Kendrick Lamar, "For Free? (Interlude)" Sheet Music Transcription & Notation

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.

#17 - What Will The Rap Of The Future Sound Like?

What will the rap of the future sound like? Although speculation may be rampant of it, we can actually consider such a subject empirically. By examining how the handling of different layers of accent has changed over rap’s history, we can then make more informed decisions about what will happen next. Interestingly enough, a strong metaphor can be found in the development of classical music.

What we know as Western music today, from its earliest existence, has been marked by its extensive development of the treatment and handling of many voices singing at once, whether those of a human or instrument. This practice of polyphony gives rise to the very Western conception of the tonic key, what could be called for the musical lay person a type of musical “home” for a certain piece of music. For instance, in most pop music the song begins in the tonic key, moves away from it, and then ends in the tonic key again by the end of the piece. Interestingly enough, much of the development of Western classical music since the beginning of its modern period has not been marked by new discoveries into previously uncharted areas of this system, but rather a continual refinement of how this system itself is handled.

The handling of all of these different musical voices played at once is the musical science/art of “counterpoint.” Counterpoint describes the rules for how the composer is to handle musical dissonance, which can be considered deviations from the underlying chordal structure of a piece of music at a certain time. For instance, if a C major chord (C-E-G) is played on a piano, but a violin at the same time plays a D note, which is not part of the underlying C major triadic harmony, the rules of counterpoint will prescribe how that D is to be dealt with. It could be handled as a suspension, meaning that it would have to resolve down by step to a C, which is part of the underlying harmonic structure and thus resolves the dissonance. Or it could be a passing note, moving in the violin from the note C, to D, to E, which has the D dissonance handled correctly because it is surrounded by 2 notes that are part of the underlying structure.

These guidelines were crystallized by J.S. Bach in the early 18th century, with works of his such as the 2 books of the “Well Tempered-Clavier” and “The Art of Fugue.” Counterpoint had never before reached such complexity, and no work before or after would ever uncover so well the innate, natural structure of the handling of dissonance in music. That is an important part of the matter here: the rules Bach uncovered work not because they acted only in an internally consistent system, but because they describe how music actually works.

Thus, with the writing of his compositions there remained nothing new to be discovered (20th century dodecaphonic composers notwithstanding.) He described every possible kind of dissonance, and then handled it correctly. And so the only thing that would develop as far as counterpoint was concerned for the next 300 years or so would be how the counterpoint system itself that Bach had codified was handled. Basically, the rules which governed the handling of dissonance were gradually loosened over time. Bach prescribed the strictest handling of these procedures, and slowly, as our ears became used to more and more dissonance, more and more dissonance could be used. This can be gleaned for one’s self from the following survey of pieces across centuries:

Perotin - Sederunt Principes

Bach - Jesu Meine Freude

Ravel - Soupir

Even the non-formally music educated can detect that with each work, from one to the next, the amount of dissonance increases. This increase in musical dissonance can be described quantitatively in terms of the musical intervals that are considered “okay” to leave unresolved. (A musical interval is the distance between 2 notes, such as from a C note to a D note, which is known as a second, or a C to a B, which is a 7th.)

This can be organized as follows, where above is the musical interval that has become consonant and below is the period in which this happens:

 

What has changed, therefore, is not the system used to write music, but the handling of the rules described by that system. Bach set out very strict rules for how dissonant 9ths were to be handled: that 9th had to descend down to the 8th, in order to abide by the harmonic structure. By the time we get to Debussy, however, he simply skips from one 9th chord to the next, with no contrapuntal dissonance handling, such as passing notes, in between them. The same goes for the other dissonances. This development is seen by some to correspond to the ascending overtone series: 

One can see that the intervals that are described by the overtone series are, in order, an octave, a 5th, a 4th, 3rds and 6ths, 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 12ths, which corresponds exactly to the order of the intervals in the graph describing how the handling of that interval’s dissonance changed overtime.

This innate, natural, inherent development on a system that has not changed but simply treated differently is the metaphor I’d like to draw when discussing the handling of accent in rap music. It is my belief that a similar change in the handling of accent, based on English’s natural rhythms of speaking (analogue to the harmonic overtone series), can explain rap’s most recent developments.

In rap, there are 3 different areas of accent that are important. There is metric accent, verbal accent, and poetic accent. How can we define each?

Metric accent is the emphases given to a piece of music in its structural units. Almost all rap is in a 4/4 meter. This means that the quarter note gets the beat and so is accented(bottom number of the fraction-looking number), and that there are 4 beats per measure (top number.) A measure is also called a bar. A measure thus has 4 beats: beat 1, beat 2, beat 3, and beat 4. The beats of the measure receive their accent as follows: beats 1 and 3 are strong beats, and beats 2 and 4 are the weak beats. These are reflected in rap by the fact that bass kicks generally fall on beats 1 and 3, and the snare usually falls on beats 2 and 4. When a rapper raps, these are the musical realities that he interacts with.

Verbal accent is something we are all quite familiar with: it is how, and what part of, the words we say are emphasized. For instance, when I say, “emphasis”, I pronounce it as, “EM-pha-sis”, where the first beat is heavily accented. Or in the word “solemnity,” I pronounce it, “so-LEM-ni-ty”, where the 2nd syllable is accented. It is important that we constrict our discussion here to English rap, because the patterns of accent in other languages are generally more restrictive. In French, for instance, the final syllable of a phrase is generally the one that gets accented. This is another level of accent that the rapper interacts with.

Finally, there are poetic accents. These are accents that are created through the use of poetic techniques by the rapper, most generally rhymes, assonance, and consonance. These words naturally stand out in the ear of their listener by virtue of their echoes in other words: for instance, when Eminem rhymes “DRUG SICKNESS got me doing some BUG TWITCHES”, the capitalized words stand out as rhymes because they echo each others vowel sounds. This is also supported by a host of other phenomena, but is too much to go into right now.

Thus, the rapper has 3 levels of accent. And the natural, universal system that rappers must interact with is the realities of the cadence of English American speech patterns.

The most important elements of this system and how they relate to rap is, first, that accent can vary not just from sentence to sentence, but from word to word. That is, different parts of the sentence are emphasized depending on the speaker. Furthermore, there is a certain natural rhythm to spoken language. Although the rhythms vary greatly, one general comment we can make is that there are not long pauses in sentences, at least when communication is constant and working well.

If we were to pick songs roughly analogous to the 3 we listened to before in our survey of classical music, where would they fall in terms of time period?

First, we have to think of where the modern era of rap begins. That is because, as many rappers say, rapping has been going on forever – some say Allah was rapping to Muhammad when he passed on His word. Our first song will then be Afrika Bambaataa’s 1982 hit “Planet Rock,” where we will begin our examination of how these different levels of accent are handled. Our 2nd song will look at Busta’s verse from the Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario”, released in 1992, continuing to examine the treatment of metric, verbal, and poetic accent. Finally, our 3rd song, as an instance of contemporary developments of rap, will be Nas’ verse on 2006’s “Don’t Get Carried Away”. Throughout all 3 we will consider how these 3 levels of accent are handled, as well as how they relate to the natural rhythms of American English speakers. I will then finish with some comparison to some raps that have just come out, like those of Kendrick Lamar. Finally, there will be some summarizing remarks, as well as speculation as to where these 3 songs might fit in the history of rap as paralleled to the history of classical music, and some speculation as to where rap will go next.

Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” (which you can hear at this link here) sets the format against which the rest of our case studies will be examined. As an early example of rap, it follows rather closely the so-called rules prescribed by the system of each of these accents. That is, the rhythms that occur are governed largely by the beat and the bar, and there is not much syncopation. Verbal accent always lines up with poetic accent, and poetic accent is handled very carefully – there is not an abundance of rhyme, and they generally fall at the end of lines.

For instance, let’s consider the first 8 bars where the rap really begins. The rhymes fall largely at the end of bars: “Up out your seats, make your body SWAY / socialize, get down let your soul lead the WAY,” where the capitalized words rhyme and the slash indicates the start and end of poetic lines. And even when rhymes don’t fall at the end of the bar, they occur at the end of the poetic line: “Just start to chase your DREAMS / Up out your SEATS…”, where “seats” does not come at the end of a bar but the start of it. Furthermore, the rappers here abide largely by the dictates of metric accent: there is not much syncopation, and almost every metric beat has a note on it. “it’s (time) to (chase) your (dreams) / up out your (seats) / (make) your (bo)dy (sway)” where the words inside parentheses are all accents falling on the beat, and the musical beat that the word “up” lines up with is the only one that isn’t accented. Furthermore, the rappers abide by the verbal accent of the word, and the sentence, as you would say them in normal conversation: they say, “BO-dy”, not “bo-DY”, which is done to a greater degree in later rap. Furthermore, they rap, “it’s (time) to (chase) your (dreams),” which is how one would say it in normal conversation.

The same general remarks can be made about the rest of the rap. Consider: “(so)cialize ( ) / get (down), let (your) soul (lead) the(way)”, where, again, the syllables or words inside parentheses fall on the beat. There is slightly more syncopation as indicated by the skipped beat at the empty parentheses, but the rhyme (on the word “way”, with the previous word “sway”) again comes at the end of the phrase, as well as the end of the bar. The verbal accent of the sentence is, however, twisted slightly, as they say, “let (your) soul”, not “(let) your(soul)”, where the parenthesized words line up with the metrical accent. So while there is some variation here, the rappers follow largely the innate rules of verbal, metric, and poetic accent. They follow the stress patterns of conversational speech, follow the metric patterns of the music, and keep poetic accents, in terms of their placement, number, and nature, formally simple.

This trend grows slightly more complicated in our next example. In Busta’s verse on the Tribe Called Quest song “Scenario” from 1992 (which you can hear here) he starts out rapping in a manner strikingly similar to that which we saw on Bambaataa’s record. He places words on many of the metric beats, keeps rhymes to the end of lines and the end of bars, and guides the pronunciation of his words largely by normal verbal stress. “I heard you (rushed) and rushed ( ) and a(ttacked) / (then) they re(buked) then (you) had to (smack).” This is notated as follows:

By the time Q-Tip has finished introducing Busta to the listener, however, the future member of Dre’s Aftermath record label immediately gets into why this verse is regarded as one of the greatest of all time by the rap cognoscenti.

Watch where the capitalized rhymes fall: “watch as I comBINE all the juice from the MIND / HEEL up / REEL up / bring it back come, reWIND.”

Here, the poetic accents happen at a much greater rate than what we saw before. Before, they came at about a rate of .5 per bar; here, and for the rest of the verse, it is more like 2 accents (again, rhymes, assonances, or consonances) per bar. Furthermore, these poetic accents occur inside the poetic line, as indicated by the slashes in the typographical transcription and the slurs in the musical notation. That is, they do not come at the end of the bar. Although there are many notes placed on the metrical beat, they are offset by the syncopation that occurs on the 16th note immediately after the striking of the beat. “watch as I com(bine), all the juice from the (mind) HEEL Up, WHEEL (UP), bring it back come re(wind).” The parenthesized syllables are where the metric and verbal accent line up; that means that on the words like “juice”, up”, and “back”, a note falls on the beat but it is not accented. The rapper thus is here is liberating his verbal accent from the dictates of metric accent. Additionally, Busta does not rely on exact rhymes, as Bambaataa did; he is content to simply repeat vowel sounds, such as with the rhyme, “no BRAGGING / try to read my mind, just iMAGINE”, where the capitalized words rhyme.

Furthermore, in what is probably one of the most important developments in rap up until now and moving forward, as we shall see in Kendrick Lamar’s "good kid, m.A.A.d. city", Busta separates verbal accent from perfect alignment with the metrical accent, while preserving the word’s natural pronunciation. He rhymes, “(heel) up, wheel (up)”. The word “wheel”, although it doesn’t fall on the metrical accent of the beat, receives the verbal accent. In previous times, one gets the feeling that rappers like that from Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation clique would have adjusted the verbal accent of the line to match up with the metrical accent. Thus, where the parentheses represent the metrical beat but the capitalized syllables represented the verbal accent, they would have said, “(HEEL) up, wheel (UP)”, not, as Busta rhymes, “(HEEL) up, WHEEL (up)”, with the same typographical symbol key as before. Indeed, this adjustment is exactly what Busta does later in the verse:

 Busta changes the normal verbal accent pattern of the word “buttcheek” from “BUTTcheek” to “buttCHEEK” so that the syllable “cheek” lines up with the metrical accent of the word. He does the same for the word “Horatio” and “Observe:”

 It seems that this transition has not been completed in the collective conscious of rapperdom.

In our other areas of accent, however, Busta continues to evolve from what came before. 

Here, the difference between Busta’s flow and that from the Bambaataa track are clear: there is much more syncopation, many more notes happening completely off the beat. What’s more is that Busta feels completely comfortable altering the nature of his poetic line. Before, the line generally consisted of a full sentence, with both a verb and a noun, that abided by the start and end of a bar line. Here, Busta has no problem making his poetic line only fragments (“Oh my gosh / oh my gosh”) and fitting more than one of them inside a bar, giving him much more freedom in his flows since he does not have to abide as greatly by the rules of natural speech. (The argument for why this is would need another long article, and so won’t be fully addressed here.)

So, Bambaataa largely lined up his verbal accents with the metric accents of the music. Furthermore, he abided largely by the dictates of the metric accent when placing his notes in the bar, meaning there is not much syncopation. Furthermore, his poetic accents were rather simple, coming at the end of poetic lines that followed the musical barline.

Busta, meanwhile, liberated verbal accent from metric accent by preserving natural verbal accent in some places in defiance of the prevailing metrical accent. In other places, he adjusts the verbal accent in order to align it with the metrical accent. His poetic accents, furthermore, come inside the line, at a rate of about 1.5 per bar. Also, they are of a more obtuse nature, not always being completely clearly connected, such as through exact rhymes, to what came before.

In a 3rd case study, then, we’d expect to find a continuation of all these trends. That is, verbal accent would be divorced from the metrical accent to a much greater degree, going so far as not only to be an aberration in the flow but to give the flow its defining, asymmetric rhythm. Furthermore, poetic accents could come anywhere in the poetic line, at a much greater rate, and could be of greatly different, even obtuse, natures. Finally, we’d expect to find poetic lines of greatly different natures as well – some short, some long, some fragments, some sentences, some abiding by the bar line, some not, and so on.

And that is exactly what we find in Nas’ verse on the Busta Rhymes song, “Don’t Get Carried Away”, from 2006. You can hear it here, and see the full notation at the end of this article.

Nas, in short, blows all of our previous conceptions away. Most prominently, and what informs the rhythm of the whole verse from its first bar to the last, is that the verbal accents of the words, while preserved intact in their normal pronunciation, are completely divorced from the metrical accent over and over, happening no less than 12 times. They are indicated in the complete sheet music below by the capitalized words in the lyrics, first happening on the “smar-“ of the word “smarter.”

 It happens again on the 2nd syllable of “interest,” and so on. This is a great example of a rap that would not make much musical sense without a backing beat behind it. You can hear it for yourself at this video below:

  That is because, as Adam Bradley asserts in his book “Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop”, the backing beat is repetitive not because rapmakers don’t know how to make it anymore musically interesting, but because it must be so in order that the rapper can be more venturesome musically. If you listen to the computer rendering of just Nas’ rhythms below, you are not entirely sure as to where the beats are coming. That’s because of Nas’ frequent divorcing of the verbal accent from the metric accent of the beat. Again, this is a freer handling of accent: now, verbal accents do not have to at all line up with the metric accent of the music. The power dynamic of the 2, so to speak, can even go in the opposite direction, as we shall see.

Poetically, there is not a greater rate of accents, at least not much more than Busta’s amount and certainly not as many as Eminem has at times (and even Nas himself for that matter.) However, they are much more obtuse in relation to one another. They are not necessarily exact rhymes but merely vowel and consonant sound echoes, such as between “short” and “dwarf” in bar 7. Sometimes they rely only on the repetition of certain accented sounds, such as the “n” of “enigma” and the “is none” that follows, or the “par” from “departure” carried across the barline into the “pardon Dre…” line.

What is most genius about this verse, however, is how Nas eventually makes all 3 levels of accent – poetic, metric, and verbal – manipulate each other simultaneously to give rise to a new, never-heard-before rhythmic structure. This is seen most clearly in bars 14-19, where the time signature changes from 4/4 to a group of 2/8, 3/8, and 6/16 time signatures repeated twice. One will notice that Nas has changed the metric accent of the rap, previously 4/4, to be changed into these new complex and compound time signatures. Observe them in isolation:

 Nas changed the time signature by manipulating the verbal and poetic accent of his rap. You can see that, for all of the time signatures, a poetic accent, which we previously established creates a natural emphasis in the listener’s ear, falls on its strong beat. The “my” in the 2/8 bar rhymes with the “mind” immediately after, as well as the “nine” that falls on the strong beat of the first 6/16 measure. Furthermore, the “spray” from the first 3/8 time signature rhymes with the “dre” that comes in the 2nd 6/16 bar. The “freak” from the 2nd 2/8 time signature rhymes with the “three” from the 3/8 bar immediately following it, while the “-i-“ vowel sound of the strong-beat “like” is reflected in the “-i-“ vowel sounds that came before: “my”, “mind”, “my”, and “nine.” Finally, the “an-“ from “Andre” rhymes with “mind” and “nine” (listen closely to how Nas adjusts their “true” pronunciation to make them rhyme.) Furthermore, observe the phrasal grouping of his poetic lines: in the first 2/8+3/8+6/16 time signature grouping, they are organizing by the bar line, starting and ending there. In the 2nd grouping, which also equals its own 4/4 bar (2 8th notes + 3 8th notes + 6 16th notes = 16 16th notes = 4 quarter notes and 1 bar of 4/4), the poetic line (again, as indicated by the slur below the music) starts and ends exactly where the time signature grouping does. Furthermore, Nas’ verbal accents largely line up with the strong beats as well. This occurs on the words “spray”, “nine”, and so on. Thus, not only has Nas not had his verbal and poetic accent abide by the law of the metric accent in the music, but he has combined them in order to manipulate and change the metric accent itself!

We can see these trends manifest themselves today in someone like Kendrick Lamar as well, especially in his song “good kid, m.A.A.d. city”, from the album of the same name (you can hear the song here.) That’s because although in rap’s 4/4 time signature the beat is usually divided into 4 16th notes, they can also be divided into even 5 – quintuplets or 6 – sextuplets. That’s exactly what Kendrick does in this song: he switches his rhythms flawless between quintuplets and sextuplets, as you can see below.
 He then places poetic accents anywhere inside of these new beat divisions, a complexity of positioning that has rarely been matched before. Furthermore, he varies the nature of his poetic lines as well.

So, in short, rappers today now handle verbal, poetic, and metric accent much more freely than they have in the past. It would then be logical to predict that this trend will continue, until, paradoxically rapping becomes even more similar to spoken language.

Thanks for reading!

Javotti Media - The Cathedral Album Review

Talib Kweli has a deep history of working with strong talent in its early stages before he or she has achieved huge popularity; Kanye West’s 3 beats on Kweli’s 2002 effort Quality come to mind most immediately. With that kind of credibility, any album Kweli co-signs, such as label Javotti Media’s new project The Cathedral, deserves a look. While it’s never easy to identify a superstar before they’re born, the undiscovered star of this show is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the very one that Kweli himself decided to release an album with a few years ago under the homonymic moniker Idle Warship.

That musician is singer Res, a budding star who shines on the 14^th track of The Cathedral, entitled “For Who You Are,” which reminds the listener of an old jazz standard in the best possible way. The comparisons that this Philly vocalist is sure to draw to Lauryn Hill circa The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, or Aretha Franklin in her prime, makes a listener wonder why this track was placed towards the end of the album. The fact that there is no conventional rapping on this song speaks to the more general fact that there is something here for everyone, no matter their favorite rap subgenre.

 “Purest Heart” is almost a chopped and screwed beat from Texas, with its unintelligible vocal samples, spastic hi-hats, layered snare slaps, and double-time tempo. “Manifest Destiny” has a 90s Atlanta-esque groove that’s supported by truly funky horns before an extreme bebop brass solo takes over. A classic rap stoner track, “Roll Me Up,” recalls the slower kind of Dr. Dre G-funk with its expansive keyboards. “Doc Shebeleza Remix” even features a textbook Memphis triplet flow from Cassper Nyovest. This perhaps isn’t surprising when the diverse geographical origins of this crew are recognized: Cory Mo was born in Houston, while débutante Res comes from Philadelphia originally.

But these references to larger musical currents in mainstream Hip Hop are always bolstered by a willingness to embrace the eclectic. “Hypnotized Snakes,” from NIKO IS, makes use of an Middle Eastern music vocal sample that somehow works perfectly with the Latin percussion behind it. These musicians also consistently show a willingness to think beyond just hooks and choruses. There are multiple instrumental interludes, such as on the aforementioned “Manifest Destiny.” Meanwhile, K-Valentine’s “Chiraq” is a singeing, searing freestyle that clocks in at almost two-and-a-half minutes. “What’s Real (Live)” has an extended dynamic crescendo at the end.

This compilation isn’t the Boss Yo Life Up Gang album of 2013, whose spotlight shown on established artists Young Jeezy and YG. The Cathedral conversely mixes in a number of appearances from more established talent who will draw in a larger public to hear their lesser known brethren. Appearances from Pharoahe Monch, Big K.R.I.T., and the album anchor, Kweli, should be enough to grab many mainstream underground listeners. Kweli himself leads the way on the first track, setting the tone for the originality found on the rest of the album by using a wide-ranging, affected delivery that one doesn’t hear very often from him. The long block rhymes are still there, however; “foolishness” flipped with “pugilist” are classic Kweli.

If The Cathedral doesn’t make use of old school sounds as much as one might expect, directed as it is by an experienced NYC rapper, then it makes use of an old school aesthetic. That’s a holistic, comprehensive artistic approach. For example, before Nas’ Illmatic in 1994, most production for an album was handled all by the same producer, as by Eric B. for Rakim on Paid In Full in 1987. There are no breaks for silence, even for a second, between each track on The Cathedral, and each track’s own beat frequently bleeds into the next. Even the host of the album, Affion Crockett, is a throwback to the original meaning of a rapper’s initials: MC. Affion is more a master of ceremonies than someone who just introduces and ends each song with ad libs, instead acting as a comedian who commentates on all of the album’s action as a fully integrated player. Throw in quotes or samples of Nas, Wu-Tang Clan, 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar, and Fleetwood Mac, and these artists’ musical consciousness turns out to be strongly unified.

Overall, the refreshingly large ambition of this musically kaleidoscopic album results in something that is greater than the sum of its parts. With so many versatile sounds from so many different artists that all work together as one, prospective listeners would do well to keep an eye (and an ear) out for these artists’ upcoming solo projects.

Rap Analysis - How To Have Better Delivery

Many rap fans complain, “Radio sucks”. While being accurate, it also relies on a common misconception: that rappers on the radio are supposed to be good musically. Musicians on the radio are really only meant to be good financially, so that they can sell records. However, record labels like Interscope spend millions of dollars every year to discover and sell their acts. Would any intelligent music fan really believe that the musicians they choose aren’t at least good at something? So what exactly are they good at?

It might do well to consider what all rappers who are on the radio have in common. They aren’t all master rhymers – Kendrick can rattle off multisyllables on “F*ckin’ Problems”, like “Hallelujah / Holla back, I’ll do ya”, where almost all the syllables rhyme, but is Big Sean’s rhyme, “I tell a bad bitch do whatever I say / My block behind me like I’m coming out the driveway”, from “Clique” anywhere close? (All songs referenced here are on the Billboard Top 10 at the time of this writing).

Macklemore can drop solid puns, like “Ice on the fringe is so damn frosty / The people like, ‘Damn, that’s a cold ass honky’”, from “Thrift Shop”, but can he rhyme in the pocket like T.I. on “Ball”? “They like, eh, look at T.I. , ballin’ in the V.I. / bunch of bad bitches with him looking like Aaliyah” So if none of those four things, what do they all have in common?

They all have awesome delivery.

Delivery in rap is the way you say your words. Delivery, rather than being measured with numbers, is instead only able to be described. Delivery can be hard as concrete, like Mos Def in “Mathematics:"

Would the line “The system break man, child and women into figures / two columns for who is and who ain’t niggas!” line from “Mathematics” be the same without Mos Def’s cynical indignation as he says it?

Delivery can be soft, as well.

Sure, on the page, the line “Soul food, you know how Granny do it / When I brought it why the guard have to look all through it?” looks pretty good, but would it be half as much without the heartbroken, lilting delivery Kanye gives it on “Family Business”?


So what can you do to have a better delivery?

When you write, be sure to rap out loud to yourself. No rapping in your head and then writing it down. Write to a beat so that your delivery fits with the song. Imagine how mismatched Mos’ delivery would be if it were on Kanye’s “Family Business”! Ask yourself some questions when you listen to your rap: do you sound like you absolutely, truly believe what you’re saying? Because if you don’t, why should anyone else? Listen closely to the rappers who have great delivery, including those on the radio.

Listen to how their voices fluctuate up and down in pitch, almost as if they were singing, and whether they flow along, or more often stop and start. As often as you can record audio of yourself rapping back and ask these questions. You might also try rapping some of your favorite verses by other rappers and giving them your own signature delivery, changing rhythms and words as necessary.
As a finale, just consider: there are better rappers, there are worse rappers, but any rapper you’ve ever heard of didn’t sound like he didn’t believe what he was saying to be so true that it should be completely self-evident to anyone who hears it too.

Why Eminem Is A Rap Jimi Hendrix - Rap Analysis

You check your phone for the time, wondering, “Who does my music teacher think they are?”

Being kept waiting is one thing, but paying someone who is late on you is something else. However, eventually you might want to ask yourself instead, “Who do other people think my music teacher is?,” because you won’t be learning just any kind of music from them.

Only for now you sit back, trying to relax and ignore the glare from the portrait of Beethoven on the wall — or Mozart, or Bach, they all have funny wigs on usually, so who can tell? But it’s right above the gleaming black grand piano you’re sitting at, so it’s hard to look somewhere else. You could take a seat at the very impressive 20-piece drum set over there, you figure. But then you’d have to pass by the array of expensive guitars drawn up in orderly rows and columns like a little guitar army, and you can just imagine the disastrous domino effect you’d start if you accidently bumped into one of them. Staring at the microphone set up to record a vocalist’s performance, you guess that the chest-high stack of notated music scores are right next to it so that your teacher can get to them easily. “I mean, professor, not teacher…” A successful, highly respected musician like the one who would have to work in this gorgeous studio would surely desire the statelier, more respectful title. But you can’t really be sure, because you’ve never met your new teach…professor; you only recently signed up for lessons. And while you’re thinking through all of this, the professor still hasn’t come. “What’s the deal?”

But look at your phone again, and try searching his name on the Internet in order to find some good reasons for your waiting in the musical awards and praise he’s no doubt won in the past. Because some of his lyrics from the songs you might come across could make you stop your complaining very, very quickly:

“All I do is drop f-bombs, feel my wrath of attack.”

“I spit when I talk. I’ll [CENSORED] anything that walks.”

“Let’s shoot him in his kneecaps, he’ll never see it coming!”

And just now you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, 5 or 15 or 500 minutes late isn’t so bad…”

Because those are not the kind of sentiments, sentences, or expletives usually heard from accomplished musicians, or accomplished anythings, for that matter. Besides seeming to have more curses than witches and warlocks, it also sounds like he gets around more than the vinyl records his albums are sometimes printed on. But the lessons you signed up for are actually lessons on how to rap, so this musician might break a lot of people’s preconceived notions of what a musician should act like or look like.

But what else besides “musician” could you call someone who has practiced and honed their abilities on an instrument for years while mastering it technically? Who can express themselves convincingly in multiple ways by sometimes being more in your face than a nose, sometimes more underhanded than a softball pitcher? Who maintains an original artistic voice while acknowledging their predecessors and influences? These are all characteristics of a master musician, no matter whether they do their work at a piano, a drum set, a guitar, or a microphone, like the mystery rap instructor from the start of this chapter. Let the suspense build for a bit before I reveal his true, real life identity, and in the meantime I’ll show that many people don’t consider rappers to be true musicians and that this negative stance towards rap, which comes from many different corners of our society, affects the way both rap outsiders and rap fans view the genre.

For example, lawyers have been using rap videos and lyrics as evidence in criminal trials in order to prosecute suspects, as detailed in a 2014 New York Times article.[i] The authors write, “As expert witnesses who have testified in such cases, we have observed firsthand how prosecutors misrepresent rap music to judges and juries.” The case the writers discuss comes from New Jersey, but what they detail is not an isolated incident in just one state.[ii][iii] Meanwhile, this judicial and legal practice has never been instituted for other kinds of music like rock. Skepticism towards the genre’s artistic value also comes from political and cultural channels as well. President Barack Obama was involved with his own rap-related controversy when First Lady Michelle Obama invited Chicago rapper Common to perform at the White House in 2011. The administration was attacked by critics for supporting Common, a supposedly “controversial” and “vile” rapper.[iv] But Common’s real message at the small concert was specifically against violence, as he performed such lyrics as, “It’s hard to see blessings in a violent culture.”[v] The outcry against Common showed that some news outlets were skeptical of the genre as a whole when they lumped a rapper renowned for his politically conscious messages into a supposedly uniform group of gangsters and thugs. There was little similar protest against past White House invites like soul king James Brown in 2001, who is well known for his raunchy songs about sex and his multiple arrests throughout the years for drugs, weapons, and domestic violence. Resistance towards rap has even come from the artistic world itself at times. Rap did not receive its own Best Song category at the Grammys until 2004, 12 years after rock first did, and 18 years after rap group Run-D.M.C. had great success with their album Raising Hell, which went triple-platinum by selling more than 3 million copies. An Internet-wide search also returns few results of academic papers that are written on rap in terms of its musical characteristics, further showing that few people think of rappers as musicians first and foremost. The reader very well may feel that rappers are musicians, but there others out there in powerful positions in the world who don’t, and this is bad for the way both rap diehards and strangers to rap feel about the music.

All of these large-scale trends might seem far removed from a rap fan’s own enjoyment of their favorite music, but they actually affect how even a dedicated listener views the genre in small but crucial and negative ways. For example, there are many names that are used to refer to the words a rapper writes: lyrics, lines, verses, rap, even poetry, sometimes. Yet none of those terms refer to uniquely musical details, like rhythm, melody, or orchestration. This has unfavorable consequences when it allows rap’s opponents, like those just detailed, to continue their attacks with fewer challenges to what they say. While hurting rap fans, their claims also encourage possible newcomers to the music to never hear it in the first place, and so such possible converts miss out on a whole lot of very enjoyable art. To be fair, rap has its own share of unusual characteristics that do set it apart from most kinds of music in some ways. For instance, rap performance has no established system of schools or teachers dedicated to its practice, as pianists and guitarists do, that might lead outsiders to take it more seriously (Alas, our opening story of a rap music teacher was just that: a story.)


But if we were to look past those peculiarities, like the lurid subject matter that our previous police departments and political commentators chose to emphasize, we would start to see rappers as true musicians. We can do this by sticking to an artistic template that can be established around already widely recognized musicians like The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Michael Jackson, each of whom have sold at least 10 million records and many awards. Those acts altogether cover various genres, including disco, R&B, soul, and pop, not to mention all kinds of rock, such as psychedelic, blues, electronic, experimental, folk, and still more. But as we’ll see, they also possess timeless musical skills that all very talented musicians do: technical mastery of an instrument, originality, and versatility. Certainly there are other artists that can be included on this list who would also fit our criteria and expand our musical horizons into jazz and other areas, such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, and still more. But that entire list of critically and popularly acclaimed artists is conspicuously missing a very popular genre of today’s musical world: rap. Representative of this is the fact that there is no rap artist higher than 44th place in Rolling Stone magazine’s “100 Greatest Artists Of All Time” article[vi]. My goal is to change that by showing that rappers are true musicians on the level of Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, or even that Beethoven guy from the start of our story.


As colleagues in this group like John Lennon or Michael Jackson who would leave this world a few Grammy awards early, Jimi Hendrix still managed to leave a footprint in the musical world the size of Big Foot’s. Despite the short time frame of his 4-year solo career, you can listen to any of the Seattle guitarist’s tracks to hear his searing virtuosity, but particularly on the song “All Along The Watchtower.” Hendrix’s lightning-quick playing, use of complex techniques like harmonics, and his stamina in being able to play for hours straight at his live shows all speak to his unsurpassed skill. Soaring pitch bends and impossibly quick chords in his solo are enough to make many listeners forget that this song is in fact a cover of a Bob Dylan record. 4 decades later, Hendrix is still sometimes hailed as the greatest guitarist ever.

To defend rappers as true musicians, this guideline of technical mastery can actually be successfully applied to our mystery teacher from the start of this story, who is none other than…drum roll, please…

No, seriously, roll those drums! I’ll wait.

Thank you, because now I can reveal that our mystery man is…

Eminem.

An artist like Eminem couldn’t be any more different from Jimi Hendrix in terms of the music the two made, right? Well, it might seem that way when we listen to how their songs sound, but not when we look at the musical skills that went into making each of the two’s songs and albums.

It might feel slightly odd to consider a human voice like Eminem’s to be an instrument until you see how other, more traditional musicians who rely on their voice are treated. No one would ever argue that Michael Jackson isn’t a musician because his main focus was singing. These vocalists have something with which they make music: their vocal cords. They have to take care of their instrument, by not overusing it and singing too much. They train for years and years on their instrument, sometimes taking lessons from established masters. They build up their stamina in practice sessions so that they can sing or play fast and loud during long live shows, just as Hendrix did. All of this is also the case for rappers as well, and Eminem’s song “Rap God” displays some very good reasons for how this is true. Fittingly, “Rap God” is actually one of the tracks that contains some of the lines from above that, heaven forbid, nearly scared you away from learning about rap completely!

Eminem starts off his lines on this 2013 track somewhat unremarkably: “I’m beginning to feel like a rap god, rap god / All my people from the front to the back nod, back nod.” His careful, almost hesitant delivery on these lines might be the opposite of what you were expecting on a track with a bragging title like “Rap God.” It takes Eminem about 6 seconds to say those 2 sentences, something any of us could pretty easily do — try it yourself. But with that boom-banging beat in the background, you get the feeling that this is all just an appetizer before the main course…and it is. Because these lines are just a set up for what Eminem does in the 3rd verse, when this Rap God writes his gospel.

“You assuming I’m superhuman / What I gotta do to get it through to you / I’m superhuman / Innovative and I’m made of rubber so that anything you say is richocheting off of me and it’ll glue to you.” Now, just reading those rhymes on a page and not hearing the song itself might make them stick out for how many there are, but Eminem also raps all of those 54 syllables at the rambling-auctioneer speed of just 5 seconds. Go ahead and try doing that yourself without taking a breath. Pretty difficult, right? This is the equivalent of Hendrix’s fast, ripping 32nd note riffs on his own songs. To emphasize that rappers are very talented musicians, we can also talk about the strictly musical aspects of these lines. Those 54 syllables of writing are the same thing as 54 musical notes, all of which occur in the musical duration of 2 bars. A bar is a musical unit of time that organizes all pieces of music so that instrumentalists know when to start and stop their playing. Bars are similar to how minutes organize hours, or how hours organize days. They are useful to talk about because they always last the same amount of musical time between two different songs, even if one song is slow and the other is fast. This means that you can use bars to make accurate comparisons between different pieces of music, and that’s exactly what we’ll do with Eminem’s “Rap God.”

Because in order to know whether Eminem is a technical master, we have to compare his own rapping technique to other popular rap that came out the same year, 2013. There are few records more popular than one that tops the Billboard Rap Song chart for 15 weeks straight in a single year, like how Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ hit “Thrift Shop” did. We can even take Macklemore’s fastest lines from this record and see that they aren’t as quick as Eminem’s: “Copping it, washing it / ‘Bout to go and get some compliments / Passing off on those moccasins someone else has been walking in.” In those 2 bars, Macklemore raps 29 syllables or notes, which is only about half of Eminem’s own mark of 54 that came in the same exact musical length of time. Macklemore is still a very talented rapper, just in ways that are different from the methods of our Detroit microphone rocker on “Rap God.” Eminem likewise outpaces other famous rappers of his time, such as Flo Rida, Jay-Z, or Pitbull, all of whom also had songs that charted around that time.

“Rap God” isn’t even something that was put together with the magic of a recording studio and multiple takes. You can search for Eminem’s live performances of the track online to see him spit these endurance-testing lyrics exactly the same way as the studio version. Being able to rap quickly in itself does not mean you are a master rapper, but when you know how to use slow rapping to make quick rapping stand out even more, as we see Eminem do, then you truly are a master on the level of someone like Jimi Hendrix. These conclusions hopefully move more of the focus in discussions on rap towards its value as music primarily, and move it away from any kind of moral value it may or may not have to society that those lawyers and policemen chose to emphasize. As important as that debate is to have, it is besides the point here when we’re debating rap’s value as music and only music.

This means that resistance to rap as music is at its strongest when its argument responds using the same musical terms, like rhythm or technique, that I’ve just used. One particularly strong argument is the thought that rap is not music because rappers do not craft a melody in their work. A melody is the idea in a musical composition that stands out the most, and is made up of a combination of rhythms and pitches. The type of pitch in a melody is the difference between the sound of your voice when you’re talking to your friend and the sound of a voice when it sings tunes like “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” “The Star-Spangled Banner, or “Happy Birthday.” Critics of rap cite melody as Western civilization’s most important and necessary musical element. While other musical cultures like those in Africa or Asia might focus on features like drumming percussion, the West has developed melody and complex harmony, which is the playing of multiple melodies at the same time. Accordingly, opponents of rap think that its lack of traditional melody makes it a lower form of music.

On the surface, the soaring leaps of “The Star-Spangled Banner” seems like they couldn’t be any more different from the sometimes monotone delivery of a rapper. But every sound we hear in our lives has pitch, and even when people speak they use pitch to craft a kind of vocal melody. For instance, when you ask a question your voice ends in a rising pitch to show that you’re waiting for an answer. This means that the sound of a person’s voice when rapping does indeed have a kind of melody. It goes up and down in logical ways, with a smooth, flowing contour made up of high and low points. Every rap has moments of tension that a rapper crafts by saying their words a certain way. For example, they might say them so that each syllable is very separated from the next one. But then there are moments of relaxation, when a rapper might pronounce their words so that they are all connected to each other. For instance, Eminem began “Rap God” very slowly, and this made the cookin’ 3rd verse even more impressive. These same considerations have been used to assess traditional melodies for centuries. As an example, our national anthem goes way, WAY up to create tension (“Oh, oh, say can you see…”), and then comes back down at the end of the verse to release it so that the song feels like it’s finished (“…at the twilight’s last gleaming...”) This shows that Eminem crafts melodies in the same way that Francis Scott Key did when he wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or when Jimi Hendrix recorded his own version of “All Along The Watchtower.”

As good as Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison were at their own respective instruments — let’s not kid ourselves about Ringo, okay? — not many people would argue that they were technical masters on the same level of someone like Jimi Hendrix. Instead, The Beatles are renowned for the originality of their songwriting. The Beatles started off their career writing a pretty standard form of straight guitar rock and roll on their albums like Please Please Me and With the Beatles, both of which display a deep familiarity with the work of legends of the past, like the Everly Brothers. This is shown in their use of close harmonies and short rock and roll songs with very tight forms. However, by the end of their career The Beatles had moved onto innovative songs like “Revolution 9” from The White Album, which is a sound collage of random poetry readings and snippets from famous classical music pieces. Such a technique had been pioneered previously by French classical composers, and The Beatles are legendary for successfully adapting it into a popular music form. Another example of their innovation includes the use of new and different instruments in their music, like their sitars on “Within You, Without You” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These 4 Liverpudlians accordingly stand out for their special ability to make new and engaging music out of material that’s on the more traditional side.

This means that our second criteria for expert musicians is that, like the Beatles, they should know the history of the music they’re making while always building on that history in order to take it to new places. Eminem does exactly that throughout all of his albums, even on two tracks he released very early on in his career.

Another song from your rap teacher on which you maybe learned more than you wanted to about him was the song “Bad Guys Always Die” and its line, “Let’s shoot him in his kneecaps, he’ll never see it coming!” It might make you feel a little better to know that Eminem isn’t threatening just any human being here, but the evil villain from the 1999 movie Wild Wild West that starred Will Smith. On “Bad Guys Always Die,” Eminem weaves the classic western image of a high noon, gunslingin’ showdown between two desperadoes, himself and Dr. Dre, into the main plot of Wild Wild West. But Eminem also turns a familiar type of genre narrative, one that details the daring escapades of the rapper, into a musical tribute by inserting references to the Beastie Boys 1986 track “Paul Revere,” from their legendary Licensed To Ill album.

When Beastie Boy Ad-Rock is ready to introduce a new character into the story of a bar fight gone more wrong on “Paul Revere,” Ad-Rock raps, “Quick on the draw, I thought I'd be dead / He put the gun to my head and this is what he said.” At that point his fellow Beastie Boys compadre MCA starts rapping. 13 years later, when Eminem is ready to introduce himself as a character into the plot of “Bad Guys Always Die,” he has Dr. Dre rap, “And just when I went to fill him with hot lead / I put the gun to his head, and this is what he said.” The lines are unmistakably a direct quotation of the Beastie Boys, whom Eminem has called one of his important influences in interviews. But this is not the only time Eminem gives them an obvious shout out, as both songs end in similar ways as well. In the wrap up of their tale of a shotgun robbery, The Beastie Boys rap up, “Mike D. grabbed the money, MCA snatched the gold / I grabbed two girlies.” When Eminem ends his own story, he styles the lines “Dre grabbed the map, the plaques and the gold / I grabbed two girlies.” Once again, the lines are almost identical, but Eminem has changed the Beastie Boys’ lines to fit his own story.

Eminem continues to lace musical tributes through this track when he references the past musical work of his partner in crimes Dr. Dre. Eminem knows that Dre made one of the greatest rap albums ever released, the 1992 album The Chronic, on which fellow LA rapper Snoop Dogg played a big part. And so on “Bad Guys Always Die,” Eminem flips “Do you recall when you and Snoop was a group? / The Chronic, well, all we gotta do is find the path to part two.” Far from being familiar with only the biggest hits of Dr. Dre’s career, Eminem shows that he knows the details of the devil as well: “I could hear somebody singing / It sounded like ‘A G Thang,’ and a verse from ‘Keep Their Heads Ringin.’” In those rhymes 2 titles of historically important Dr. Dre songs are mentioned: “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang” and “Keep Their Heads Ringin’.” While the first one comes from the famous Chronic album, it is the Friday movie soundtrack that contains the less well known but no less well made “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” track by Dr. Dre.

Clearly, Eminem knows his history. But with all of these historical quotations and references, can Eminem also make his own artistic voice stand out? Eminem’s approach to storytelling builds on what has come before him, but it is a complex rhyming technique that has always been the signature of Eminem’s rap over his entire career. This skill is found even in his very first single, which came out in 1997. Let’s take a look at that track’s opening rhymes below, where all rhymes are bolded, and where each line is its own sentence:

“Slim Shady,

Brain dead like Jim Brady

I’m an M-80

You little like that Kim lady

I’m buzzin’,

Dirty dozen, naughty rotten rhymer

Cursing at you players worse than Marty Schottenheimer”

Here, Eminem’s rhymes are very complex in terms of the number of rhymes he drops, and the length of those rhymes. The phrases in the “Slim Shady” / “Jim Brady” / “M-80” / “Kim lady” rhyme group are all 3-syllable rhymes. Many rappers at that time were using rhymes that were 1 or 2 syllables long, as we’ll soon see. But it is Eminem’s final rhymes in these lines that are truly amazing, because every syllable in the phrase “naughty rotten rhymer” matches up exactly with those in “Marty Schottenheimer.” For instance, “naugh-” rhymes with “Mar-”, “Schott-” rhymes with “rot-”, and so on. That is a rhyme with a length of 6 whole syllables. And out of a total 48 syllables in those lines, 28 syllables are rhymed, which means more than half of all syllables in Eminem’s lines are rhymed. But Eminem’s verbal fireworks don’t end there, because later on in the song he also uses a technique called extended rhyming. This is when a rapper continues rhymes on the same vowel sounds for a long time:

“Smell the Folgers crystals

This is lyrical combat

Gentleman, hold your pistols

But I form like Voltron and blast you with my shoulder missiles

Slim Shady, Eminem was the old initials”

Above, Eminem continues a 4-syllable rhyme over 5 different sentences, on the phrases “Folgers crystals / “hold your pistols” / “shoulder missiles” / “old initials.” This is far different from a lot of the other rap that was made around 1997.

Because to know whether this kind of complex rhyming Eminem uses is original in rap or not, we need to compare it to other rap that was popular at that time. It would say even more about Eminem’s originality if his complex rhyming wasn’t found even in the hit rap songs that came out years later, and a famous rap song that topped the Billboard charts would be even better (Eminem’s own song was off the charts…as in it didn’t even make it onto them.) Luckily enough, we do not have to go very far at all to find such a song. Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West,” from the same 1999 soundtrack as “Bad Guys Always Die,” was much more popular than Eminem’s record when the film’s music album first came out. Let’s compare the Fresh Prince’s opening rhymes on the song “Wild Wild West” to Eminem’s:

“Jim West

Desperado

Rough rider,

No, you don’t want nada

None of this,

Six-gunning this

Brother running this

Buffalo Soldier,

Look, it’s like I told ya”

In these lines, the Philadelphia emcee doesn’t have any rhymes that are longer than 2 syllables, which falls far short of Eminem’s own 6 and 4-syllable rhymes. Throughout the whole song Smith actually doesn’t have any rhymes that are longer than 3 syllables. Plus, only about a third of Smith’s syllables here are rhymed, which is far below Eminem’s rate of roughly 50%. We can make all these comparisons because although Will Smith’s quoted lines last about 8 seconds in a quicker song, and Eminem’s examples last about 12 seconds each in a slower song, they are all the same musical length of time: 4 bars.

Will Smith’s best rhymes on this song aren’t even in the same sport, much less league, as Eminem’s:

“Tryna bring down me, the champion

When y’all clowns gon’ see that it can’t be done?

Understand me son,

I’m the slickest they is

I’m the quickest they is”

In the above, Smith actually does have 3-syllable rhymes, on “champion” and “can’t be done,” where he changes the pronunciation of the words to make them match up with each other. But unlike Eminem, who continues complex rhymes for a long time in his own rap, Smith immediately moves on to shorter rhymes afterwards, on “slickest” with “quickest.” Again, only about a third of the Fresh Prince’s syllables are rhymed, still far short of Eminem’s own rate. Eminem’s rhyming stats also compare favorably to other famous rappers of the time, such as Puff Daddy, Mase, and Timbaland. Although Eminem was not the first to use such complex rhymes — earlier pioneers like Slick Rick did as well — he was one of the first rappers to extend them even further, while popularizing such trickeries for a global audience eventually.

Michael Jackson was one person who similarly reached fans all across the world, while also stamping his own unique mark on many different genres. To hear this you need only direct your ears towards singles that came out at two different points in his career, one from the 1980s and one from the 1970s. Jackson’s 6th album, Thriller, was a huge mix of different genres, including disco, rock, funk, and R&B. But few would have imagined that Jackson would be capable of such a wide artistic range when he was a youngster coming up with The Jackson 5, a group focused squarely on bubblegum pop songs. This family band’s style is perfectly encapsulated in their 1970 hit, “ABC,” with its live instrumentation, sweet vocal harmonies borrowed from Motown soul, and simple lyrics of teenage puppy love. Meanwhile, the second single from Jackson’s later album Thriller, “Beat It,” starts off with foreboding synth orchestra hits, and are overmatched only by the rude blues riff served up by a peer of our own Jimi Hendrix as a guitar-wielding Picasso, Eddie Van Halen. Far from singing in the smooth, sonorous tenor of his Jackson 5 days, Jackson introduces an edgy, growling element into his vocal delivery as a tough guy talking about gang fights.

So besides Eminem’s technical mastery and originality, what about his versatility? The 3 tracks of his we examined might seem somewhat similar: Eminem is playing a tough, gangster criminal while dropping complex rhymes. What if he were to take on a more vulnerable persona, while he made his approach to rhyming more flexible? That’s exactly what he does on tracks besides those we’ve just examined, such as “Stan,” “Mockingbird,” or “Like Toy Soldiers.” Because a consideration of versatility needs a wide survey of an artist’s music, we’ll save that aspect for the next chapter. There, we’ll see just what makes Eminem so surprisingly similar to Michael Jackson, another talented musician who could have given us the coolest music lessons of all time.


Footnotes:

[i] Nielson, Erik, and Charis E. Kubrin. ""Rap Lyrics On Trial"" New York Times 14 Jan. 2014: A27. New York Times. 13 Jan. 2014. Web. Feb. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/opinion/rap-lyrics-on-trial.html?_r=2>.

[ii] Fausset, Richard. "Lil' Boosie Murder Trial: Did His Lyrics Show Intent To Kill?" Los Angeles Times. N.p., 10 May 2012. Web. Feb. 2014. <http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/10/nation/la-na-nn-rap-lyrics-at-heart-of-murder-trial-20120510>.

[iii] Goldstein, Joseph, and J. David Goodman. "Seeking Clues to Gangs and Crime, Detectives Follow Internet Rap Videos." New York Times 8 Jan. 2014: A20. 7 Jan. 2014. Web. Feb. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/nyregion/seeking-clues-to-gangs-and-crime-detectives-monitor-internet-rap-videos.html>.

[iv] "Michelle Obama Hosting Vile Rapper at White House?" Fox Nation. N.p., n.d. Web. Feb. 2014. <http://nation.foxnews.com/common/2011/05/09/michelle-obama-hosting-vile-rapper-white-house>.

[v] Zak, Dan. "Amid Media Controversy, Rapper Common Performs At White House." Washington Post. N.p., 11 May 2011. Web. Feb. 2014. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/rapper-common-performs-at-white-house-amid-media-controversy/2011/05/11/AFQHgcuG_story.html>.

[vi] Yauch, Adam. "100 Greatest Artists: Public Enemy | Rolling Stone." Rolling Stone. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014. <http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists-of-all-time-19691231/public-enemy-20110420>.