Book of Rhymes

by Adam Bradley

  This culture of animosity has been a shaping force in the thematic range of hip hop’s poetry. Whether in the classic site of rap domination and submission, the battle, or in the more abstract forms of the same dynamic in so-called gangsta rap, hip hop has always drawn from these conventional masculine energies. Among the relatively few voices to challenge, or even to acknowledge this obvious impulse is the spoken-word poet Saul Williams. Williams sees a fundamental distinction between the poet and the MC, not in terms of their respective forms, but in terms of their expressive ranges. Where the MC must be in control—the “master of ceremonies”—a poet “is allowed to be introspective, allowed to raise questions,” he told Salon.com in 2004. “The poet is allowed to be vulnerable whereas, with MCs and in hip-hop, vulnerability is a sign of weakness. And so it becomes less and less real, less connected to the true nature of humankind. The further we go on the tip of invulnerability and being hardcore, the less we can show a soft side.”

  The greatest casualty of hip hop’s idea of invulnerability may be its capacity to express the full and complex range of human emotion. Rap’s audience is driven by sometimes schizophrenic impulses. The aura of invulnerability attracts us with its obvious difference from ourselves. As an audience we don’t simply want to see ourselves replicated, we want at least to believe that the artist before us is somehow better—elevated, enlightened, inspired, somehow closer to perfection. Rap often advances this mode of escapism. However, when an entertainer becomes not simply distanced but aloof from us and the collective human experience, this usually spells the end of their popularity. Rap has proved itself quite skilled at toeing this line, of balancing its audience’s need for idols with its desire for connection. The next challenge is to see if rap can become something other than the soundtrack of adolescent rebellion, more than the music of the moment.

  It has already begun. What distinguishes the rap that lasts from that which disappears isn’t always only the level of technical skill. Another significant component is the expressive capacity of the lyrics. Both Tupac and Biggie shared a necessary humanism, a sense of fallibility that endeared them to their fans. Tupac’s boasts were balanced by his more introspective ventures into his own mortality, social and gender issues, and his family history. Biggie’s persona was so outsized that even his boasts took on a certain self-effacing comedy, one that contrasts sharply with the depth of tragedy and pain expressed elsewhere in his lyrics of suicide and self-abnegation. These artists are only the most visible examples of a set of countertraditions within rap lyricism that challenges the dominant ethos of invulnerability, the thematic of hardcore.

  Rap’s expressive growth is also visible from outside hip-hop culture, in the ways that rap has become a mode of expression for an unlikely array of individuals. Early in 2006, Saturday Night Live ran a sketch called “Lazy Sunday” in which two of its cast members, Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg, performed a two-minute parody of an old-school rap video. The clip, often referred to as “The Chronicles of Narnia Rap,” quickly became an Internet phenomenon, a fixture on YouTube, inspiring numerous imitators. What made the skit so remarkable wasn’t simply that Parnell and Samberg are white—white MCs have been around nearly since the beginning of rap and Eminem has gone on to become one of the most respected and successful MCs of all time. Nor was it that they had pulled off a successful rap parody—this has been done before and since; later in 2006 the king of pop parody, Weird Al Yankovic, did a sendup of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty” called “White and Nerdy.” What makes “Lazy Sunday” stand out from so many of the response raps that it inspired was that Parnell and Samberg’s flows, though unabashedly old school, were actually quite good. Their rhymes never seem forced, even when rhyming multisyllabically.

  Rap parodies like “Lazy Sunday” or Jamie Kennedy’s similarly amusing and skillful “Rollin’ with Saget” work because they play upon the premise that rap is always dead serious, that even when rappers laugh, they rarely laugh at themselves. Humor emerges from the ironic distance between the “whiteness” (read: harmlessness, softness, corniness) of the white rapper and the “blackness” (read: dangerousness, hardness, coolness) of rap itself. Tied up in this, of course, are long-standing issues of racial stereotype. These parodists achieve in rap a lesser version of what Ralph Ellison claimed the white southern novelist William Faulkner achieved in rendering black characters in his fiction: “to start with the stereotype, accept it as true, and then seek out the human truth which it hides.” By playing into common assumptions about race and rap, they invite examination of the human complexity that pulses behind the mask of stereotype.

  Rap’s stereotypical place in the popular imagination is dominated by images of aggression: young black men talking about guns, drugs, and violence. Comedy would seem to have little place in rap. But rap has more than its share of comedians, from clown princes like Flavor Flav and Ol’ Dirty Bastard to slow, sardonic wits like Too Short and Snoop Dogg. It is in that territory between fear and laughter that rap finds its most fertile expression. “I might crack a smile, but ain’t a damn thing funny,” Mobb Deep’s Prodigy once rhymed, summing up the common attitude of mirthless menace. Even at its funniest, in the clever rhymes of the Notorious B.I.G., for instance, or the weed-head high jinx of Redman and Method Man, rap often retains an underlying promise of violence. “Rap is really funny, man,” Ice-T once cautioned, “but if you don’t see that it’s funny, it will scare the shit out of you.”

  Rap’s comedy is often complicit with its aggression—sometimes serving to undercut the violence even to the point of parody, other times rendering it more sinister still. Rap shares in the spirit of the tragicomic, the governing mood behind a host of black American cultural expressions, from the blues to the dozens. Rap’s defining difference, though, is here: While it sometimes laughs, it rarely laughs at itself.

  At its most basic level, comedy comes in three types: jokes on them, jokes on us, and jokes on me. The first form is often the lowest; it is humor mixed with a sadistic urge to cause others pain. Out of this strain we get schoolyard taunts and racist jokes. When the joke’s on them, the teller need not implicate him- or herself at all. The second form, where the joke’s on us, is more common and more affirming. This is the kind where the joke is shared by all or most. Think about standup comics who make their living offering witty observations; think Seinfeld and The Cosby Show where the comedy is geared toward the common human denominator of experience. The final form leaves the teller most vulnerable, and thus it should come as little surprise that it is the rarest form of all. When the joke is on the teller, the implications are personal and sometimes painful. The laughter, therefore, is deep and often cathartic. This is blues humor. This is Richard Pryor doing a bit about almost burning himself to death while freebasing cocaine. This is laughing to keep from crying.

  It might be too simple to say that these three levels of comedy are in ascending relation to one another, that this final form somehow transcends the others. But I think it’s safe to say that being able to find humor in one’s own experience has been a source of great inspiration to some of the finest artists in a range of disciplines. Is hip hop expansive enough in its expression to encompass such vulnerability? Do the conventions of the form allow the necessary distance for artists to look back at themselves with ironic awareness? “Hip hop doesn’t place as high a premium on irony as its ancestral forms, particularly blues—even as it relies upon blues and the surrounding blues folklore for much of its material,” writes William Jelani Cobb. “This is not to say that hip hop is completely anti-ironic, simply that irony is not at the center of the hip hop ethos. That said, hip hop has precious little room for acknowledging pain in order to ultimately transcend it.” Ralph Ellison’s famous definition of the blues comes to mind here: “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger the jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but
by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

  Acknowledging pain is acknowledging weakness, even if that weakness is exposed only to transcend it with strength and resolve. I would depart from Cobb’s otherwise apt characterization of rap’s difference from the blues in that I believe that rap has a tremendous capacity for lyrically expressing pain, one that is even now emerging. The greatest art celebrates human frailty more often than it does invincibility.

  Rather than decrying what rap is, it might be more fruitful to consider what it can become. As a musical and poetic form in its relative adolescence, rap is likely to undergo even more radical changes in the years ahead. Where will those changes lead? The greatest challenge for rap may be in finding the expressive range to deal with the complexity of human experience, in its weakness as well as in its strength.

  Rap’s poetry may prove its lasting legacy to global culture. When all the club bangers have faded, when all the styles and videos are long forgotten, the words will remain. “Timeless music. . . ,” Jay-Z mused in a 2006 interview with XXL. “Right now in hip-hop, there’s a lot of disposable music, and I believe the genre will suffer unless you have an event album.” For Jay-Z, an “event album” is one that aspires to the highest level of craft. Rather than a handful of ready-made radio singles with filler tracks mixed in, it is an artfully constructed album that aspires to greatness. It is Dr. Dre’s The Chronic or Jay-Z’s own The Blueprint. It is an earthquake that shifts the cultural topography one verse at a time.

  Hip hop is haunted by this sense of tradition. It is a music whose death was announced soon after its birth, and the continuing reports of its demise seemingly return with each passing year. Part of the fear, as Jay-Z perceived, is that much of the music is disposable—cultural ephemera intended to entertain audiences for the moment, not to make a lasting contribution to our culture. Part of it, too, is the fear of commercialization and cooption. When rappers talk about writing their verses on the spot in the studio, blunt in hand, in fifteen minutes flat, it’s hard to imagine they clutter their minds with thoughts of tradition. Those MCs who do think about tradition often find themselves ignored by the listening public. Mos Def is one MC who’s found commercial success without compromising craft. He describes his longing for tradition this way:

  All I know is I wanted to feel a certain way when I heard music, and I was making music from in me. . . . And I wanted it to be something that was durable. You can listen to all these Jimi records and Miles records and Curtis Mayfield records; I wanted to be able to add something to that conversation.

  Rap has already found its way into the American song-book alongside legends like Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, and Curtis Mayfield. But unlike rock, jazz, and soul, rap has been slow to gain acknowledgment as great art. That is starting to change. Rap now constitutes a tradition unto itself, with roots in Western poetry as well as in African-American oral expression. More than thirty years after rap’s birth in the South Bronx, it is now possible to talk about rap’s history as well as its present. It is the focal point in a renaissance of the word, a development reshaping the very nature of our daily experience, whether we listen to it or not.

  Epilogue

  NOT ALL RAP is created equal. Not every rhyme responds well to close analysis. A lot of rap verses, like a lot of other poems, are fashioned with little skill or care. They might make for good music, but they’re terrible poetry. When it comes to listening, however, well-crafted rhymes aren’t always necessary. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, even the most banal lyrics can seem profound when accompanied by the right music. Great pop music is rarely great poetry; the lyrics usually end up seeming shallow and saccharine when confined to the page.

  Hip-hop lyrics are different in that a striking number of them do hold up on the page. The same musical characteristics that annoy rap’s critics—the predictability of the beat, the repetitive nature of the music, and the limited melodic range—are the very qualities that make it ideal for poetry. The spareness and the repetition lend emphasis to the words. The beat’s regularity provides a basis for the MC to explore different flows, different moods. If poetry is essentially about the precise selection and arrangement of language, then hip hop may just be the best place to find it in today’s music, if not in contemporary culture as a whole.

  Nonetheless, the most popular rap often has the least to offer someone interested in hip-hop poetics. Rap veteran Ice-T was defending the sanctity of rap’s tradition when he called out the hip-hop newcomer Soulja Boy (he of the ubiquitous 2007 hit “Crank That [Soulja Boy]”). In an explicative-laced tirade, he accused the teenage rapper of “single-handedly ruining hip hop” by producing “garbage” rap with little substance. Soulja Boy responded, as one might expect, by cracking on Ice-T’s age and his lack of relevance. But he also issued a provocative challenge: “You don’t like the way hip hop is, then change it.” Soulja Boy and the loose association of predominantly southern artists that make up the culture of crunk, snap music, and other forms of club rap are doing just that. “Crank That” is nobody’s idea of a hip-hop poetic masterpiece: It is bass heavy with simple melodies and even simpler lyrics. It was a worldwide hit that had people yelling out “Superman!” from Oakland to Auckland. It popularized a new dance craze and sparked a host of discussions about the song’s distinctive terminology. What stands out most about the lyrics are the energy of Soulja Boy’s delivery and the vocal quality of his southern slang. The less said about the poetry, the better. Far from being a defect, however, the absence of poetic innovation seems by design. Clever wordplay and complex flows would have weighed the song down. It was a hit precisely because Soulja Boy didn’t try to make the song anything other than what it was.

  The pleasure derived from poetically sophisticated rhymes is not necessarily greater than that which can be gained from a commercially successful but less literary track. The difference is that poetically minded MCs demand their audience’s participation to make meaning out of their words. Unlike a hot beat, a great poetic line is not always readily apparent. As we’ve seen in the preceding chapters, rap’s poetry enlists us in the process of making meaning: demanding that we cede the power of our imaginations to the MC’s suggestion (in basic ways through imagery and in more extended ways through storytelling) and calibrate our emotional sensitivities to register those of the performance (through tonal shifts and emotional appeals on the level of voice). These complex poetic processes occur in a matter of seconds, often without our ever acknowledging them. Those who love hip hop are already nuanced, if largely unconscious, students of hip-hop poetics.

  But while all rap fans know what makes a great verse, we’re still developing a common vocabulary to talk about it with one another. As an art form, rap embodies a series of opposites: predictability and spontaneity, repetition and revision, order and chaos. These creative tensions help define the specific values and conventions that govern rap. To help bring us closer to a language for talking about rap as art, I offer what I’ll call the Ten Rap Commandments of Poetry. I present them to you in closing with hopes they will inspire continued discussions on rap’s complex poetics.

  1. Rap Thrives on Rhythm, Never on Monotony

  Rhythm is the foundation of rap, in the beats as well as in the rhymes. Rappers’ flows, their distinctive vocal cadences, establish reciprocal relationships with the beat. MCs can rap a little behind, or a little ahead, they can use their voices as counterpoint, or they can simply ride the beat where it wants to take them. But they must always respect the integrity of the rhythm by not letting the overall performance slip into complete chaos and disharmony.

  Yes, rap is repetitive: The beats are usually in 4/4 time, and the samples are often constructed on short, repeated riffs. However, the departure from established rhythm patterns is just as important as the patterns themselves. One of the reasons, for instance, that Tupac is considered by many to be one of
the greatest MCs of all time is that he mastered the skill of satisfying his listeners’ rhythmic expectations with his distinctive flow while still finding ways to surprise them with unexpected departures from that pattern.

  2. Rhyme Is Rap’s Reason for Being

  Rhyme is one of the few givens in rap lyricism. An MC must satisfy convention—and the audience—by rhyming words in some kind of discernable pattern. That said, over the years MCs have conceived an increasing variety of ways to quench the audience’s thirst for rhyme while expanding their own lyrical possibilities. In most old-school rap, rhymes fell at the end of lines; nowadays, one is just as likely to hear a rhyme in the middle of a line, or a string of rhymed lines in a row. Also, the definition of which words rhyme with one another has expanded from the narrow, perfect rhymes of the past to half rhymes and other aural analogues that satisfy the expectation of rhyme while allowing rappers a much wider expressive range.