Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  Voice in storytelling is the governing authorial intelligence of a narrative. Voice would seem to be a given in rap: the MC and speaker’s voice are one and the same. We assume that MCs are rapping to us in their own voices and, as such, that what they say is true to their own experience. All along, however, MCs have been taking far greater liberties with voice than their public stances of authenticity would suggest. Rap becomes much more interesting as poetry and rappers become more impressive as poets when we acknowledge rap as a kind of performance art, a blend of fact and fantasy, narrative and drama expressed in storytelling.

  Storytelling is, at its base, a form of communication between artist and audience. Its vehicle of expression is voice. Voice is, of course, the physical instrument of expression, the sound we hear when an MC is rapping. It is also the term that defines the perspective poets take in relation to their audience. Used in this sense, a given rapper might employ multiple “voices,” even in a single song. T. S. Eliot distinguished three possible voices in poetic narrative:

  The first is the poet talking to himself—or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.

  Rap rarely employs the first voice, the cosseted tone of a poet addressing him- or herself in isolation. When they do use it, it can have powerful effects, as when Nas reflects upon his own life, or when Biggie contemplates his own death. The second and third voices, the narrative and the dramatic, are both common in rap. The narrative voice is that of the MC directly addressing an audience—this is by far the most prevalent voice, employed in braggadocio and battle raps. The dramatic voice, by contrast, uses the persona of a constructed character to address an audience (or another constructed character in the rhyme).

  Narrative and dramatic voices often interpenetrate in rap. The consequence of this fusion is that audiences often don’t know what to make of the rapper’s poetic voice. Is the “I” speaking to them simply a narrator relating his lived experience, or is it a character in a poetic drama the rapper imagines for us? As a genre, rap has found great artistic success in having it both ways; but it has come at a social cost.

  Rap most often combines the intimacy of the narrative voice with the imaginative freedom of the dramatic voice. It shares this impulse with the tall tale of the oral tradition. As an audience we have yet to condition ourselves to understand rap’s tall tales as acts of projection. Rap’s relation to reality is like an inside joke that much of the listening public doesn’t get. The joke lies in the MC’s winking assertion of the “truth” of obvious fictions. Taken to the extreme, like in the short-lived “horrorcore” rap genre in which rappers like the Gravediggaz (a group that included both the RZA and Prince Paul) described macabre tales to rival the dark imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe, this interplay is obvious to all but the most obtuse listener. But rap usually resides in the indeterminacy found in between the narrative and the dramatic voice.

  As a narrative form, rap can be usefully compared to the dramatic monologue. Dramatic monologues are “poems spoken by a character through a persona (Greek for ‘mask’), rather than by the poet or an unidentified speaker.” Think of Marshall Mathers rapping as Eminem rapping as Slim Shady, for instance, or Troy Donald Jamerson rapping as Pharoahe Monch. “On 99 percent of the songs that I do,” Pharoahe explains, “I take on a presence or a character.” This is far from unusual in rap. So where does the poet’s direct expression end and the persona begin? Answering this rests upon how we interpret the “I” in rap.

  The dramatic monologue is most often associated with the Victorian poets. Robert Browning’s poems like My Last Duchess and Fra Lippo Lippi offer powerful first-person poetic narratives that illustrate the speaker’s descent into madness. In their poetic voice, they involve both the subjectivity of the “I” as poet and persona as well as the element of impersonation—of rendering, often to the point of exaggeration, the characteristic vocal qualities of another. This is precisely what we see happening when Eminem raps as Slim Shady. The voice takes on a nasally whine, the flow becomes ecstatic and erratic, all while the lyrics describe exaggerated and comic acts of violence.

  Dramatic monologues extend MCs’ first-person narrative voices, freeing them to say things they might not say in their own voice and explore territories of experience they might not otherwise visit were it not for the liberation of imaginative distance. MCs have written rhymes that leave their persona incarcerated (Ice Cube’s “My Summer Vacation”) or even dead (Cube’s “Alive on Arrival” or Nas’s “Undying Love”)—a host of circumstances that the MC might not, or even could not, have the firsthand experience to describe.

  In its use of dramatic monologue rap extends a tradition with deep roots in African-American expressive culture. The dramatic monologue is the model upon which such aspects of the oral tradition like the toasts and the stories of John Henry and Stagolee emerge. “In both Stagolee and the dramatic monologue,” notes Cecil Brown, “the narrator creates a character who gives the audience a look into his special world. The audience sees through the eyes of the character the rapper creates. It is the ‘I’ that makes the bridge between the ‘I’ of the rapper and the ‘I’ of the character.”

  By severing—or at least loosening—the bond between personal identity and first-person narration, rappers find a new expressive range for their rhymes. Occasionally, rappers have gone so far as to relinquish the “I” entirely as the focal point of the lyrics. The effect is to demand that the listener understand as fiction the story contained in the lyrics. Rapping in the third person, while certainly uncommon, forces listeners to acknowledge the constructedness of the narrative. Common’s “Testify” does precisely this, rendering a taut story of deception and betrayal while staying entirely in the third person. By relinquishing the first-person focus on the narrative, Common establishes a new relationship with his audience as equal bystanders in a drama of his own creation.

  More common are those instances in which the MC retains the first-person voice, but retreats to the peripheries as a first-person narrator of other characters’ actions. This highlights the rapper’s role as storyteller even as it retains a direct connection between the story and the teller, the teller and the audience. Tupac’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” Nas’s “Sekou Story,” and Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” all come to mind. The “I” of the MC becomes the eyes of the audience, revealing a host of experiences both real and imagined.

  But how do rappers see themselves in relation to the stories they tell? Do they self-consciously assert the dramatic, the fictional element, of the their storytelling? The question of authenticity in rap is phrased as a question of sincerity in literary poetry: “It may be of great interest to discover how accurately a poem reflects its author’s experience, attitudes, or beliefs; but this is a question that belongs to biography not to criticism.” Testifying before a Congressional subcommittee on profanity in rap in 2007, David Banner made a clear and compelling case for rap’s respect as a dramatic medium: “The same respect is often not extended to hip-hop artists as to those in other arenas. Stephen King and Steven Spielberg are renowned for their horrific creations. These movies are embraced as art. Why then is our content not merely deemed horror music?”

  One could answer Banner’s question any number of ways. Perhaps it is a matter of racial, generational, and socio-economic bias. Perhaps the difference is formal, having to do with the relation between creator and creation, the speaker and the spoken. Rap, after all, relies upon a near collapse of the distinction, while the other forms keep them clearly separate. Perhaps the best response comes from Jay-Z. He addresses in broad terms the very question taken up at the Congressional hearing: the perceived virulence of rap as an influence on popular culture. His an
swer gets to the bottom of the question of the “real” in rap.

  In hip-hop, the whole “keep it real” has become more than a phrase. Scorsese and Denzel are not tied to the films they make, so people see the separation between art and life. Unfortunately, they don’t see that separation between Shawn Carter and Jay-Z. As far as they’re concerned, everything I talk about is happening for real. To them, at no point is it entertainment. Rappers in general, THEY ARE the guys telling their story. To me, real is just the basis for a great fantasy. Not everything I say in a song is true. I’ll take a small thing from life and build upon it, and usually it becomes a fantastic story.

  Hip-hop storytelling is what happens when elements of the real become a “fantastic story.” Devin the Dude echoes Jay-Z’s point about fact and fiction, playfully dividing the sources of his storytelling down by percentage: “I’d say 60 percent is really just personal shit I went through; 20 percent is stuff I know about somebody who’s close, or a story I heard. Ten percent is wishful thinking. And the other 10 percent is some high shit we just thought of [Laughs.].” Regardless of how it breaks down, rap storytelling is the vernacular product drawn from multiple sources—fact, fiction, and everything in between.

  If we understand rap simply as fact—as it would seem many Americans do—then it’s no wonder that so many are scandalized by it. But if we treat it as fantasy, as entertainment, then its offensiveness becomes indistinguishable from that of other explicit material that those very same Americans who criticize rap seem to have a voracious appetite for consuming when it comes in the form of movies or television, books or graphic novels. Rap’s difference from these other forms is not one of substance but of rhetoric, not of content but of packaging. That packaging is both the product of corporate media and the stuff of the artists themselves.

  Unlike writers or filmmakers, rappers rely upon the assumption of first-hand experience with their subject matter. Some have called attention to the irony of the rapper who finds fortune and fame by rapping about already having fortune and fame. Rap relies upon this slippage. “Others talk about it while I live it” is a common boast. Both artist and audience consciously create this illusion and tacitly agree to overlook its artificiality. But this fiction has a way of intruding upon fact, be it through acts of actual violence by concertgoers at rap shows—a problem that almost doomed the rap-concert business in the 1990s—to the artists themselves trying to live up to their own lyrics.

  As a result, some of rap’s greatest fictions have become “facts” in the public consciousness. Audiences tend to accept uncritically what rappers say as the truth. Even rappers themselves sometimes buy into their own fictions. When Tupac Shakur was in high school he wasn’t gangbanging, he was in the drama club. He didn’t have a criminal record until after he constructed the Thug Life persona that both he and his fans came to see as “real.” It is a credit to Tupac as an artist that he rendered such a vivid character in rhyme that people could mistake it for the truth, and yet that identification may have cost him his life. Rarely are the stakes of rap storytelling as high as they were for Tupac, and yet almost every story rappers tell plays upon the line that divides fantasy from reality.

  Undoubtedly the themes of sex and violence are disproportionately represented in rap. This seemingly impoverished range of subjects, however, has produced stories of exquisite complexity and nuance. The theme of a story is also an occasion for expression, a way of making new meanings out of familiar circumstances.

  In the mid-1990s, perhaps the dominant narrative voice belonged to its dominant MC, the Notorious B.I.G., who weaved tales of gangster excess drawn more from films like Scarface, Bad Lieutenant, and King of New York, than personal experience. What makes Biggie’s stories stand out is his genius in pacing, and his ability to match violence with rueful comedy. “I Got a Story to Tell,” from Life After Death, the last album completed in his lifetime, released just two weeks after his death, shows him at the height of his creative powers. To a spare beat set by a wicked kick and snare he rhymes of a dangerous liaison with another man’s woman.

  What begins as a tale of sexual adventure quickly becomes one of ingenuity as the satisfied couple (“She came twice, I came last / Roll a grass”), resting in the bed of the absent cuckold—a player from the New York Knicks—is interrupted by the door opening downstairs. While the woman panics, Big stays calm (“She don’t know I’m cool as a fan / Gat in hand, I don’t want to blast her man / But I can and I will, though”), and directs her to stall him while he disguises himself for an ambush. When the player comes upstairs, Biggie is waiting, gun drawn and scarf around his face, ordering the man to give him all his money. Not only, Biggie tells us, does he leave with $100,000 in cash, but also with the knowledge that he has duped the man into seeing an unlikely robbery in place of a dangerous liaison. Triumphant, Biggie concludes: “Grab the keys to the five, call my niggas on the cell, / Bring some weed, I got a story to tell.” The verse clocks in at less than three minutes, but the track continues for an additional minute and a half as Biggie tells the story again to his boys, this time talking instead of rhyming. By amplifying what was already a dramatic narrative, Biggie has, in effect, enshrined his own verse in legend.

  “I Got a Story to Tell” differs in its tone from the other notable story rap on Life After Death, “Niggas Bleed.” Gone are the playfulness and mischief, replaced by a dead-serious story about crime and consequence. Biggie’s voice is not exactly his own, and yet it is informed by his rap persona. He tells the story of a drug deal gone bad. But even on this dark song, Biggie can’t resist himself. With the last line, he undercuts the mood of menace by having his story end on a blunder—the getaway car hits a hydrant. This small detail transforms the entire song, with all its menace and drama, into a setup for a Biggie punch line. Unlike so many of those rappers who followed his lead, Biggie never took himself too seriously.

  Perhaps the most natural story of all is the story of oneself. For rap music, this often means combining the dual modes of braggadocio and narrative into a kind of autobiography of greatness. Stories of one’s rise to the top—in the rap game, in the crack game, whatever—are quite common. Stories of the MC’s life form one of the core narratives in rap. Of course writing of one’s own birth is a hoary conceit in Western literature, so much so that even its parodies (Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy being foremost) are now canonical. In the African-American tradition, autobiography’s roots are in the slave narratives, which almost invariably began with some version of “I was born. . . .”

  MCs have employed this convention in surprising ways. A partial catalogue of birth narratives includes Ras Kass’s “Ordo Abchao (Order Out of Chaos)”; the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Intro” from his debut album, Ready to Die; Andre 3000’s “She’s Alive” from The Love Below; and Jay-Z’s “December 4th” from The Black Album. By far the most arresting example, though, is Nas’s “Fetus,” the hidden track on 2002’s The Lost Tapes. The song begins with pensive guitar chords followed by the sound of bubbling liquid, soon overlaid with a beat and a piano riff that picks up on the guitar’s melody. Then Nas begins, almost as a preface, in a tone more spoken than rapped, “Yeah. I want all my niggas to come journey with me / My name is Nas, and the year is 1973 / The beginning of me / Therefore I can see / Through my belly button window / Who I am.” By endowing the insensible with voice, he aspires to an expressive level that transcends speaking for oneself, or of oneself, to one that self-consciously constructs itself as an artist giving shape to that which lacks coherence.

  Another unforgettable, unconventional example of rap autobiography is Andre 3000’s “A Life in the Day of Benjamin André (Incomplete),” the last track on The Love Below. At just over five minutes, it’s a long song by today’s rap standards. But what makes it stand out is the fact that he rhymes for the entire time—no hooks, no breaks, just words. Unlike the previous examples, Andre chooses to begin not with his actual birth, but his birth as a lover and as an artist: “I me
t you in a club in Atlanta, Georgia / Said me and homeboy were comin’ out with an album.” The narrative that follows intertwines Andre’s rise to prominence as an artist with his love relationships, most notably the tumultuous one he had with the R&B singer Erykah Badu. The lines that follow epitomize the way Andre balances the improvisational qualities of storytelling with a clear and directed narrative trajectory, stream-of-consciousness forays with factual assertion:

  Now you know her as Erykah “On and On” Badu,

  Call “Tyrone” on the phone “Why you

  Do that girl like that, boy; you ought to be ashamed!”

  The song wasn’t about me and that ain’t my name.

  We’re young, in love, in short we had fun.

  No regrets no abortion, had a son

  By the name of Seven, and he’s five

  By the time I do this mix, he’ll probably be six

  You do the arithmetic; me do the language arts

  Y’all stand against the wall blindfolded, me throw the

  darts . . .

  These lines show Andre using stark enjambment, other voices, layered rhyme, and playful wordplay to render an unforgettable story, which also happens to be the story of his life.

  Like so many other narrative forms today, rap too has seen a revolution in its storytelling structure. In particular, MCs have begun to devise nonlinear narratives, perhaps in emulation of filmmakers. “Narrative is a verbal presentation of a sequence of events or facts . . . whose disposition in time implies causal connection and point,” notes the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Obvious examples include Nas’s “Rewind,” which begins with an invocation: