenes, other times out in the open. In the 1980s Big Daddy Kane ghostwrote for a host of popular artists, but only the closest observers seemed to take notice. For Kane, as for any ghostwriter, the primary challenge was one of style. How do you write rhymes that authentically come across as another person’s voice? How do you embody another artist’s style? In a revealing interview with Brian Coleman, Kane offered these observations about ghostwriting for two different artists, Shanté and Biz Markie:

  Writing for Biz was in a whole different style [from mine], so that could be a challenge. But Fly Ty wanted Shanté to have my style, so I wrote for her in that way, and it wasn’t a problem, of course. Biz had invented this whole different style and wanted to flow like that—he just couldn’t always work the words out. So I wrote in that style for him. Because it was different, the way I wrote for him, it didn’t sound like nothin’ that would come from me, so it was harder to tell. Shanté would always tell people that I wrote rhymes for her. It wasn’t a big deal. The Biz thing was something that we kept on the hush. Anybody that was really into the artwork and reading all the credits on albums could put one and one together and figure it out, but it wasn’t something we mentioned back then.

  Kane makes an important distinction between style and songwriting. Biz, he says, had “invented this whole different style,” he just “couldn’t always work the words out.” Style, in this case, is a quality that at once transcends words and is nonetheless bound up in them. Biz Markie created a persona as the clown prince of hip hop with songs like “Picking Boogers” and “Just a Friend.” He used his beatboxing alongside his slow, thick-tongued flow to craft a distinctive vocal style, certainly distinct from the smooth, articulate delivery of Kane. It is a testament to the various strengths of both artists that they both are remembered as distinctive lyrical stylists from their era.

  Ghostwriting’s long tradition in hip hop is not necessarily at odds with hip hop’s claims to authenticity. There is the famous case of the Sugar Hill Gang “borrowing” rhymes directly from the rhyme book of Grandmaster Caz. Some performers are notorious for not writing their rhymes—and unapologetic about it as well. Diddy once wrote the check to the person who penned this line for him: “Don’t worry if I write rhymes / I write checks.”

  But what does rap have to fear by openly acknowledging the difference between songwriter and performer? Does it still matter to rap’s audience that the illusion of the inviolable MC persists, or have we come to a place where we are comfortable with the concept that some people are good poets, some good performers, and only a few are both?

  In 2006 rap legend Chuck D asked the West Coast rapper Paris to pen almost all the lyrics for Public Enemy’s Rebirth of a Nation. What was so surprising about this was how openly the two of them discussed their collaboration. Perhaps most shocking of all to the rap fan, it wasn’t some rap dilettante like Shaquille O’Neal buying himself some hot lines he couldn’t possibly have written himself, it was one of rap’s most respected lyricists, one of its most memorable voices. Why would the man who had written the lyrics for “Yo! Bum Rush the Show” and “Fight the Power” need a ghostwriter? The answer, to hear Chuck himself explain it, was that he didn’t need one, he wanted one. “I really pride myself on being a vocalist, so why can’t I vocalize somebody else’s writings?” he asks. He argues for rap to recognize openly what it already concedes in private. “I think often that the mistake made in rap music is that people feel that a vocalist should write their own lyrics,” he says. “That’s been a major, major mistake in hip-hop, because not everyone is equipped to be a lyricist and not everyone is equipped to be a vocalist.”

  Keep in mind that Chuck D is making this point in the midst of a long and illustrious rap career during which he has written many, many lyrics and turned in some of rap’s most indelible performances. He certainly has the authority to say it, but he does so at a time when, as a senior statesman, his influence on rap itself is limited. But what if rap did follow Chuck’s lead? What would it look like? Perhaps someday not far from now rap will produce its Irving Berlin, an artist famous for writing classic lyrics while never performing them himself. But for now rap still relies on the close association, at least on the surface, of creator and performer.

  Rap lyrics are so closely bound to the image and identity of the performer that the very idea of a distinction seems counterintuitive. We assume that the writer is also the performer, that the lyricist and the rapper are one and the same. It has always been this way. Perhaps it is rap’s proximity to literary poetry, perhaps it is the assumption of reality behind the lyrics, perhaps it’s the illusion of spontaneity, but rap is inherently associated with personal expression rather than song craft. Part of the unspoken pact between MC and audience is that the MC is authentic, that what he or she is saying is sincere or real.

  This is quite different from the understanding other pop artists have with their audiences. When Mariah Carey performs a song, we understand that the words she sings may or may not be her own; it makes little difference to us either way. The songs themselves, which are often undistinguished pop confections, matter less to us than the memorable performance she gives them. American Idol has made a franchise out of discovering popular performers
who explicitly do not compose the songs they sing and often succeed in spite of, not because of, the material they’re asked to perform.

  Rap’s emphasis on originality, ownership, and spontaneity so thoroughly governs the art form that even in those instances when the MC is expected to repeat previously written rhymes—at a concert, for instance—he must still find ways of maintaining the illusion of immediacy. This might mean flipping a few freestyle references into the established rhyme, or involving the audience by leaving blank spaces in the delivery for the crowd to fill in the words, or giving microphones to a crew so that they can ad-lib or emphasize particular words or phrases. All of these techniques achieve the same effect, which is to defamiliarize the live performance from the prerecorded one, in effect making it new, and thus real, again. It reestablishes the MC’s relation to words. The MC is not simply a performer, but something more: an artist conceiving the lyrics before our very eyes. Of course, sometimes this comes as a detriment to the performance. Too many people on stage with mics leads to mud-died sound and garbled lyrics; too much crowd participation ends up seeming like laziness on the MC’s part; too much freestyle from an MC unskilled in the art can lead to disaster and embarrassment. But even when these things go wrong, they still achieve the goal of connecting MCs with their creations anew.

  Style is finally the means by which MCs call attention to themselves—to their relation to other artists, to their connection to particular places or times, and perhaps most of all, to their individual excellence. But style is also a vessel, a container waiting to be filled with emotions, ideas, and stories. It is here, where rap’s form meets its function, that hip-hop poetics achieves its highest calling. Ralph Ellison once said, “We tell ourselves our individual stories so that we may understand the collective.” If this is true, then we have much to learn from listening to hip hop, a form uniquely suited to the art of storytelling.

  FIVE S’torytelling

  Here’s a little story that must be told, from beginning to end. . . .

  —Common, “Book of Life”

  STORYTELLING DISTINGUISHES RAP from other forms of popular music. That isn’t to suggest that lyricists in other musical genres don’t tell captivating stories: anyone who’s ever heard the Eagles’ “Hotel California” or Don McLean’s “American Pie” or the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” knows better than that. Rap isn’t even the first musical genre to tell a story to music in rapid phrases that are as close to speech as to song; that distinction belongs to operatic recitatives, which date from the seventeenth century. Rap’s difference from other genres is one of degree, not of kind. Rap just tells so many stories. Indeed, it’s difficult to identify a rap song that doesn’t tell some kind of story in rhyme.

  Storytelling highlights both the good and the bad in rap music and hip-hop culture. Advocates often cite rap’s stories as proof of the music’s truth-telling capacity, its prophetic voice for everyday people. Conversely, rap’s critics target storytelling, particularly the explicit tales of so-called gangsta rap, as a corrupting influence on our culture, celebrating the worst excesses of violence, misogyny, and commercialism.

  Most of rap’s stories are neither incisive social commentaries nor thug fantasies. Like most stories throughout the history of human civilization, most of rap’s stories are occasions to imagine alternate realities. To hear rap’s storytelling at its best is to experience liberation from the constraints of everyday life, to be lost in the rhythm and the rhyme. Rap’s greatest storytellers are among the greatest storytellers alive, staying close to the tones of common speech even as they craft innovations on narrative form. Rap’s stories demand our attention not simply as entertainment, but as art. Whether it is Common weaving the classic hip-hop allegory “I Used to Love H.E.R.” or Nas inverting narrative chronology in “Rewind,” rap is an effective form for sophisticated narrative expression.

  Between the street life and the good life is a broad expanse of human experience. Rap has its screenwriters, making Hollywood blockbusters in rhyme with sharp cuts, vivid characters, and intricate plotlines. It has its investigative reporters and conspiracy theorists, its biographers and memoirists, its True Crime authors and its mystery writers. It even has its comics and its sportswriters, its children’s authors and its spiritualists. It is high concept and low brow; it has literary hacks and bona fide masters. It has all of these and more, extending an oral tradition as fundamental to human experience, as ancient and as essential, as most anything we have.

  Even so-called gangsta rap, which one of its originators, Ice-T, prefers to call “reality rap” for its gritty fidelity to the everyday struggles of pimps, hos, and hustlers, is more concerned with imagining possible realities rather than simply recording experiences. The fact is, rap’s realism is as much about telling stories as it is about telling truths. While “keeping it real” and “real talk” have become a part of rap’s code of ethics, reality’s importance to rap’s lyrical artistry is more complicated. Reality may carry considerable weight when it comes to an MC’s social capital, but it has less to do with the craft of writing great rhymes or telling good stories. In a 2006 interview, the Chicago-bred rapper Lupe Fiasco reflected upon the interrelatedness of storytelling, poetry, and rap.

  I come from a literary background, and I loved to tell stories. I remember freestyling stories, not in rhyme, by just coming up with things when I was a kid on the bus. But I couldn’t play an instrument, so I decided to take my storytelling mind and to apply it to rap, which seemed like a natural thing. So I practiced a lot and really tried to apply the techniques I’d learned from poetry—which, of course, is the predecessor of rap—and include new things. I’d add haikus and try all wild poetic things, and I knew I’d have something different and interesting to say.

  To tell a familiar narrative in a new way is the motivating impulse behind a lot of rap storytelling. With a storyteller’s mind, rappers create poetic narratives with character and setting; conflict, climax, and resolution. They do all of this while rhyming many of their words, and usually in less than four minutes.

  Rap’s early years were filled with rhymed stories. Few hip-hop heads could forget Wonder Mike’s question from his last verse on “Rapper’s Delight”: “Have you ever went over to a friend’s house to eat / and the food just ain’t no good?” On the other end of the spectrum from the Sugar Hill Gang’s comic tone, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” offers a powerful description of urban plight: “A child is born with no state of mind / blind to the ways of mankind.”

  Undoubtedly the most influential storyteller in rap history is the Ruler, Slick Rick. During rap’s first decade, Slick Rick helped establish the conventions that would define rap as a storytelling genre. Storytelling for him wasn’t just about entertainment; he understood the expressive power of a story well told: “Stories can teach, and stories can destroy, and stories can ease tensions,” he once observed. His best-known tales, love stories like “Mona Lisa,” cautionary tales like “Children’s Story,” and explicit stories like “Sleazy Gynecologist,” offer a primer of rap storytelling. Speaking of his classic album, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick, he recalls: “It was almost like a diary: ‘When I was nineteen, this is what happened and this is what I learned from it.’ It’s all just writing down life experiences as you go on. I just put them in rap form.”

  MCs like Slick Rick put their lives, real and imagined, in rap form. Rap stories can take up anything from a few bars to an entire song, or even multiple songs. They can be told by one rapper or by several. They can follow conventional narrative chronology or be presented backwards or in fragments. They can represent a kind of rap realism or they can be fashioned as a form of heightened reality through extended metaphors or other nonliteral representations. At their best, they allow their listeners to inhabit other voices, other selves, and in the process conceive new visions of possibility and freedom.

  Rappers face the same challenge as ea
rlier poetic storytellers: Namely, how do you tell the story you want to tell the way you want to tell it while satisfying the audience’s expectation of rhyme? Rhyme, along with rhythm and wordplay, makes meaning in rap’s stories. Together, rap’s formal qualities shape narrative structure even as they are shaped to fit narrative. The most basic convention in rap storytelling is the necessity of working within limitations, turning them to the MC’s specific purposes. On “Regiments of Steel” Chubb Rock rhymes that “Rap has developed in the Motherland by storytellers / of wisdom, no wonder we’re best sellers / The art was passed on from generation to generation / Developed in the mind, cause the rhyme.”

  The fact that rappers tell their stories in rhyme shapes their very development. Rhyme provides rap’s stories with their greatest formal constraint and their most valuable literary asset. Overdetermined rhymes are the bugaboo of narrative poetry; at the same time, rhyme skillfully rendered is rap’s most fundamental claim to art. Those who see no difference between a newspaper account of a crime and a rhyme about a crime fail to understand the process of artistic creation—the necessary act of imagination it takes to tell a story, any story, in verse.

  Rap shares most of the rest of its basic storytelling conventions with other narrative forms, poetic and otherwise. In a rap narrative, chronology usually moves from beginning to middle to end. It most often presents an initial situation followed by a sequence of events that leads to a change or reversal, culminating in a revelation of insight enabled by that reversal. It puts characters in relation to one another; for rap this usually means the first-person narrator in relation to others who sometimes are given voice as well—either through indirect quotation or through the introduction of another (or several other) MCs. Finally, it involves patterning of formal and thematic elements that support and extend the narrative action. All of these conventions are open to revision and even rejection. The one inviolate element of rap storytelling, however, is voice.