#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!

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

Just Cam - "Voices"

Check out this tight song that I just helped my man out with. Note the sick delivery and tight phrasing that he uses. If you like it, check out his ReverbNation page!

Learn how to get your music heard at ReverbNation.com

Rap Music Transcription - Rock, From Heltah Skeltah

Below is Rock's rap rhythms transcribed from the song "Hellz Kitchen." It is the sheet music for his words.

Rapper's Flow Encyclopedia - Big Boi

In today’s analysis we are going to go into somewhat uncharted territory for my analysis. This time, we’ll be taking a look at the Dirty South – Big Boi aka Daddy Fat Saxxx aka Sir Lucious Left Foot aka Francis the Savannah Chitlin Pimp (and more.) But today, I’m gonna switch up styles on you: we’re gonna take a look more at the musical rhythms of Big Boi’s verses on “Aquemini”, rather than what could be called the verbal rhythms of his verse, the words and such. To that end, I am going to walk you through the whole process: from the basic rhythms that happen in rap music, to some variations on them, and then on to how a rapper can combine all these different techniques to come up with very distinct, subtle rhythms.

I know “subtle” is not the first word that comes to mind for you when you think of Big Boi, but some of his flows are so specific that it is really the only adjective that works. I’ll keep the long reading to a minimum as much as possible and show you rather than tell you with lots of videos and audio. At the end, we’ll finally see what contributes to Big Boi’s southern-feeling flow, and that kind of swing, jazz feel that the listener gets from him. And answer the question: just what IS he doing when he talks so damn fast?

The song is on youtube below:


The Rapgenius lyrics are here.

To get our answers, we’re going to need to go through some basic music theory. Now, there is a good amount of simple math in here, but if you just read through it the videos will demonstrate it for you much better.

Now, for rap music, the time signature is 4/4. A time signature is what organizes musical time. The number is not a fraction – 4 is not divided by 4. Instead, the top number signifies how many beats there are in a measure, and the bottom number signifies what rhythmic duration gets the beat. So from that 4/4, we know that there are 4 beats to a measure, and the quarter note gets the beat. A measure, also called a bar in rap music, is simply a length of musical time. It is similar to a minute in that way, but unlike a minute, a measure can last a differing amount of seconds depending on how fast a song is. And just like a minute is made up of seconds, a bar is made up of a smaller time duration: a quarter note. 4 of them, to be exact. Musicians use the beat defined by the time signature to keep track of musical time instead of seconds because, as you know from your own experience, sometimes music is slow and sometimes it is fast. A rapper or producer needs to be able to count to themselves where they are in the music so that they place their musical idea in the right place. This is what makes musical sounds musical – they are all organized in strict time relationships to each other. That’s why the jangling of your keys or running water doesn’t sound musical, but Dre’s beat on “How We Do” does – they are all separated from each other according to divisions of that same beat.

So, all of a song’s musical events – for instance, in the song we’ll be examining, “Aquemini,” the guitar, the synth, the sung chorus – can all be placed in musical time according to divisions of that beat. (Note that this use of the term “beat” is different from what is sometimes called the beat in rap music, which definition refers to the musical backing of a song’s track — everything besides a rapper’s words.) Music notation represents this concept very well, and that is why I’ve chosen to use it.

The video below plays the beat, which remember, is 4 quarter notes in a measure in rap music. Those black round circles on the line with the vertical line connected to them represent the musical duration of a quarter note, and are played by the high triangle. The squiggly things in between them are called quarter note rests – they last the same amount of time as a quarter note, but instead represent that no note is supposed to play on them. For every video, you will get a bar of rest from the triangle, represented by that square thing on the line, and a bar of the bass kick being played.
In the video below, the lower bass drum you hear is playing the quarter note of the 4/4 time signature. Thus, it plays on every quarter note in a bar. Then, we have the triangle playing all those quarter note beats, lining up exactly with the bass kick drum. Just ignore the blank music line in the middle for now. Check it out for yourself:

In the next video, we have that quarter note split in half, which is called, logically, an 8th note (¼ divided by 2 = 1/8.) The 8th note musical duration is represented by those same black circles with vertical lines like a quarter note, but this time they are connected across the top with a horizontal line, called a beam. Thus, in the video below, we have 2 8th notes followed by a quarter note, and then another 2 8th notes followed by a quarter note. Then, we have a whole bar of 8th notes. You can tell for yourself that each 8th note lasts half a quarter note. You can also tell that 8 8th notes take up the same amount of time as 4 quarter notes.

What would you expect we can do with 8th notes? That’s right, cut them in half too. And that gives us 16th notes (1/8 divided by 2 = 1/16.) And 16 16th notes last the same amount of time as 8 8th notes that last the same amount of time as 4 quarter notes. (Notice a pattern yet?) In the video below, 4 16th notes, represented by the double horizontal lines above the notes connecting each other, are played, followed by a quarter note, all happening twice. You can tell for yourself that 4 16th notes last the same amount of time as 1 quarter note, which, again, is being played by the bass kick drum. Then, after the full bar rest by the triangle, there is a full bar of 16th notes.

Now, we could divide 16th notes again into 32nd notes, but that makes the notes even faster and are very hard to rap. So, most rap happens at the level of the 16th note. We can combine all of these – quarter notes, 8th notes, and 16th notes – to make interesting rhythms, because doing the same rhythmic level all the time would be really boring. So, we might get something like the following:
However, we still need a little more spice. Why do the triangle notes always have to land at the same time as every bass kick drum hit? Well, they don’t. When notes skip that underlying beat playing the bass kick drum, which is present in all music even if no notes are hitting it, then we call that syncopation. That’s demonstrated below:

But that’s still a little too robotic. How about we turn to a master, Notorious B.I.G., in the following 4 bars. They are the first 4 of Biggie’s verse on “Hypnotize”:

There, you see he’s combined all the metric levels: he opens with syncopation off the bass kick drum with “pop”, 4 16th notes on the 2nd beat (“sicker than your”), 2 8th notes (“average”), 2 16th notes with an 8th note (“papa twist”), and so on. A combination of those levels of rhythm with syncopation is what gives a rapper’s rhythms spice.

However, who says we have to always divide the beat by half, into 2 8th notes?

Well — again, we don’t.

What if we divided it by 3? Then, you’d get what we call “triplet” 8th notes, while what we described above – quarter notes, 8th notes, and 16th notes – are called “duplet” 8th notes. And what makes Big Boi’s flow so unique is that it occurs at a metric level where the triplets and duplets are actually equivalent to each other, and can flow back and forth between each kind of division, by 2 or 3.
Played below is the quarter note beat, still played by the bass kick, divided into three by the triangle. After a bar of rest from the triangle, you’ll then have demonstrated how the 3 triplets and 4 16th notes last the same amount of time – the length of a beat, still played by the bass kick. Then, you’ll have a full bar of triplets.

And we can do with those triplets what we did with the 8th notes: cut them in half. This gives us what we call “sextuplets”, since 3 x 2 = 6. In the first half of the first bar of the triangle playing in the video below, I give you a full beat of 3 triplet 8th notes. In the second half of that bar, I divide the first triplet 8th note, which falls on the beat, by 2, making 2 triplet 16th notes. They are represented still by those 2 horizontal lines connecting above the notes, and that “3” above the bracket.
In the next bar, I divide the 2nd triplet 8th note into 2 triplet 16th notes as well, just like we did with the first triplet 8th note, so that there is just one full triplet 8th note left at the end.
In the 3rd bar, I divide that last triplet note by half so that all 3 triplet 8th notes are split in two, and we get 6 16th notes per beat. I place a quarter note between those full sextuplet beats.
Finally, I give you a full bar of those 6 16th notes. You can still hear that 6 sextuplets take up the same amount of time as the quarter note played by the bass kick drum.

However, we can also arrive at sextuplets from the rhythmic duration of the duplet 8th note. What if we had the musical duration of a duplet 8th note, equal to half of one quarter note, divided by 3 instead of 2 like before, just like we divided the quarter note beat into 3 8th notes instead of 2 8th notes?

That’s what I walk you through in the video below: I start out with a full bar of 2 duplet 8th notes played against a single quarter note in the bass kick.

In the 2nd bar, I divide one of the 8th notes divides into 3. Again, that duplet 8th note + 3 triplet 16th notes = 1 quarter note, as you can hear against the bass kick.

Next, just like above, I split both duplet 8th notes into 3, so that you get the same 6 sextuplets per beat that we had above. I play 6 sextuplets to a beat followed by a quarter note twice, and then fill a full bar with sextuplets.

Just think about it for yourself: 6 can be divided by 3, or 2, and you still arrive at a whole number.
The easiest way to see this is to apply it to the rap of Big Boi. In the video below are the first 2 bars of his rap. The bass kick is still playing the quarter note level. Listen to all of the rhythmic levels we have described so far occur in Big Boi’s rap:

In the above, we get the sextuplet level during the first beat “Now is the time to…”, and the 4 16th notes to a beat in the second bar (“get your work and…”).

But now let’s listen to the same 2 bars with the 8th note level represented as well, this time by the higher snare drum hit.

There, we can hear the 2 16th notes to an 8th note (on the words “like spike”, or “Lee said,”) and the 3 16th notes to an 8th note there (“get on the”.) Listen for yourself how each lasts the same amount of time as the 8th note snare, which is itself half of the quarter note beat played by the low bass kick drum.

But, as we established above with the syncopation and the example from Biggie’s “Hypnotize”, you don’t always need to fill the entire beat full of notes. That’s what he does here on the words “get on”, where he hits on only the first 2 16th notes of the triplet 16th note level, or on the words “is a”, where he hits on only the last 2 16th notes of the triplet 16th note level.

So, sometimes Big Boi makes the sextuplet play on the 4-16th-notes-to-a-beat level, which, remember, are called duplet 16th notes. He does this below, on the words “you on that dust” (3 triplet 16th notes, represented by that 3 over the words, plus the duplet 8th note of “dust”, equals 1 beat of the bass kick drum), or “familiar with that” (3 triplet 16th notes + 2 duplet 16th notes = 1 beat of the bass kick drum.)

But in the same 2 bars, he also plays on the triplet level of the sextuplet:
In the above, he does this on “smack man”, “green stuff”, “sack man”, and “pac man”, and “that man.” You can hear that those rhythms are close to, but not quite, the duplet 16th note rhythms. Because the rhythm on the words “smack man, the” is not this:

Or this:

But this:

Although this is impressive in itself, the flawless way in which Big Boi moves between these 2 levels of rap is what’s most impressive. Consider the next 4 bars:

Notice how he moves between the full sextuplet level, which is both duplet and triplet together (“ready to bust on”, “any nigga like”), to the triplet level (“that man”), back to sextuplet (“me and my nigga we”), to the duplet level (“roll to-“), to the 16th note triplet level (“-gether like”), back to the triplet level + sextuplet level (“bat man and”,) and so on.

This equivalency of rhythmic level between the triplet and duplet can be represented by the fact that sextuplets, the intersection of the triplet (“three”) and duplet (“2”) can be notated in a number of ways (3 x 2 = the “6” of sextuplet,) as I’ve done in the music you’ve seen. Notice that the rhythms in the video below in the first bar all sound the same, and that the rhythms in the second bar all sound the same.

Each separate notation simply represents a different rhythmic level, either the triplet, the duplet, or the triplet and duplet together, called the sextuplet. You can tell that they still all last the same amount of time. What notation you choose is simply which one most accurately reflects the rhythmic level of the music being played, or the rap.

Now, listen to his whole 1st verse and 2nd verse combined and try to hear all of these changes:



These rhythms are, for me, the defining style of Big Boi’s rap. He uses them in tons of songs, not just this one. And, conversely, his rhymes are rather unremarkable. Not that they aren’t good, it’s just that I literally do not have much to say about them. They are mostly single syllable rhymes, both inside and at the end of the sentence. His sentence structure is varied in that it doesn’t always end and start at the bar, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

Thanks for reading!

Rapper's Flow Encyclopedia - MF DOOM Analysis

As long as I’ve been avoiding it, it’s time to take my exceptional analytical skills to the unique, one-of-a-kind case of the masked man. I avoided it not only because of the daunting task it would be, as we’ll soon find out, but also because I wanted to make sure the analysis did justice to his entire body of work. Unquestionably, MF DOOM has one of the most unique flows of all time, doing certain things in such a way that no one else does, and now we’ve got proof as to why that is. I originally thought I would need at least 3 songs to have enough to say, but after transcribing his song, “Vomitspit”, from his album, MM…FOOD? (an anagram of his name), there is more than enough here to go on, to say the least. You can hear the song here. To try and decode some of DOOM’s crazy slang, here’s the Rapgenius page for the song.
Shall we?

The first aspect of DOOM’s rap that stands out is his insane rhyming skill. Now, a lot of rappers can drop multi-syllable internal and external rhymes, as we’ve seen, such as in my Mos Def analysis or my Jean Grae Analysis. But what sets DOOM apart is his special approach to rhyming and the extent to which he takes multi-syllable rhymes. In this whole rap, 44 bars long, there are no true, strict instances of the simplest type of rhyme: external, single-syllable rhymes (“External” means they come at the end of the sentence). Now, there are single-syllable rhymes, but they are usually mixed up as internal syllables in a complex rhyme chain. (A rhyme chain is the way a rapper moves from one rhyming group on the same syllable to another.)

For instance, in bars 1 and 2 (just look at the words beneath the music for now), he rhymes “beat” with “sleep”, but they are also rhymed with “jeep”, connected inside a rhyme group on the sound “-ear”, consisting of “hear”, “blare”, and “stare.” Those two groups are then chained along with the “-i” vowel sound rhyme, on “times” and “rhymes.” If we call the “-ee” group A, the second group on “-ear” B, and the rhyme on “-“ with C, then we get a rhyme chain of:

ABAC/BAABC

Where the slash separates the bars. Now, these are very different from your classic couplet form of the 90s, with its ABAB rhyme forms, or even some of today’s rappers. But this is really just a taste for why his approach to rhyme is so complex, and largely defines his style.

But that’s as simple as it gets as far as DOOM’s rhyming goes. Because most of the time his rhymes are external or internal (inside the sentence) multi-syllable rhymes. This is very well reflected in his amount of rhymes per bar. Throughout this whole rap of 44 bars, there are 496 syllables, and of those syllables, 215 are rhymed. That means that there are 43% of his syllables are rhymed, which is one of the highest rates you will find for any rapper. For instance, as quoted in this article here, Camron has a rate of .41 rhymes per syllable, Eminem has a rate of .38 rhymes per syllable, while DOOM has the highest rate out of any rapper. Now, this is not very surprising when you consider his approach to what I call the rhyme barrier.

The rhyme barrier is the natural limiting of word choice for a rapper when they decide to choose a word. At the start of a rap, the rapper can choose any words to say. But once he decides to rhyme those words, his word choice is then restricted to only words that rhyme. How well a rapper negotiates the rhyme barrier is, for me, a measure of how good a rapper is. Can they continue to stay on topic, while still dropping complex rhymes?

DOOM, however, flips this script. That’s because his approach to the rhyme barrier is rather idiosyncratic. It is my view that he consistently sacrifices a consistent dramatic narrative in order to drop complex rhymes. Now, I would consider this a shortcoming of a rapper normally, but for DOOM I see it as endemic of his style.

For instance, he raps, “A lot of stuff happens that the new won’t TELL YOUS / BLUES on L JUICE, SNOOZE all HELL LOOSE.” Now, I’m not exactly sure what the first line of that has to do with the second line. But it does allow DOOM to make 8 of 10 straight syllables rhyme. This is something he consistently does, and is a marker of his style.

There are more metrics we can use to define DOOM’s style. For instance, out of those 496 syllables, there are 283 words. This means that the amount of syllables per word, a measure of the complexity of the words that a rapper uses, is 1.75. This compares as being substantially more complex than other rates I’ve seen, such as in my Nas analysis. For example, Eminem’s rap in “Business” has 1.21 syllables per word, while Game’s in “How We Do” and Nas in the Busta Rhymes song “Don’t Get Carried Away” have rates of 1.19 and 1.48, respectively. Finally, in a freestyle of 44 bars with 496 syllables per bar, there are 11.27 syllables per bar. This also compares as being higher than the rates of other rappers out there. So, DOOM is, overall, a complex, wordy rapper, something which may be obvious to some of you out there, but now we have the right numbers to describe it.

However, back to his rhymes. As I said before, most of the time his rhymes are external multi-syllable rhymes that are couched within rather conventional rhyme chain and sentence phrasing schemes. Representative for this is the music from bars 3-6:

For this discussion, it’s important to know what a bar is: a bar is simply a musical duration of time, just like an hour is a measure of chronological time. A bunch of bars together make a verse or hook, and the verses and hooks together make a song. The bars are represented in the music above by the vertical lines that separate the musical notes, such as between the word “hologram” and “even” in the image above.

(As a disclaimer, this article will make use of notated sheet music, but I PROMISE even if you can’t read music, you will be able to understand it.) Furthermore, those curved lines under the noteheads, such as from “real” to “hologram”, represent basically sentences. These are also important for categorizing rappers, as we’ll see.

So, let’s have that music again:


(For now, just look at the words below the note-heads. We’ll get into reading those in part 2 of my DOOM analysis.) You can see that there are 4 multi-syllable end rhymes in total: “hologram” with “swallowed the ham” and “sand sandwich salad” with “man’s bland ballad.”
Another good representation of this is bars 13-16:



Here, “funky socks” is rhymed with “monkey pox” at the end of a sentence. This example, along with the last one, are also good examples of DOOM’s conventional sentence phrasing and rhyme chaining. Notice how, compared to our first example (“it’s the beat…”), the rhyme groups here are chained much more conventionally. In this and the last example, they are simply AB, where A represents the “any whos / any shoes” group, and B represents the “funky socks / monkey pox” grouping. Furthermore, observe how each sentence falls completely within the barlines (remember, those vertical lines such as between “whos” and “seeds”, which, again, is just a measurement of musical time.)

We can also describe this by measuring how many sentences there are per bar. There are 44 bars, and there are 54 sentences, so there are 1.23 sentences per bar. Now, this contrasts with someone like Busta Rhymes on “Holla”, the sheet music of which you can see here, and for which I will be having a full analysis in the coming days. In that song there are 36 sentences in the first 24 bars, for a rate of 1.5 sentences per bar. DOOM, meanwhile, does not make much use of syncopation. For instance, in a rap of 44 bars, there will be 176 beats, because there are 4 beats per bar. Of those 176 beats, 135 fall within a sentence, and only 18 of those 135 are skipped by DOOM – for instance, in bar 3, between “real rhymes” and “not your everyday hologram”, a beat is skipped by DOOM and doesn’t have a note/word placed on it.


This means he has .13 syncopated beats per every on-beat. That is a low figure. For instance, for Notorious B.I.G.’s first verse on “Hypnotize”, out of 72 beats over 18 bars, he lands on 60 of them, and skips the other 12. This means that he has .2 syncopated beats for every on-beat. (Busta and Notorious B.I.G. are 2 rappers who will get their own complete blog post coming up over my 30 day Kickstarter campaign, which you can donate to at this link here.) Furthermore, with 54 sentences and 496 syllables, there are 9.18 syllables per sentence. In Notorious’ rap, however, there are 30 sentences over 18 bars, for a rate of 1.66 sentences per bar (much higher than DOOM’s 1.23 sentences per bar), but also only 5.93 syllables per sentence, much lower than DOOM’s rate of 9.19 syllables per sentence. Also, there are 383 words, and 496 syllables / 383 words = 1.30 syllables per word.

So, for the most part, DOOM does not make the structure of his raps very complex, while it is the musical content of those raps that is complex.

But then again…

Time for a little Music Theory 101. Because this is easiest to show visually, I made the video down below to explain how to count beats and bars. Watch the first 6 minutes of it to understand. I say it’s for rappers, but it’s also very useful to the intelligent musical listener as well. You can also skip ahead for just a summary.

How To Count Beats & Bars

Basically, a beat is a musical unit of time whose length in seconds can change between songs, because sometimes songs are fast and songs are slow. It is the rate at which these beats come that changes. There are 4 beats per bar, and usually 16 bars make up a verse in rap music. This is important because we can also categorize and describe rappers by whether their rhymes always fall in the same place relative to the beat and bar, or in different places.
So let’s now use this to describe our first example from above, the opening bars of the song:



Even if you’ve never been taught how to read music, you can still understand the above image. Compare the rhymes of “hologram” with “swallowed the ham.” You can tell that they still fall in the same place in the bar: at the end, with the “-ogram” and “the ham” part of the rhymes being in the same exact position. Just look at how the noteheads over them look exactly the same. This means that they fall in the same place relative to the beat of the time signature. As explained before, the beat is the underlying pulse in all music that is what rappers count by.



You can see that the rhymes “any whos” and “any shoes” and “funky socks” with “money pox” are all in the same place in the bar, and relative to the beat. They come at the end of the bar, and each pairing’s noteheads above them look the same.

However, the most mind-bending aspect of DOOM’s rap is how he subverts this tendency, how he places his rhymes in almost the same place from bar to bar, but not quite. Because DOOM uses incredibly nuanced rhythms that blows the complexity of almost any other type of music – rap, electronic, classical, country, more – out of the water. As a demonstration of this, listen to the song with DOOM’s rhythms played by the triangle first with the underlying beat in the background played by the drums, and bob your head to it. Then, I repeat DOOM’s rhythms, but without a beat. Now, try and tell if you can see where the beat that was played by the drums is falling.

See The Video Here

A lot harder to tell where the underlying beat is now, isn’t it?

Let’s find out why. One of those beats counted by the bass kick can be divided in half to make an 8th note. That 8th note can be divided in half to make a 16th note. Now, this is usually the metric level that rap makes use of: 16th notes. They are rather simple and can be heard easily by a listener or rapper. However, that doesn’t mean that the beat can’t be split into other groupings – for instance, 5 16th notes (called quintuplets), instead of 4 16th notes (called “quadruplets”). That is what Andre 3K does in his first verse on “Aquemini”, as I explain in my article here. This also means that you can divide them into 7 – septuplets – or 9 –nontuplets? Notuplets? Whatever.

But those divisions of 5, 7, and 9 are a lot harder to hear. However, DOOM makes ample use of those divisions. As you can in the video, he divides the beat into 7 on the words “Break it rolling”, and “through ya hood”, such as in the music below (the numbers over the brackets indicate how they’re divided, if it’s not by 4):


He also divides 2 beats together into 9, such as on “While he’s in his oratory” and “glorious like a horror story:”


Now, just how fine is DOOM’s sense of rhythm? Let’s do some math. The beats per minute, a measurement of how fast a song is, is, for “Vomitspit”, 94. That means that each beat lasts .64 seconds. That means that each quadruplet sixteenth note lasts .64 / 4, = .16 seconds. But a quintuplet sixteenth note lasts .64/5 =, .13 seconds, and a septuplet sixteenth note lasts .64 / 7 = .09 seconds. He makes use of a 32nd septuplet notes, which would last .045 seconds, such as on the “hood” of “through ya hood.”



You can hear how long that would last in the video below:

See The Video Here

Two final points. Note how the structure of the song, a freestyle (a song with no chorus but just one long verse), supports DOOM’s display of his superior rapping skills. He doesn’t have to stop for a chorus, where rhythms are largely repeated and the amount of rhymes are reduced. Furthermore, he can make it just one long verse, more than twice as long as what is normal (16 bars), so he can just go, and go, and go.

A final idiosyncratic aspect to DOOM’s raps are the large pauses he takes between raps. Now, when an emcee raps, they are constrained by some of the realities of actual spoken speech. For instance, in a normal conversation with your friend, you wouldn’t take huge pauses in between your sentences when you’re giving your side of the conversation, unless you can’t think of something to say, or something like that. So rappers have to stick to this – no large pauses in between sentences. DOOM, however, does take large pauses in between sentences, and that gives his work part of his unique DOOM flow. For instance, you can see this in between, most notably, “Funk me” and “I’m like any whos”, but he also does it between “horror story” and “the mask is like Jason”, “monkey pox” and “instead, she want to…”, and so on.

So, as a short summary, DOOM uses incredibly complex rhythms and rhyming tendencies, couched in a wordy, sentence-heavy style. However, the structure of his sentences are rather conventional, in order to strongly support just how radically innovative his rhythms and rhymes are. You can see all of these in the video below, where I play the rhythms of his words as the green bar follows along to the music and the bass kick counts the beats.

See The Video Here

Thanks again for reading!

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.

How to Have Better Flow

Here is a 2 part video on how to have better flow. First, you need to know how to count beats, so if you don't, learn how to at this video here.

Part 2:

Here are the handouts: