Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  Listen up gangstas and honeys with your hair done

  Pull up a chair, hon’, and put it in the air, son

  Dog, whatever they call you, god, just listen

  I spit a story backwards, it starts at the ending . . .

  The first image Nas describes is of a man with a bullet coming out of his body. As we rewind, Nas inverts narrative tension without compromising its effect upon the listener; just the opposite, emotions are amplified. Nas uses a similar narrative conceit on “Blaze a 50,” except instead of telling the entire story in reverse, he narrates his story in conventional fashion all the way through, but, not being satisfied with the ending, “rewinds” to an earlier point and ends it another way.

  Nas is perhaps contemporary rap’s greatest innovator in storytelling. His catalog includes songs narrated before birth (“Fetus”) and after death (“Amongst Kings”), biographies (“U.B.R. [Unauthorized Biography of Rakim]”) and autobiographies (“Doo Rags”), allegorical tales (“Money Is My Bitch”) and epistolary ones (“One Love”), he’s rapped in the voice of a woman (“Sekou Story”) and even of a gun (“I Gave You Power”).

  His most arresting story, however, may be “Undying Love,” a dramatic monologue about infidelity, jealousy, murder, and suicide that would have made Robert Browning proud. It pairs well with Biggie’s “I Got a Story to Tell,” except where Biggie rhymes in the voice of the man cheating, Nas rhymes in the voice of the man being cheated upon. What’s remarkable about the story this song tells is that it pierces the armor of invincibility surrounding the MC’s ego, if only in fiction rather than fact. In the process, Nas explores a texture of emotion rarely acknowledged in rap: human frailty. In doing so, he suggests that rap may yet be capable of encompassing the full range of human emotion.

  Rap has always expressed a broad expanse of moods. Its rawest emotions are often on display when MCs aren’t telling stories at all. After all, rap is the product of two seemingly disparate places—the block party and the lyrical battlefield. The good-times spirit that rap often displays is tempered by the more aggressive, even menacing, tone it takes on other occasions. As a consequence, rap is often misunderstood, taken either as a joke or as a threat. In reality it is both and so much more. It is to rap’s complicated, sometimes contradictory, spirit that we now turn.

  SIX Signifying

  TWO COMPETITORS FACE one another, encircled by a crowd. One of them begins delivering improvised poetic lines filled with insults and puns. The second responds, trying to outdo his adversary by conjuring up even sharper verbal jabs. This goes on for several rounds until one of them gets tripped up in his words, or until the audience asserts its judgment with cheers or jeers. Such a battle could be happening right now in a Brooklyn basement or at a Bronx block party, at an open-mic night or in a street-corner cipher. It also could have happened three millennia ago, at a poetry contest in ancient Greece.

  The Greeks may not have been rappers, but they certainly knew how to put on a freestyle battle. The Greek tradition of “capping” involved contests between two or more poets matching verses on set themes, responding to one another “by varying, punning, riddling, or cleverly modifying” that particular theme. Like today’s freestyle rap battles between rappers, these ancient poetic competitions were largely improvised. As classical scholar Derek Collins explains, “The ability of the live performer to cap his adversary with a verse . . . while keeping in step with theme and meter at hand and at the same time producing puns, riddles, ridicule, depends among other things upon improvisation.” As with rap battles, the competitive spirit of these Greek rhyme contests sometimes spilled over into physical violence. “Improvisation and humor at the wrong time,” Collins writes, “occasionally resulted in death, while such repartee at the right moment could absolve one from punishable offense.” It doesn’t get any realer than that.

  Battles are an essential part of almost every poetic tradition in the world. In the tenth-century Japanese royal court, for instance, a poet named Fujiwara no Kintô gained fame for his ability to vanquish his adversaries with just a few lines. Across the African continent, poetic contests have long been common, serving both functional and ceremonial purposes. Among the women of Namibia, for instance, a tradition of heated poetic exchange in response to perceived slights developed, a practice that continues to this day. Unifying all of these disparate traditions are the basic elements of improvisation, insult, braggadocio, and eloquence.

  While battling might not be the first thing one thinks of when it comes to poetry, traditions of poetic expression around the world are rooted in it. Rap takes its rightful place within this longstanding practice of verbal warfare. When Jay-Z announced his short-lived retirement, he underscored the centrality of the battle to rap in the following public statement: “People compare rap to other genres of music, like jazz or rock ’n’ roll. But it’s really most like a sport. Boxing to be exact. The stamina, the one-man army, the combat aspect of it, the ring, the stage, and the fact that boxers never quit when they should.” Far from disqualifying rap as a poetic form, rap’s combative nature actually binds it more securely to the spirit of competition at the heart of some of the earliest poetic expressions. Whether in a freestyle session or in a recording booth, rap seems almost to require this spirit of competition.

  The battle in rap is not simply between competitors, it is also between the MC and the words themselves. Mastering language before it masters you is the first contest an MC must win, even before the real competition begins. Lil Wayne, who, like Jay-Z, the MC to whom he’s most often compared, claims never to write down his rhymes, picks up on this same pugilistic sensibility, but in relation to language itself. “I don’t write, homie,” he explains. “I just go straight in [the recording booth] and cut the music on. . . . It’s sort of like a fight, I just start fightin’ with the words. I don’t need a tablet [of paper]. If I had a tablet, I’d get beat up.”

  Rap’s proving ground is the cipher, a competitive and collaborative space created when MCs gather to exchange verses, either in freestyle battles or in collaborative lyrical brainstorming sessions. The cipher is a verbal cutting contest that prizes wit and wordplay above all else. It is, of course, connected to the poetic compositions born in the MC’s book of rhymes, and yet it exercises its own distinct set of skills. Often a rapper is good at writing, but not at freestyling, or vice versa. It is almost an unwritten rap rule that the dopest freestylers tend to make the wackest studio albums. Within the hip-hop community, some insist that freestyling is a necessary element of MCing, while others recognize it as a completely separate skill.

  Lil Wayne, as mentioned above, sees writing as an impediment to rap. “I could be at my happiest moment,” he says, “my saddest moment, I could be speechless, I could be voiceless, but I could still rap. That’s what I do. So that’s why I really don’t use the pen and pad, ’cause I kind of feel like when you use the pen and pad, you’re readin’, And when you’re readin’ somethin’, man, you’re payin’ attention to what you’re readin’ instead of what you’re doin’.” So what is freestyle’s relation to rap’s poetry? After all, the complex poetics we’ve been discussing thus far are most often the product of composition and revision, not just unfiltered impromptu expression. Is freestyling, therefore, somehow less “poetic” than those lines born in an MC’s book of rhymes? Are the lyrical products of each necessarily distinct?

  Most MCs tend to underscore the connection rather than the division between freestyling and writing rhymes. “When you write a rhyme it arrives in the form of a freestyle anyway,” observes Guru. “It’s just a matter of how you catch it and capture it and put it down on paper.” Black Thought of the Roots similarly suggests an inherent connection between the two methods of lyrical creation. Speaking about “Proceed,” a classic track from an early album, he remarks: “All the lyrics on there were written down, not freestyled. But when I wrote the stuff down, it was also always the first thing that came into my head. So I guess it was half a
nd half.” Kurupt echoes both MCs when he describes his own compositional process as a hybrid of the written and the freestyled, working in symbiotic unity:

  I think in freestyle, I’ll kick a rhyme right now, you see what I’m saying? That’s like my whole thing. That’s where I get my rhymes from. I might freestyle and say something that I just think is so catty. So then I just sit down and write the freestyle rhyme I said, but then I calculate it more, you see what I’m saying? I put more brain power to it when I just sit and write it because I can think more about how I can word it, you see what I’m saying?

  No matter how we define the precise connection, the freestyle battle provides a way of understanding something of the spirit of rap poetry as a whole. Most rap, whether freestyled or written, celebrates individual excellence. Through ritualized insults made up of puns and other plays on words, rap embodies a spirit of competition, even when no competitors are in sight. Understanding the rap battle helps explain why MCs often rail against unnamed “sucker MCs,” even if they’re rapping alone in the recording booth. It doesn’t really matter if LL had someone specific in mind when he wrote, “LL Cool J is hard as hell / Battle anybody I don’t care who you tell / I excel, they all fail / I’m gonna crack shells, Double-L must rock the bells.” The lines are just as fierce, the swagger just as hard. Competition is abstract, but no less real. Whether freestyled or written, something in rap requires this spirit of verbal combat. It is rap’s motivating energy and its sustaining drive.

  Rap was born in the first person. It is a music obsessed with the “I,” even to the point of narcissism. MCs become larger than life through rhyme, often projecting images of impervious strength. The flipside, of course, is vulnerability, something one sees only rarely, but which is powerful when it appears. When rappers talk about themselves, there is more at stake than the individual. Through self-exploration, they expose an expanse of meaning.

  This chapter is about what MCs rhyme about when they aren’t telling lengthy stories—in other words, what MCs rhyme about most of the time. While this includes innumerable topics, we can summarize them in just a few: celebrating themselves, dissing their opponents, and shit-talking in every other possible way. This form of lyrical celebration of self and denigration of others can be puerile, but it can also be gratifying. It is fueled by one of rap’s great intangible and essential qualities: swagger. Swagger, or just swag, is the essential quality of lyrical confidence. It expresses itself in an MC’s vocal delivery, in confidence and even brashness. Swagger is difficult to describe, but you know it when you hear it. You can hear it in these lines from Lil Wayne’s “Dr. Carter,”

  And I don’t rap fast, I rap slow

  ’Cause I mean every letter in the words in the sentence of

  my quotes.

  Swagger just flow sweeter than honey oats.

  That swagger, I got it, I wear it like a coat.

  Wayne displays the very swagger he’s rhyming about in his deliberate meaning and assured ownership (“That swagger, I got it . . .”). Swagger is not new to rap, of course. It has its roots in the African-American verbal practice of signifying.

  Over centuries, black expressive culture has developed a tradition called signifying. Signifying is a rhetorical practice that involves repetition and difference, besting and boasting. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote in his groundbreaking study The Signifying Monkey, signifying is “the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discourse” with roots that stretch through slavery back to West Africa. Among black Americans, signifying has taken on many forms over the years. The dozens, familiar to many through “Yo Mama” jokes, involves a ritualized exchange of insults, with the winner being the one who could marshal creativity without breaking cool. Another product of the signifying tradition was the toasts, long narrative poems often recited by black men in barbershops, on street corners, and in penitentiaries. The toasts detailed the exploits of street hustlers and outlaw heroes like the signifying monkey and Shine. As in so many of today’s raps, in the toasts the underdog almost always ended up on top.

  In the decade before hip hop was born, the toasts and other “raps” gained great popularity. Artists like Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets and other masters of signifying like Muhammad Ali and H. Rap Brown are often mentioned as forefathers of rap. Certainly they deserve credit as major influences—sometimes even direct influences, particularly in rap’s early years. H. Rap Brown’s famous “Rap’s Poem” from the 1960s might easily be mistaken for a rap verse with its profane braggadocio:

  I’m the bed tucker the cock plucker the motherfucker

  The milkshaker the record breaker the population maker

  The gun-slinger the baby bringer

  The hum-dinger the pussy ringer

  The man with the terrible middle finger.

  The hard hitter the bullshitter the polynussy getter

  The beast from the East the Judge the sludge

  The women’s pet the men’s fret and the punks’ pin-up boy.

  They call me Rap the dicker the ass kicker

  The cherry picker the city slicker the titty licker

  Brown was employing the rhetorical figure kenning, popularized a few millennia ago in Beowulf, which joins two terms together to form an eponym, a self-descriptive alias. It’s impossible not to hear echoes of Rap Brown in GZA when he rhymes “I be the body-dropper, the heartbeat-stopper / child-educator plus head-amputator.” Perhaps the classic example of rap kenning, though, is Smoothe da Hustler and Trigga Tha Gambler trading bars on 1995’s “Broken Language.” Spitting their brand of thugged-out linguistics, they deliver fierce lines like these:

  (Smoothe)

  The coke cooker, the hook up on your hooker hooker

  the 35 cents short send my 25’s over looker

  (Trigga)

  The rap burner, the Ike the Tina Turner

  ass whippin’ learner, the hitman, the money earner

  (Smoothe)

  The -tologist without the dermame

  and my little brother

  (Trigga)

  The cock me back, bust me off nigga

  The undercover

  Glock to your head pursuer

  It is a testament to the staying power of the technique as well as to the skill of Smoothe and Trigga’s use of it that Redman and Method Man remade the track in 2008. This kind of self-mythologizing is a common means of braggadocio, exalting the individual by making him or her too big for one name alone. It is an ancient signifying technique that seems as fresh as ever.

  Rap Brown’s influence is even more apparent in hip hop’s first commercial hit, “Rapper’s Delight.” In a striking example of signifying, The Sugar Hill Gang echoes Brown’s precise language. In the original, Rap rhymes, “Yes, I’m hemp the demp the women’s pimp / Women fight for my delight.” Years later, Big Bank Hank rhymes, “Yes, I’m imp the gimp, the ladies’ pimp / The women fight for my delight.” Echoing across both time and genre, what unifies these two expressions is the art of signifying.

  Of course, it is facile simply to draw a straight line between verbal expressions like the dozens and the toasts and rap. Rap is also music; it relies upon a rhythmic, and often a harmonic and melodic, relation to song. What rap shares with these earlier expressive practices is an attitude, a spirit of competition and drive towards eloquence. Rap wears its relation to tradition lightly, never with an onerous sense of the past. And yet the past is always there, a past that runs through Africa, but also through Europe and Asia as well. Signifying is far from dead; it is alive and well in rap. For some, that’s a problem.

  Rap signifying was unexpectedly held up to public scrutiny in the summer of 2008 when a clip of NBA star Shaquille O’Neal dissing former teammate Kobe Bryant in a rap “freestyle” appeared on the celebrity gossip site TMZ.com. The lumbering lyricist dropped a series of heavy-handed put-downs only a week after Bryant’s Lakers were eliminated after they lost game six of the NBA Finals by thirty-nine points to the Boston Celtics. T
heir personal animosity stems from both on and off the court tensions during their years as Lakers teammates, when they won three straight NBA titles. When Shaq took the mic at a New York club in late June, he channeled much of his animosity into the verse. “Check it. . . . You know how I be / Last week Kobe couldn’t do it without me,” Shaq begins, then meanders off on a tangent about his rhyme skills not being as good as Biggie’s (obvious) and how he lives next to Diddy (or, rather, Diddy lives next to him), before returning again to Kobe. At the end of the verse he spits this bit of rap invective:

  I’m a horse . . . Kobe ratted me out

  That’s why I’m getting divorced.

  He said Shaq gave a bitch a mil’

  I don’t do that, ’cause my name’s Shaquille.

  I love ’em, but don’t leave ’em

  I got a vasectomy, now I can’t breed ’em

  Kobe, how my ass taste?

  Everybody: Kobe, how my ass taste?

  Yeah, you couldn’t do without me . . .

  In a lyrical equivalent of kicking somebody when he’s down, Shaq takes the occasion of Kobe’s defeat to settle a number of scores, including getting back at Kobe for bringing Shaq’s name up in an interview with police after Kobe was arrested for sexual assault in Colorado. At once, Shaq’s rhyme is the best and worst example of rap signifying. Best, because it clearly displays how rap can be used effectively for the purposes of character assassination. Worst, because Shaq’s limited skills as a lyricist keep the verse from achieving the subtlety and invention that signifying at its best always employs. Shaq’s verse is a blunt instrument rather than a surgical knife; it doesn’t cut out his opponent’s heart as much as it attempts to smash it.