Logic, Growing Pains, Rap Analysis

***As appeared on last week's website e-newsletter***

Sometimes all of you guys on this newsletter just blow me the hell away, you know that?

I’m over here, sitting around, writing about rap, thinking I know what I know. And then one of you send me a song, and it makes me re-think everything, and what I used to know I don’t anymore.

Let me walk you through the entire experience of my first listen to “Growing Pains II.”

So I go to YouTube, and turn it on to get to know it, and immediately begin killing time on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Blogger, YouTube, YouFace, MyBook, wherever. I’m listening, and it’s cool, and I’m letting it sink in, but still thinking, “This isn’t anything I haven’t heard before. I mean it’s really, really good, but still pretty standard.”

And then 3:40 rolls around, and I get knocked on my ass.

I get knocked on my ass because it occurs to me that I’m not even the one person here who’s telling you that Logic’s song is a great one. Arthur gave me such a good song to analyze that he basically did my job for me, haha!

Seriously, by around 3:50 — ten seconds into this part of the song — I know I’m hearing something great. Because it isn’t just that Logic put an extended beat drop here, while still rapping — he put an extended beat drop in here at this point, while rapping…and rapping…and rapping…and still rapping…

Immediately, my mind at this point is racing to connect what Logic’s doing to other examples I might know of. Of course beat drops are classic in Hip Hop — I can right away think of a killer one from Black Thought off the top of my head, where he gives his rap the maximum punch available by inserting his best lines when the spotlight’s all on him: “Thump this in your cassette deck / Hip Hop has not left yet”, time-stamped on YouTube here:

https://youtu.be/3dNkIDPC9UE?t=135

And of course, Lil Wayne has his own greatest one, on “Got Money,” perfectly marrying the beat to the rap and the rap to the beat:

https://youtu.be/crfhQnIv9Jk?t=69

And then there are songs that might be considered just extended beat drops, where the beat never comes in. I’m thinking of Supa Nate’s verse from jail on the OutKast Aquemini album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71jax17z2Fw

or even Big Noyd’s freestyle on Mobb Deep’s Infamous album, called “[Just Step Prelude]:”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bD1Nlhe1A0

It’s also got me thinking about some Cool Kids beats. There, the beats often drop out, but the exiting beat is simply replaced by a new beat, as different as it might be, like on “Action Figures:”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09HeBs4Fx2w

Lil Wayne’s breakdown on “Let The Beat Build” comes close to doing what Logic did, but the producer only drops Wayne down to the drum instrumental…there’s not as much there, but there is STILL something.

Even Kendrick doesn’t beat Logic to the punch. Kendrick’s outro verse on “The City,” from Game’s R.E.D. Album, is a long, LONG beat drop rap verse, almost 40 seconds long with no beat…but Kendrick never brings the beat back, like Logic does on his own track. You can hear Kendrick’s verse here:

https://youtu.be/9xN_EmhQ4hQ?t=267

This all makes Logic’s own rap verse an extremely interesting mix of musical approaches to structure we’ve seen from rappers in the past. We now have to ask ourselves: is what Logic is doing here no more than a complicated version of a verse? Is it simply a long beat drop? Is it a mini-freestyle, inserted into a larger pop song structure? Let’s try and find out.

On the one hand, someone might want to call Logic’s rap between 3:40 and 4:20 just another verse in the song. However, this particular section of the song is so unique when set against the rest of the song, that I don’t think you can call it a verse. Not only does Logic completely change his flow, he also drops the beat all the way out right behind him. Additionally, Logic raps a cappella here for a very long time, when compared to the other examples we just looked at before: for almost 40 seconds, or 14 bars in musical time.

Actually, this verse’s length isn’t exactly 14 bars — it’s 14 and a half, which is a very unusual length for a verse to be. Logic is able to make this a cappella section end at a relatively awkward stopping point, because he has no beat behind him. This means that he is using a rhythmic approach called rubato, where the music-maker is ever so slightly changing the feel of where the beat is falling behind them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo_rubato

So, because it’s so different in terms of length, beat structure, and rhythmic approach, I don’t think we can call Logic’s rap at 3:40 just another verse.

I also wouldn’t call it “just” an extended beat drop, because beat drops, as the term is usually used, rely on the beat almost immediately coming back. Out of all the examples I quoted, the beat drop is never longer than 2 bars, including the Lil Wayne and Black Thought examples. Here, the beat exits for over 14 bars!

Instead, I would in the end call this a cappella section at 3:40 a nestled song-within-a-song. Yes, Logic does have the grand, unified “Growing Pain II” idea on this track, that starts and ends the song. But right at 3:40, it’s almost as if Logic has inserted what could be considered a completely new track. Because he has taken the beat out of the mix, and then gone on to rap for so long, this rap version of a musical black sheep feels like a freestyle. We almost forget that there was a chorus before this section, because it feels so very different. There is no chorus connected to this rap here, so just imagine how easy it would be for a talented producer to take his lyrics from here, put them over their own beat, and come up with a dope remix — THAT’S why it is its own song.

Logic led us down this path, by starting off the song very traditionally for the first three and a half minutes. Afterwards, though, he takes us down an unseen left turn road. We saw this before, from Kendrick specifically…but Logic once more surprises us when he brings the beat, unlike Kendrick did. That’s how Logic can actually give us 2 songs, when we think we’re hearing only one.

Excuse My French, But Is This REALLY French?

Today, I started listening to Polish Hip Hop for a graduate project I’m working on at the University of Colorado — specifically, the rhythms of the rapper’s words, not the beat behind them, the art of the video, or anything else like that. The first guy I checked out was O.S.T.R., this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxq2N38aXGk

I was somewhat surprised to find out that the rhythms of the Polish words were extremely similar to those of English words, to the point that English words could have been interchanged into the melody, and things would still sound the same — the semantic meaning would be different, but the musical rhythms could have stayed the same.

Surprised by this, I decided to pick the language from the countries we’ve studied that is as different as possible from English and Polish, and decided on China. I did this to see if the same thing would still happen. However, the rhythms of the Chinese video here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzwNVCq9bjg

were incredibly similar to those of both English an Polish as well. How the hell could this be?

I mean, when people speak these languages in real life, their rhythms are incredibly different. Having studied French for years, I know that the accent of every grammatical clause or word in French falls at the very end. English speakers like us might pronounce the word for your state like this:

coloRAdo

But French people would say:

coloraDO

We might say:

TEXas

But French people would say:

texAS

All of this is true, even though Colorado’s accented syllable is the penultimate one, and Texas’ accented syllable is its first one. France simplifies that into the same thing: an accent on the final syllable.

But listen to where the accents fall in this French rap song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3sOlpoQYNo

Even if you don’t speak French, and they’re talking too quickly for me to understand what they’re saying anyway, you can hear that the rappers’ accents aren’t falling only at the end of the sentence; they’re falling inside as well. This makes this kind of rapped-French more similar to English than it is to “proper” French.

It seems, then, that French rappers must break the rules of speaking French in order to rap in French.  Perhaps this might be an “extension of self”, a rebellion against the norm that is acted out not just verbally (the meaning of the words they say), but phonologically (how they grammatically say those words) as well (this idea might be developed further later.)

And just in case a person might think these rules I refer to are no more than loose conventions, consider the Académie française:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise

I now quote Wikipedia: “The body has the task of acting as an official authority on the language; it is charged with publishing an official dictionary of the language.”

Could a living, breathing art like rap ever have happened in a language with such a cloistered climate? It’s no mistake that French used to be the language of diplomacy; in the future, we’ll speak of a lingua anglica, not a lingua franca.

English is so popular because it has no problem incorporating other languages’ words, like omerta, or (ironically) even French ones, like voyage. In contrast, the Academié française proscriptively decrees that French people should use the word “le courrier electronique” when referring to what we call e-mail. But what is easier for a person, no matter their native language, to say: “e-mail” (2 syllables) or “le courrier electronique” (8 syllables)? The answer is “e-mail”, obviously, so that’s the word most French people use.

Don’t doubt the power of nativist institutions like the Academie française. A certain percentage of all songs on French radios stations must be in French:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_pop_music#Radio_in_France

And the Toubon Law makes the use of French in many public instances mandatory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law

I mention all of this to show that these ways of speaking French from France aren’t just conventions; they’re taken as common foundations of a well-integrated social fabric, on an equal level with virtues as idealistic as France’s cherished secularism (laïcité: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%C3%AFcit%C3%A9), which has so recently been thrown into the forefront of the world’s consciousness with the Charlie Hebdo killings.

Some other notes on the societal conventions of speaking French from France:

1.) People who speak French from France (not African/Caribbean/etc. French, which I’m not familiar with) speak more quietly than American English speakers;
2.) Such French people talk more quickly than American English speakers; and
3.) French people speak in more regular, straightforward, constant rhythms than American English speakers.

You can see all of these conventions manifested in a series of interviews with native speakers outside the abbey of St. Michel in France, here:

https://youtu.be/L_RxZc7eMeU?t=96

Listen to how quietly these francophones speak, how they never pause (even for a second) until the end of the sentence, and how quickly they speak their words. For all of these reasons, I can read and write French really well, but when I try to speak it and combine it with my nails-on-chalkboard accent, it’s almost impossible to be understood by others.

So in that rap song I just linked to, note that the francophones are variously upsetting those established conventions at certain times: they speak (yell, maybe) loudly, they speak relatively slowly, and they speak in stop-and-start rhythms, not a run of straight syllables until the end. Once again, French speakers seem to have to imitate English (or at least speak in non-French ways) for now, in order to be able to rap.

These subversions of French grammatical norms line up well with the uniquely French linguistic phenomenon of verlan:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan

Verlan basically inverts and reverses the rules of French. It’s not just harmless wordplay; it’s destructive wordcrime, to certain establishment institutions like the Academie francaise. Verlan is, unquestionably, a subversive reaction to such entities; disenfranchised, criminalized (not necessarily criminal) youth use it as a code (technically, an “argot” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot) that authorities like cops don’t understand in order to communicate with each other.

Could French speakers’ conscious or unconscious imitation of English function in a similar way?

Combine this now with what I couldn’t have missed in listening to that Chinese hip hop video I linked to before: the distinguishing tones of the Chinese words — necessary in most circumstances for proper comprehension — are now completely gone! There is a minimum of “high level”, “high rising”, etc., tones:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#Tones

Having talked to a Vietnamese speaker — another tonal language — I found that the absence of what would seem like vital verbal information is actually, to a native speaker, not a huge hurdle. You simply need to know the language very, very well to understand the rapper, and you also have to use context clues to figure it out as well. Similar to verlan, does this function as a way to define an in-group and an out-group?

It’s my theory, then, that these languages actually now have to imitate the norms of the English language at this point in time in order to be rapped. Chinese rappers imitate English’s lack of tonality; French rappers imitate the fact that accents in English can fall anywhere in a word, and so on.

It occurs to me that this imitation of English, in at least some Chinese and some French rap, is an evolutionary stage in international rap. I draw this conclusion because I find similarities to it in the development of other musical genres when they are transported to a different country.

Consider, for instance, classical music in China. After it was eventually accepted by the Communist party there, there was a major effort to make classical the dominant music of the country. For instance, a conservatory system of teaching music, an import from Western countries, was established. Tan Dun, the most famous Chinese music composer (think of movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), is, in fact, a huge example of the success of this system. (He attended the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.)

The early Chinese composers largely imitated Western styles, often inartfully, with no originality or what I’d call artistic self-awareness, and came off as sounding like kitsch.

A modern composer like Tan Dun, however, has merged classical and folk aesthetics in his own music. For instance, he uses the traditional pentatonic scale, but he forms complete chordal harmonies behind it. This gives his music a decidedly authentic feel, while crossing the East-West divide. A great example of this is his “Song Of Peace”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbfLeFYcHhM&list=PLs0cGvZnrIeaZvPFsznyYRho9PZ7q2QqA

Compare the intro of the piece with what immediately follows. The opening is clearly in a Chinese aesthetic, with a deep sensibility for timbre (sound-color). Only afterwards is it that we get a melody in equal-tempered intonation, a decidedly Western development.

Something similar happened when Japanese classical music first came of age. Toru Takemitsu utilized traditional Japanese instruments like the biwa flute, but used it in an full orchestra.

It might be one day, then, that French and Chinese rappers can rap in ways that are not just semantically French and Chinese, but grammatically French and Chinese as well. But that day doesn’t seem to have come yet.

Bone Thugs...Explained!

So, after my incommunicado-ness over the book, here is my first original analysis, post-manuscript. It's about Bizzy Bone's verse on the singular B.I.G. song, "Notorious Thugs," and was done in response to a question from a reader like you, named Ehab.

Enjoy guys!

Peace,

Martin

Bizzy Bone, Analysis:

So, I haven't talked about Bizzy much in my writing not because I didn't think he was good, but only because I didn't know any of his stuff. Scratch that — I THOUGHT I didn't know any of his stuff, but as it turns out, "Notorious Thugz" is one of my favorite songs from that B.I.G. album. I obviously knew Biggie started it off, but I didn't realize the guy after him was Bizzy — I just thought it was some random Junior Mafia member, like throughout the rest of the album.

Anyway, "Notorious Thugz" is one of the most unique songs in Biggie's entire catalogue, in my opinion, because his flow is so much quicker here than it is on almost every other song he made. The song is in a double-time flow, so the rapper either really has to rap slow to match the beat, or rap quickly, to act as a counterpoint to it. There kind of is no in-between here.

The fact that the beat is in double-time doesn't just mean that the beat is slower, however. The fact that the beat is slower actually means that the rappers have MORE musical positions in which to place their notes. Bizzy Bone is an expert at realizing this and taking advantage of it, and I believe that this is what separates him from Twista, like Ehab said in his original e-mail to me:

>singing too fast doesn't make you a goddamn skilled rapper but when it comes to Bizzy l've always felt something different and way complicated..

That "way complicated" part to Bizzy that he mentions, I think, is Bizzy's ability to place notes in multiple rhythmic positions, each of which have various rhythmic meanings, over a double-time beat. That sounds kind of complex, so allow me to explain. To talk about this more, let me make sure that we all know what a double-time beat is.

In normal, non-double-time rap music, there are 4 beats to a bar. Beats are like the minutes of musical time, in that they're a building block for it. Just like 60 minutes make up an hour in everyday life, 4 beats make up a measure (another word for bar) in rap music. And we use beats, not minutes or seconds, to count music, because while we want minutes or seconds to always last the same amount of time so that everyone knows what we're talking about when we use them, we want something else that can be fast OR slow in music, since some music is fast, and since some is slow.

In a normal bar of rap music, beats 1 and 3 are the strong beats, while beats 2 and 4 are the weak beats. Because of this, beats 1 and 3 generally have bass kicks land on them, while beats 2 and 4 have snares land on them. This gives the music a strong, propulsive feel.

Double-time music upsets this straightforward feel a bit. In double-time music, snares happen on the third beat of the bar, not the second, while bass kicks happen on beats 1, 2, and 4. This makes the music sound twice as slow as it should be, since snares are only coming half as often as they should; hence the term double-time. For example, this exact Notorious Thugz' song could be notated in a 4/4 meter at 156 BPM (beats per minute, which is a mathematical measurement of tempo, the speed of a song), or in a 2/2 meter at 78 BPM. And if you'll notice, the snares do happen on beat 3 on it, but the rappers respond to the lower division of the quarter note (another term for a beat.) You can use the website here to track those 2 BPMs on this song, if you'd like.

This is the paradox, then: there are simultaneously 2 very obvious layers of rhythm to double-time beats. Bizzy Bone takes musical advantage of this by sometimes rapping at the faster, 156 BPM level, and then slowing things down to the lower, 78 BPM level.

For example, check out Bizzy's opening lines. They're overall pretty fast, right? This means those opening rhythms are responding to that 156 BPM speed. But throughout the verse, he ends up slowing down the overall rate of his rhythms. Take a listen to his lines at 3:14, when he raps "Beg my pardon to Martin, baby we ain't marchin', we shootin'" His rhythms are much more slower, up-and-down, and almost march-like at that point. While he's using this for expressive effect — to emphasize the poetic point he's making — it also has musical consequences: here, he is now responding to that slower, 78 BPM level. He makes this shifts in rhythmic gear all over the place, and I would now encourage you to go out and find them yourself :)

He even mixes in a third rhythmic level at certain points, when he raps in a special type of triplet flow. At2:37, he raps these words, where the accented syllables are in capital letters:

"DEEP in my TEMple and HAD to get".

That's a 3 over 2 polyrhythm, where the 156 BPM beat is divided into 2 8th notes, while Bizzy conversely divides it into 3. We can see this when we realize that every third syllable in those lines turns out to be emphasized: DEEP, TEM-, and then HAD. This means that his own rhythmic speed over that 156 BPM is actually 1.5 times faster than the beat behind him, since he's placing 3 notes where the beat places only 2 eighth notes, and 3 divided by 2 is 1.5. So, 156 BPM times 1.5 is 234, and this adds a third rhythmic layer to the rap track. This is a complex rhythmic technique called metric modulation, which you can read more about on Wikipedia here.

That got kind of technical at the end, so let me try to paint a more descriptive picture. If I were to describe this more generally, just try to follow along to the structural markers of Bizzy's phrasing. (Phrasing here refers to the building blocks of Bizzy's melody, the sentences he raps and where they start and stop, but separated from their verbal meaning.) Bizzy is awesome because he makes his melody endlessly re-listenable, and we can enjoy his rap listen after listen by paying attention to:

1.) Where his phrases stop,
2.) Where his phrases start;
3.) How long or short his phrases are,
4.) etc.,

with regards to:

1.) The start of each bar 156 BPM bar;
2.) The start of each 78 BPM bar;
3.) The downbeat of each 156 BPM bar;
4.) The downbeat of each 78 BPM bar;
5.) etc.,

and so on. See how deep this is?

Bizzy is constantly shifting the listener's interpretation of the beat behind him, and trying to track him as he does this incredibly quick is really, really fucking amazing, haha. You're right, that there is more to Bizzy as a Midwest chopper style, than some other people. This is because I think he realizes that, in rap, it's not about the notes; it's about the syllables. That is, his approach isn't to try a rapid-fire triplet flow, like Twista does. He just thinks to himself, "Where should I put the syllables?" He imagines musical time like a malleable piece of clay, whereas other, less-talented rappers see it in a more clear-cut, almost woodblock-ish way, where YOU have to do what the MUSIC wants, not where YOU have the ability to make the MUSIC do what YOU want.

Rap Music Analysis - The 23 Most Repetitive Rappers

**I want to thank everyone who helped this article spread. It went on a worldwide tour of my hometown HipHopDX (thanks to Danielle Harling), as well as XXL, BET, Pigeons and Planes (thanks to Graham Corrigan), Complex (thanks to Justin Davis), and even a translation into French (thanks to French Montana.) If you like these articles, and want to see more, feel free to like the Composer's Corner facebook page.

This chart measures what rappers repeat the same words the most. This chart is actually an index, as is explained on Wikipedia here.

As the guy who generated this data for me emailed me, "Repetitiveness: This is an algorithm I hand rolled to use on this data. It's similar to vocabulary density, but uses ngrams instead of individual words. I think it gives a really meaningful metric. I got the idea when I saw this meme comparing Beyonce to Freddie Mercury."


I used Excel to create the visualization. The data analyst got the raw material from crawling popular lyrics websites.

Love,

Martin

P.S. - UPDATE:

Here is the data on how many words and how many songs the data was compiled for each artist, so you can decide how big the sample size should be:

P.S. - It's happened so much I had to make an FAQ for negative feedback, so before you offer non-constructive criticism, please read this.

P.S. - If you like this and want to encourage me to write more articles, think about buying a T-shirt here. Don't worry, I won't make any money off it - it's all for the love of the game. The rap game.

Godïus R.ichard Oasis & Cartier Jones Interview

I don't often push music, so if I'm endorsing a message like this, then you know it's gotta be some slick shit.

That's exactly what we're about to get from Godïus R.ichard Oasis & Cartier Jones, who are about to come out with a full album, previewed in a video planned to drop any day now. If you're into rappers who are a little more out there than most, like OutKast or Chance The Rapper, you'll definitely dig what these guys are coming up with.

To get properly introduced to these 2 Chicago rappers, just check out the interview below.

Rap Analysis - Who Is More Versatile, Black Thought Or Waka Flocka Flame?

There are two main challenges in the writing about rap from a strictly musical point of view, and not a poetic one, for instance. One is keeping my argument mostly at the level where anyone, even non-musicians, can understand it. The second is making all of my arguments as quantitative as possible, and thereby most convincing. I have to do that because I’m writing about a strictly sonic phenomenon, and so it’s hard to demonstrate any of my claims, even when I’m just giving general descriptions. If I were talking about poetry or race relations, I could quote or transcribe song lyrics; I can't do that for the strictly musical elements of rap.

All of this is especially challenging when discussing a musician’s versatility, or lack thereof. However, some simple statistical analysis, equally understandable by the layman or laywoman, can bolster what might be the shortcomings of strictly music analysis in dealing with those 2 problems mentioned above.

In lots of my other articles, I've described what bars are. As a reminder, they’re the building blocks of musical time that are always repeated in a song, and always last the same amount of time. They're similar to how minutes are the building blocks of chronological time. However, bars are different from minutes because bars can last different amount of times between different songs. We need this so that some songs can be slow, and other songs can be fast.

I also mentioned that each bar is made up of 4 beats, just as every minute is made up of 60 seconds. As it turns out, the rate at which those beats come, when compared to a minute, can give us a measurement of how fast or slow a song is. The rate of how slowly or quickly beats come in a given song is called BPM, for “Beats Per Minute.” The lower the number of BPM is, the slower a song is. Conversely, the higher the number of BPM is, the quicker a song is. Songs can vary widely in their BPM, anywhere from that of John Cage’s piece “As Slow aS Possible,” which is to last 640 years in a certain performance in Germany, to the 184 beats per minute of Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.”

Rap songs, especially recently, have a much narrower range of speeds in which they appear. As we’ll see, this is usually somewhere between 60 and 120 BPM. However, this does not bespeak a closemindedness of rap’s music-makers; instead, it only emphasizes the importance of a unique and personal approach that must come from the rapper on every song.

Using an investigation into the speeds of the songs at which certain rappers perform, we can see who is more versatile in their ability to deliver their lyrics, and who is more narrowly focused.

Using music software, I calculated the speed of songs from different rappers’ discographies. In certain situations, I was able to use every official album from an artist; in others who had a smaller output, I was forced to limit the search to only their studio albums. However, this always resulted in a sizable data set of at least 36 songs.

When I think “versatility” in rap, there’s only one person who comes to mind: Black Thought, emcee for the rap group The Roots.[1]

The Roots were the artistic force behind the second rap album I ever owned, their 2002 album Phrenology.[2] Since then, they’ve dropped The Tipping Point (my personal favorite,) Game Theory, Rising Down, How I Got Over, Wake Up!, Betty Wright: The Movie, Undun, Wise Up Ghost, and …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin. During this time, they collaborated with everyone from Elvis Costello to John Legend to Betty Wright. They’ve also been the backing band for the TV program “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” So far, I’ve got a lot of evidence that Black Thought is a jack of all musical trades, and a master of all musical trades. And that’d be good enough for a lot of writers…

But not me, which is where my aforementioned promise of statistical funsies comes in.

As I mentioned before, I went ahead and calculated the speed of Black Thought’s songs for a huge portion of his oeuvre.[3] The results for Black Thought’s 126 songs are below, in ascending order:

Each of those values should be read as, “60.8 beats-per-minute,” "61.8 beats-per-minute,” and so on.

Now, two things are pretty clear from this:

1.) Black Thought has a huge catalogue, and

2.) Black Thought has rapped over songs with tons of different speeds. His lowest song has only 60.8 BPM (on “Boom!”, from The Tipping Point,), while his quickest has 117 BPM (on “Here I Come,” from Game Theory.)

But in that list format, all of that information remains largely intellectual, and doesn’t really hit home. Let’s put it in a graph form that’s much easier to understand, because it’s visual. That same info, in graph form, looks like this:

This is a little more helpful. We can see that at either end of the graph — all the way to the left, or all the way to the right — we start getting some outliers, which are points that aren’t very close to the main portion of the data.

But what’d be really helpful is a graph that described, in detail, where Black Thought’s speeds fell most often, and where they fell least often. That’s exactly what this next graph is: 

The above graph shows where Black Thought’s BPMs fall most often. The horizontal axis along the bottom of the graph shows the BPMs, while the vertical axis along the lefthand side shows how often Black Thought had a song with that BPM along on the bottom. For instance, go to the chart’s highest point in the middle, closest to the very top of the graph. This falls along the vertical “Frequency” axis at exactly 14 times, while it falls on the horizontal “BPM” axis around 93. This means that Black Thought had 14 songs with a BPM of 93. This is his most common BPM, and applies to songs as different as “Stay Cool,” “What They Do,” and “Ain’t Sayin Nothin’ New,” which all come from 3 different albums.

Meanwhile, there are some other BPMs for which Black Thought doesn’t have a single song. If you look at 66 BPM on one end of the graph, or 120 BPM on the other end of the graph, you’ll see that the graph’s line doesn’t rise at all above the horizontal axis, and so it’s value is “0,” which means “0 songs are at this speed.”

As we’ll see soon, Black Thought has a very wide range of BPMs. His slowest song is at 60.8 BPM, and his fastest at 117 BPM.[4] This gives him a BPM range of about 56.2 BPM. His song’s average BPM is 93.2, which I suspect is true for most rap nowadays. That number also fits in very well with the frequency distribution of his BPMs, since it is a number very nearby — 93 BPM — which is the most frequent in Black Thought’s musical speeds.

If I suspected Black Thought to be extremely versatile, then I suspected another rapper, Waka Flocka, to be more limited in his musical approaches. If I applied the same operations to his rap that I just did for Black Thought, could I back this up with empirical proof as well?

Waka Flocka has a much more limited discography than Black Thought, so he has only 36 songs over his 2 official, major record label studio albums, Flockaveli (2010) and Triple F Life: Friends, Fans, and Family (2012.) The BPMs of all of these 36 songs are below, in ascending order:

Even in simple list form, some differences between Black Thought’s musical speeds of Waka’s speeds immediately stands out. For one thing, Waka Flocka’s speeds are more concentrated at the lower end of the BPM speed; 29 of the songs fall between 60 and 70 BPM. (For the musicians: double-time tempos were reduced to a straightforward BPM.) We can also see that Flocka’s slowest song, at 60 BPM, is slightly slower than Black Thought’s lower limit of 60.8. Additionally, Flocka’s fastest song, at 85 BPM, doesn’t come close to Black Thought’s comparatively breakneck speed of 117 BPM. So while Black Thought’s range of speeds is 56.2, as we said before, Waka Flocka’s range is only 25.

This is all represented visually below:

As we can see, Waka Flocka’s BPM speeds are mostly all the way on the left, towards the slower and lower end of the spectrum. Meanwhile, Black Thought’s speeds were more equally spread out.

We can, in fact, combine the frequency distribution graphs of both Black Thought and Waka Flocka to compare them visually:




We see that Black Thought’s output has a wider spread of speeds, as well as more songs at more different speeds than Waka Flocka’s. Waka Flocka is also more consistent in his choice of musical speeds; his most chosen speed was chosen 15 times, while Black Thought’s most chosen speed was chosen 14 times.

These statistics have already yielded some great results in describing the differences between rappers. Simply put, Black Thought raps over quicker songs, while Waka Flocka raps over slower songs. However, we can also calculate how much variation there is in each rapper’s output by talking about each data set’s standard deviation.

As the Encyclopedia Brittanica says:

“Standard deviation, in statistics, [is] a measure of the variability of any set of numerical values about their arithmetic mean (average.)”[5]

If a set of numerical values has a high standard deviation, the values are very spread out; if it has a low standard deviation, the values are grouped more closely to each other.

We want to use standard deviation because it is, in this instance, a measurement of a rapper’s versatility. That’s because the set for which we’re finding the standard deviation is the set we’ve been talking about this entire section so far: the speed of songs. A higher standard deviation means a wider spread of points, which means a wider spread of song tempos, which means a more versatile rapper, because they can rap over a greater variety of musical speeds. Get it?

How do you think the standard deviation for Black Thought’s BPMs and the standard deviation for Waka Flocka’s BPMs compare? Who will have the higher standard deviation, and, thus, the greater amount of versatility?

In fact, the standard deviation for Flocka’s BPM data set is…4.77

And Black Thought’s is…9.16, much greater than Flocka’s 4.77.

This quantitatively confirms the qualitative assertion with which I began this chapter: that Black Thought is a very versatile rapper. So WF might be a great rapper, but it wouldn’t be because of his versatility.

Footnotes:

[1] And not just because he too has the good luck to be from Philadelphia.

[2] Will Smith’s Big Willie Style was the first. Obviously.

[3] A rapper who’s been in it since at least 1992 is bound to have a huge amount of recordings, so to gather every song was basically unworkable.

[4] Double-time songs in these charts are represented in straight time, at their “true” speed, without double counting quarters.

[5] http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/562938/standard-deviation

Talib Kweli Interview

Below is the interview I just conducted with Talib Kweli. I asked him a lot of the same questions that I asked Jean Grae here and Pharoahe Monch here. It’ll be helpful to aspiring rappers, big hip hop fans, and new fans too. I ask him how he writes his rhymes, what advice he can give to starting rappers, and more. Enjoy!

Composer’s Corner: You grew up in a household with some professors in it. For instance, your mom is an English professor at Medgar Evers College, and your dad was an administrator at Adelphi University. What is your formal education history of music like? Have you ever taken piano lessons or anything like that?

Talib Kweli: I think I played a recorder in junior high school. At one point for like a month I took guitar lessons from a kid in my high school. I didn’t really learn shit though. Then there was a movie a couple years ago that never got made but that I got a part for. I played a drummer. I took about 4 months of drum lessons to make it look it real.

Composer’s Corner: It sounds like none of these impacted the rapper and musician you are today because those experiences were scattershot.

Talib Kweli: Those things were just things I tried. I can’t say I learned a whole lot. If anything what I know musically from rapping I probably brought to those things more than the other way around.

Composer’s Corner: Did you have anyone in particular who helped you learn the basics of rap, saying, “This is how you count beats, this is how you count bars,” stuff like that?

Talib Kweli: I approach music from a very intellectual standpoint. I’m not saying that to brag. I’m just saying I don’t feel like I’m necessarily as naturally talented at it as some of my favorite musicians. I think that’s what the interesting about Black Star always was, with Mos Def. I can write really well. But Mos Def is more organic. Even in the way we recorded. When we were recording with Black Star, I’d have to take the beat and listen to it for a while, for a couple weeks, before I was like, “Okay, I’m ready.” And then write it down on the paper. Mos would just hear it and start saying things.

Composer’s Corner: What is your compositional process? You were getting into it a little bit. You always have the beat first and you listen to it for a while before you know what you want to do?

Talib Kweli: That was back then, and I’ve evolved and changed and tried different things over the years. When I first started listening to Hip Hop, I didn’t really listen in an investing way to Hip Hop until like 1987, 1988. Groqwing up in New York you hear it. I knew Run-D.M.C. and Beastie Boys, but I didn’t really listen to Hip Hop. When I got to junior high school is when I started listening to Hip Hop, because that’s what all the kids were listening to. As soon as I started listening to it I started writing my own rhymes and I’d give them to kids in my neighborhood who were already rappers. I was already writing plays and poetry. I was definitely a gifted writer when I was young, so the writing was there. But it was the musicality of it that I had to come to learn. So when I first started rapping, when I gained the confidence to rap under my own name, what I would do is I’d have composition notebooks full of rhymes. Just full of rhymes. And when I started meeting producers as a teenager, and going into studios for the first time, I would try to say these rhymes to established beats. And I think that’s where my style developed from. To say rhymes that were already written with a syncopation in my head or written with a rhythm in my head and try to fit them to different beats. And over the years I’ve really gotten out of that habit and I’ve developed a habit where I want to hear the beat and the rhymes come directly out of the beat. As soon as I hear a beat, rhyme s start popping into my head, and I’m like, “Okay, I like that beat.”

Composer’s Corner: Yours is the first case of a rapper I’ve talked to who said that they write the rhymes first, and then get the beat. And you think that’s where your style developed from? Because some of the rhythms you use are so crazy, and no other rapper is out there doing the same thing. You fit 5 syllables to a beat, or sometimes 6 to a beat.

Talib Kweli: That’s exactly it./ That’s exactly the inspiration. I had all these rhymes that were written a certain way. And then I would hear beats I would like, and I would literally try to fit them. You hear that and you read that as a severe criticism. You’re talking about it as something that’s interesting musically and I appreciate that. That’s something that’s been said about my style that people have said that they love and people say that they loathe. And for me, I’m glad that I learned that way. It makes my style unique. I feel like that’s what makes my style unique. I take comfort in something that Bob Dylan once said. He was like, ”When I go to a concert, I’m not going to sing along, or I’m not going because I can do what the artist on stage can do. I’m going to see them do something I can’t do. So when I go, I want to watch a virtuoso performance, per se.” And when he said that, it struck me. I was like, “Okay, that’s where I’m at artistically.” So while I still make music these days where I go in and out of that style, so sometimes I stay more static and rap to the beat when I’m really trying to get a point across. And then I go back into that. As opposed to earlier in my career, it was always like that, because I didn’t have any beats.

Composer’s Corner: So you have the line first, and then fit the rhythms to that line? You have the text first, and then you come up with the rhythms for it?

Talib Kweli: That’s how it started. Nowadays, it’s honestly married. I think about things in couplets. Rhymes pop in my head as I’m watching TV or walking down the street.

Composer’s Corner: So you’re constantly coming up with rhymes?

Talib Kweli: Yeah.

Composer’s Corner: The couplet form is far and away from the raps that you see earlier in your career. Did it take you a while to come back to this easier and simpler form to rap in? Do you start with the couplet and build off that?

Talib Kweli: Now, I come up with a bunch of couplets. And when they start making sense together, then I’ll write them down on my phone or piece of paper. Then it’s coming together. You know how you exercise a muscle and it becomes second nature? At this point creating music and getting the music from the stage of a thought in my head and to onto a record to onto a stage where I’m performing it, I see all of that at the same time now. When I was writing as a teenager at 13 or 14 years old, and this it what made my style develop, there was no outlet. There was no knowledge, there was no understanding of how anyone was gonna hear this. Now, I write with more experience, more resources, more urgency. Like, “Okay, I can get this out. I can shoot a video.” But back then, I was just writing for other writers only. I had a real interesting experience with Def Poetry Jam. My writing when I first started was intricate enough that I could go to a spoken word event and rap. And it people would take it the same as an ill spoken word piece. But when I got to do Def Poetry Jam by the time Black Star came out and Mos Def was a little famous and we could be on TV doing this, I froze up. Because I had been stuck in writing 16 bar raps for a couple years. And I had fallen out of the habit of being loose with the pen and writing these long, loquacious, multisyllabic rhymes. And I didn’t have anything that I felt like I could offer. And that’s sort of where “Lonely People” came from. The style that I rap on “Lonely People,” which is a record that I don’t think ever came out, thatr was like me trying to get back to that intricacy. That is a part of what I do.

Composer’s Corner: Early on, you didn’t have access to beats and styuff like thast. Some people, like you were saying before, would use that as a criticism. But you see that as something essential in the development of your personal, unique, signature style of loquaciousness?

Talib Kweli: Without a doubt. Of course there was the influence of my parents, how my parents raised me. They taught me what they taught me, and taking me to museums and libraries every weekend. That has had a huge impact on my style, my parents and the household that I came from in Brooklyn. But if we’re just talking technique, that’s where the technique comes from.

Composer’s Corner: Say you’re watching TV and coming up with couplets, like you were saying before, and you write it on your phone. When you come back to it later to work on that rap, how do you remember what the rhythm was in the first place? Do you write it down with spaces or slashes to indicate rhythms?

Talib Kweli: That’s what I was talking about, with the muscle memory. At this point, if I write it down, I can remember the rhythms.

Composer’s Corner: You’ve got such a complex style. Do sometimes consciously dial it back to make the message more straightforward for the listener?

Talib Kweli: Not so much to make the message. I never dial it back for the message, but I do dial it back for the musicality. Sometimes, it’s like Evidence, who’s a great producer-rapper, he said, “It’s not where you place your rhymes, it’s where you don’t.” Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes spaces are gorgeous. You need space, and you need time for the music to breathe.

Composer’s Corner: Can you think of the time when your style changed from not having the beats until after you write the rap to having the beats before you write the rap? It seems like you had that former style until at least through the debut Black Star album, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star.

Talib Kweli: Definitely, definitely. John Forte was probably my biggest influence musically-wise, Hip Hop-wise. Here’s a guy from the neighborhood who knew all the rappers in the industry because he just went out a lot and was very ambitious. He was a very talented rapper back then. Me and him were kind of a group, partnered together. We never had no beats. And instead of waiting on people to give us beats, Jpohn Forte learned how to make beats. And to this day, his learning how to make beats and play the guitar has been his saving grace. It’s carried him through life. He learned how to make beats, so my first beats I got were from John Forte and people around him. You asked earlier who taught me how to count bars, it was John Forte. He was like, “You’re rapping too much, you have to count bars. This is where the hook goes. Songs have a format.” I didn’t know any of that. Me and him are the exact same age. We met freestyling in Washington Park. We both went to boarding schools. We graduated the same year. We became roommates at NYU. But when we became roommates at NYU, while I went to theatre school, he spent one week at NYU and went and said, “I’m going to do music for a living.” And he dropped out.

Composer’s Corner: That seems to be a theme with your crew. I think Jean Grae did the same thing, she dropped out of NYU after she realized she already knew everything about the music business that they were going to teach her.

Talib Kweli: Yeah. Do you know how far back I go with Jean?

Composer’s Corner: I think I found out about Jean through you, but didn’t realize it went back that far.

Talib Kweli: Well, I knew Jean before I knew John Forte. When I met Jean Grae I was 14-years old. She wasn’t rapping publicly. She was just Tsidi, the girl we used to hang out with in the village. Then she started rapping. I can’t say whether she just started rapping or if she just started rapping in public. But she was really, really, really, really extra good. Those rhyme ciphers I was talking about in Washington Park, she was there. She was there for all of that.

Composer’s Corner: So is it only recently that your relationship with her has become more professional? For instance, she was on your label, and you guys started showing up on each other’s songs.

Talib Kweli: Jean is like a real New York city kid. She wasn’t just into Hip Hop, she was into all the underground music that was coming out of New York at the time. There was a trance scene, and an electronic scene, and a rave scene, and house music. Jean was doing all of that, where I was just doing Hip Hop. Jean kind of disappeared off the scene for a minute around the time when I was hanging out with John Forte actually. Then she came back around. People started putting out independent records. There was this crib on Clinton in Brooklyn, in Clinton Hills, where it was like OT, and Aggie, and Bad Seed, and Jean Grae, and Pumpkinhead, and everybody would be at this one crib making music. And Jean was the break-out all of that. She was making tracks under the name Run Run Shaw . She had ill raps. The group was called Natural Resources, and they were performing all around the city. They were developing a buzz. Jean started developing a buzz actually before I started developing a buzz.

Composer’s Corner: I didn’t realize that. I always thought it was funny, that four of my top five rappers have close relationships with each other, both personally and professionally. That’s you, Jean, Pharoahe, and Mos Def. How did you get to know them?

Talib Kweli: When Jean started making records and popping off, and becoming Jean Grae, developing the style she’s with now, that’s when I was on Rawkus. So we were part of the same scene, but it was different crews. Years later, when my manager and I, Corey Smith, came with the idea of doing Black Smith Music, we started talking about artists. And the first artist I mentioned was Jean Grae. I didn’t know he was aware of Jean Grae. And not only was he aware of Jean Grae — as you know, she likes to go out to party and drink — but Jean was one of his drinking buddies. They would party together often. I kneow her from Washington Square park, and Hip Hop shit. And he knew her, like, “Oh, that’s the girl I hang out with all the time.” Me and Corey both were like, “Okay, yeah, Jean is perfect for blacksmith.” I had been trying to get Jean on a song. Jean Grae jumped on “Black Girl Pain”, but I had tried to get Jean on Black Star. She was just doing her own thing. But she jumped on “Black Girl Pain,” and me and Corey get the label, that’s when we were like, “Jean Grae.” So that developed into my real friendship with Jean. Me and Jean were really good friends when we were 14, 15, and then we didn’t hang out for years. And then we became close again, years later.

Composer’s Corner: A lot of discussion in Hip Hop is over flow: what it is, who has it, and stuff like that. If you had to define it, what would you say? And how do you create good flow?

Talib Kweli: Flow for Hip Hop is like improvisation for jazz. Everyone has a different style. You have Miles, you have John Coltrane, and they have their own signature horn style, and that’s what your flow is like. The beat can remain the same or the beat can change, but your flow is how you interpret the beat. For me, the more free and loose I am, the better I flow. It’s something that you can overdo, or it’s something that you can not pay attention to. My flow has developed over time. I personally feel like right now in my career, over the past 4 or 5 years, I’ve been flowing the best of my career. Definitely. I would argue anybody down and play records. I would say, “Listen to my flow on this. Listen to it.” I feel like I’m becoming a master of my style, and I’ve experimented with a lot of different flows. A lot of different ones.

Composer’s Corner: Is rap more poetry, melody, or is it when you combine both together?

Talib Kweli: It’s all of that. It’s definitely when you combine all of that together. There are rappers who I love, that I’m scared of, like, “Damn, that motherfucker can flow. Damn, he can rap.” But they’ve never made a song I like. I wouldn’t go as far to name them.

Composer’s Corner: You’re saying that it never came together, the flow working well with the beat?

Talib Kweli: Yeah. You hear somebody and you recognize the talent, and you’re like, “Wow, that person can really rap. Wow, if they could just figure out what beat to flow on and how to make a song, it would be dope.” I’m aware enough of myself as an artist to know that there’s people who feel that way about me. There’s people who feel like “Get By” is my only good song, and I don’t pick good beats. I would beg to differ. But there’s people who feel like that, and there’s people who feel like that about me as well.

Composer’s Corner: So does every rapper have their own unique flow? And the question is how to make it fit to a certain beat and how to express yourself in a way that makes sense?

Talib Kweli: I’m saying that’s how it should be, and that’s what the best rappers do. There are flows that get popular. There was a Jadakiss flow that got popular. You know whose flow has gotten extremely popular lately? Chief Keef. The whole industry started rapping like that. There’s certain flows that get popular and people run with them. Definitely, Das EFX had one of the more popular flows.

Composer’s Corner: You were saying you flow the best when you’re free with it. Do you mean with where your place your rhymes, how long your sentences are, the words you use, or stuff like that?

Talib Kweli: All of that, but also how relaxed it is. Even if it’s a loud beat and an aggressive rhyme, the more relaxed I am when I’m performing it, it just flows better. It melds into the track better.

Composer’s Corner: I can’t think of a real specific song where you go hype on some shit, like DMX would.

Talib Kweli: There’s records that are certainly louder. “Human Mic,” on my new album that just came out, called Prisoner of Conscious. “Feel the Rush,” from my album Quality. There’s certain records. “We Got The Beat.” But yeah, you’re right. I would actually like to do that more. With Idol Warship, my collaboration with Res, I got to do different things flow-wise and vocally that I would have hesitated to do on a solo project.

Composer’s Corner: If you were to give advice to a starting rapper on how to be a better rapper, what would you say?

Talib Kweli: I would say study the greats. Study those albums. Great art is a collage. There’s nothing wrong with taking a bit of Jay-Z, taking a bit of Nas, taking a bit of Scarface, taking a bit of Ice Cube, taking a bit of whoever. Then, find an artistic community. Try to find one that’s live in the flesh, but definitely find one online. Soundcloud, Tumblr, wherever. Find an artistic community of people you can bounce ideas off of. That you can go rap to, and they can kick a rhyme to you that’s better than your shit that makes you go, “Oh, I got to go back to the lab.”

Composer’s Corner: What are some of those great albums you would say to check out?

Talib Kweli: Definitely Reasonable Doubt or Illmatic. Those to me are the giants of cohesive albums with incredible flows and lyrics. There’s also Main Source’s album, Breaking Atoms. The early KRS-One album. With Boogie Down Productions, called BY All Means Necessary. The Blueprint. Those things are dope. A lot of the Nas albums. Nas albums definitely. Jay-Z albums. The Kendrick Lamar album that just came out, where as a lyricist you’re like, “Holy fuck.”

Composer’s Corner: Do you see anything knew on that album that could move rap in a new direction, with his flow or any of that?

Talib Kweli: What’s interesting about him is that he has a flow that is very much part of his crew’s flow. Sometimes I hear in Kendrick aspects of Ab-Soul, aspects of ScHoolboy Q, aspects of Jay Rock, and sometimes in their music I hear aspects of him. But everybody’s still got their own thing. And I like that. That’s what I mean about having an artistic community. When you hear them do a flow that’s similar, oit’s clear that it’s because thjey’ve spent a lot of time together. And everybody has their own interpretation of it. And that’s what makes them greta. Those guys lyrically man, you don’t find that since Wu-Tang, where lyrically everybody all have something to offer.

Composer’s Corner: Do you see that kind of mutual influence dynamic working in your crew at all, with Jean or Mos?

Talib Kweli: I consider myself part of a loose knit crew of the best emcees. I consider Black Thought as my crew. Jean Grae, Mos Def, Wordsworth and Punchline, I definitely consider that part of my crew and when you hear me on a record talking about my crew, that’s who I’m talking about.

Composer’s Corner: So kind of like the extended Okayplayer family.

Talib Kweli: Yeah, exactly.

Composer’s Corner: I want to see how your process of rapping works in real time. So I’m going to give you a line that someone else from your crew has rapped, and I want to see what you would do with it next, how you would continue that rap line. Is that cool?

Talib Kweli: Okay, let’s try that.

Composer’s Corner: This is a Pharoahe Monch line. I tried to pick a line that would be similar to what you’d write. I’ll read it, and you can say what rhythm you’d use, or how you’d rhyme next. The line is, “This line will remain in the mind of my foes forever in infamy.”

Talib Kweli: The first thing I would do is find a word, probably a multisyllabic word, that goes with infamy. Something as close to infamy as I could. That’s the first thing I’d do. “Symphony”, is probably the easiest one to pick. I’d think of what “symphony” has to do with that. I always approach it as a writer first. What would symphony have to do witht hat? I’d probably spend some time on it. Symphony…Then I’d say something like, “The words are my instruments, it’s a symphony.” That’s about three-fourths of a couplet, right there: “These lines will remain in the minds of my foes forever in infamy.” That’s most of it taken up, so I only got a little bit left. So my flow would be dependent on that. You know what I’d probably do right there? I’d probably save what I just came up with, “The words are my instruments, it’s a symphony,” and find another word that rhymes with it. Let’s say “mystery”, for the sake of argument. So it’d be, : “These lines will remain in the minds of my foes forever in infamy / They don’t have a clue, it’s a mystery / “The words are my instruments, it’s a symphony.” And maybe add, “When I’m on the mic, I make history.”

Composer’s Corner: That’s actually very similar to what Pharoahe Monch does with that line, which is from the song “No Mercy.” He raps, “This rhyme, will remain in the minds of my foes forever in infamy / The epitome of lyrical epiphanies / Skillfully placed home we carefully plan symphonies.” You can see that he also rhymes on symphony, and actually has the same rhythm for that first line.

Talib Kweli: Maybe that’s just me remembering what he did then, since I’ve heard it before.

Composer’s Corner: True. Let’s try just one more. How about, “Real rhymes, not your everyday hologram.”

Talib Kweli: I’d think about twitter, or instagram, or follow man, but toss that to the side because that’s too easy…I’d probably go with a metaphor about Kevin Bacon as the character Hollow Man from that movie. So something like, “Real rhymes, not your everyday hologram / Can’t see through it, Kevin Bacon, no Hollow Man.”

Composer’s Corner: Damn. Shit man! You can come up with that so quick. That’s what you were saying before, how you see it all. I think of a point guard who sees the whole court and sees stuff develop before anyone else doies.

Talib Kweli: Point guard is a great example. I grew up playing baseball. People say baseball is boring, but the reason people say boring is because the whole time you have to see every possible scenario. And I think that’s helped me in my writing.

Composer’s Corner: Sometimes, I’m not too hot on rappers who seem to write 2 lines and then skip to a different subject. They just seem to have not written one verse all the way through, and just throw together bars willy-nilly until it makes 16.

Talib Kweli: Well, there are some great non-sequitur rappers though. Ghostface, Killah, MF DOOM is probably the greatest. I think there’s a style to it. I think Lil Wayne, to be honest with you,a s very good at it. People get mad at home because he focuses strictly on eating pussy at this point. That’s what it is, it’s not that he can’t do it. But think of how many different ways he’s come up with to tell you that he likes eating pussy.

Composer’s Corner: That alone is impressive.

Talib Kweli: Yeah, pretty impressive. [Laughs]

Composer’s Corner: Actually, that second line I gave you to rap off of was an MF DOOM line, from the song “Vomitspit.” I picked those lines because they reminded me of something you might spit, with longer words and rhymes and stuff like that.

Composer’s Corner: Say you’re in the studio and you’re coming up with your line. How much of the rhythm at the mic when you’re recording is improvised or worked on? Or is it the same take every time?

Talib Kweli: I definitely try different flows. I definitely do, for most of my rhymes. Especially the morewordy ones. Some of them are just straightforward. But for the more wordy rhymes, I try different flows every time until I lock in on one that makes sense. And then I perfect that one.

Composer’s Corner: In the recording process, how much of there is a back and forth between the rap you come up with and the beat the producer has come up with?

Talib Kweli: Truthfully, every song is different. I would definitely say the majority of the time it’s me going through rough, rough beats. Rough soul ideas. Loops, and drum ideas, and stuff like that, and then I’m like, “I like that.” And then getting with the producer and we add stuff to it.

Composer’s Corner: So you’re in on the producing pretty early?

Talib Kweli: I’m in on the process of picking the track early, but producing is adding everything to it. I pick a lot of loops, I pick loops. Like, “Okay, I like that,” then we build on that. To me, the build on top of it is obvious.

Composer’s Corner: Jean Grae had a theory that certain words, and even certain syllables, elicit emotional responses in listeners. Do you feel the same? And do you have a favorite word, like she does?

Talib Kweli: I don’t know if I have a favorite word. I think she’s right, and that’s something that you have to know intuitively.

The Infinite - 1, 2...Pass It

This week's group is "The Infinite", AKA James Lanning. James is 22-years-old, and although from Maryland, he attended New York University, where he doubled major and graduated magna cum laude (Where featuring classical pianists from Berklee, double majors with honors from NYU...what is this?!?!) He just moved back to NYC. Here his song, "1, 2...Pass it", below, and find out how he writes his rhymes below. His verse is the first one.


The Infinite - "1, 2...Pass it"

1. When you start writing rap, do you start with the rhythm or the text (the words themselves)?

I usually start with the rhythm I want to use. Sometimes I freestyle for 16 bars or so, but more often I do something comparable to scatting. This helps me decide which sounds and rhythms work best for the beat.

2. How do you write your rhymes?

There is no specific time I dedicate to writing. I am constantly thinking of compound rhymes in my head—while at work, on the subway, in the grocery store, wherever. It definitely looks like I’m talking to myself, but I’m always trying to come up with new material. That being said, if I’m not inspired, I don’t force it. I’ll use that time to work on polishing some of my old material. I prefer writing in a notebook, though I don’t carry one around with me. I use my hand, a napkin, or my phone to jot down any rhymes I think of when I don’t have access to my book of rhymes.

3. What musical training do you have?

I play piano. My favorite composer is Rachmaninoff, and my favorite peace to play is prelude in C sharp minor. I have played for around 8 years.

4. Who's your favorite rapper? Who's your favorite producer?

My favorite rapper of all time is Rakim. My favorite producer is DJ Premier.

5. When you write rhymes, do you always write them to the beat? Or do you write the rhymes, and then try to find a beat to match them?

I always write to a specific beat. I think this is a good practice ensuring that your flow does not become redundant over a series of records. Every beat gives me a different feel, which I attempt to match in the delivery and lyrics I use.

6. When you put the rhymes and beat together, is that it? Or do you back and forth between the two to make them work better together?

I write with the beat. I look at my vocals as another instrument. All of these instruments have to work together to create something that is sonically appealing. I think writing to each beat is the most effective method in meshing the emcee’s instrument with those of the instrumental.

7. In your opinion, is rap music, poetry, or both?

Rap is both poetry and music. As previously stated, the emcee is an instrument in him or her self. You can rap a cappella and still hear the rhythms and music in the words themselves. These words, their meanings, and their evocations of emotion (that is, their ability to move the emcee and the audience—move the crowd) are the poetry.

Big Sean - Various - Rap Sheet Music

This is the rap sheet music of Big Sean's vocal rhythms in the raps of some of his different songs.