Rap Music Analysis Interview - Paul Edwards

Paul Edwards is a rap journalist who wrote 2 books, called "How To Rap: The Art and Science Of The Hip-Hop Emcee" and "How To Rap 2: Advanced Techniques And Delivery." Rather than Mr. Edwards himself telling you "how to rap," he's simply organized some interviews he's done in the past with great rappers like dead prez under different headings. He has chapters on writing better stories, dealing with writer's block, and stuff like that.

For a long time, I've wanted to interview Mr. Edwards, since so many of our interests seem to dovetail nicely. The other day, I got that chance. Here is just the first round of questions I've been holding onto for the longest time, and finally got to ask. Enjoy!

Love,

Martin

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The Composers Corner: Why did you start out notating rapper’s words the way you did, with
the flow diagram? Did rappers do this on their own? Did you find it
out from the work of others? Did you come up with it on your own?

Paul Edwards: It was based on what the rappers did – the idea was to mimic their
systems as closely as possible. Part of that was so that it's “true”
to how it's done by the actual artists, but also because their systems
usually focus on the most important things in rapping, the things you
really need to be able to show clearly.

So for example, most wrote out their lyrics with one line equal to one
bar – that kind of layout makes it easier to plan out where your
rhymes are falling within each bar, whether they're on the 1 beat or
the 3 beat or the off-beat of the 4 beat, etc. And rhyme placement
makes a massive difference in how the rap will sound, so it's
important to be able to “see” it on paper. Another example is showing
where a rest falls on one of the beats in bar – in a lot of battle
rapping styles, it's crucial to include a rest on a beat after a
punchline as it gives the line so much more emphasis.

So that went hand-in-hand – notating it how the rappers notated raps
themselves and focusing on the things that were important in rapping
(as opposed to focusing on things that are important in poetry or
other music genres, for example). If it was a system that didn't show
those things or focused on things that weren't important in rapping,
then it would make things a lot more difficult for the reader.

I think it was also a key thing to avoid showing things that were not
needed as well, things that might “get in the way” of seeing the flow
clearly. You needed to be able to “read” the flow in real time and rap
along with it, just as the rappers did. So it had to be detailed
enough to replicate the flow accurately, but not so specific that it
was impossible to follow while you're recording.

Also I have to give a shout out to academic author Adam Krims (RIP)
who was a pioneer in this area – he had a system with crosses and beat
numbers along the top of a chart. I'm not sure if he got that idea
direct from rappers as well, but it's a logical way to do it and
shares some similarities with the way I do it.

The Composer's Corner: Many people do great things, whether in sports, music, politics,
whatever, but they can’t explain why they’re good at it, or what
they’re trying to do, maybe. Your book, whether inadvertently or not,
really acts as a compendium of how rappers think of themselves as
rappers as well. What rapper struck you as being particularly
self-aware and conscious as an artist, who truly understood everything
that they were doing? That is, which rapper could explain not only
that what they were doing was great, but also why it was great?

Paul Edwards: Well, it's tempting to answer that question by pointing to the rappers
who were able to explain the complexity of the “obvious” stuff in a
clear way. So for example, I think the people who are known as being
really “lyrical” had a lot more awareness of things like wordplay and
metaphors, and also putting rhyme schemes together and creating
rhythms, and they could talk at length about those kinds of things. So
Pharoahe Monch, Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, Crooked I, Tech N9ne,
Royce Da 5'9” – those kinds of rappers where you can tell they sit
down and get really deep with the content and get really technical
with the flow. They knew a lot more about literary devices and rhymes
and rhythms – you don't even have to ask in some cases, someone like G
Rap will bring up multisyllabic rhymes himself and start making some
up as examples.

But then I think that's the easy way to answer that question, because
things like clever content and complex rhyme schemes are what a lot of
hip-hop fans think of as being “lyrical” and “good,” but I think
that's partly just because they're easier to talk about and identify,
so it's easier to judge a rapper on those things. Content is the
easiest thing to talk about, so it gets the most attention, and then
after that are rhyme schemes, as they're relatively easy to talk about
once you move past talking about content. The things that are much
harder to describe are things like vocal delivery and expressing
personality and overall “feel” through the delivery.

So with rappers who are really good with vocal delivery and expressing
their personality through their voice, I think they're just as aware
of what they're doing as the guys I previously mentioned, but it's
harder to talk about vocal delivery in technical detail, so the
conversation and explanations around it isn't as “precise.”

People like Shock G, B-Real, Del the Funky Homosapien, Devin the Dude,
and the guys from The Pharcyde all had a lot to say about vocal
delivery and knew how important that was to their style, but there
isn't that much widely used or known terminology to really get into
everything they're doing with their voices. They all knew that
bringing their fun personalities to the table and loosening up and
expressing all that character through their voices was what made them
great, but it comes out more as “I have a lot of fun when I'm
recording,” rather than more precise like “I try to make every word in
the bar rhyme and use the same compound rhyme scheme for the whole
verse.”

Then for some it's really more of a feeling, like “it feels good to
approach the track like this,” so those types of rappers tended to be
vaguer and they talked about bringing a certain “feel” to the track –
not really thinking about it too much, just letting it happen. And
that's exactly what fans of those types of rappers like about them
usually, they're not ultra-rhymey or doing crazy fast rhythms or
anything like that, they sink casually into the music and play around
on the beat in a free kind of way. In those cases, some rappers
actually said to me, “don't make me think about it too much, because
then I might not be able to do it again in the future!” It's like the
analysis can be detrimental for some artists, especially if they have
a simpler style and it's more of a feel thing.

So I think pretty much all the rappers were aware of what made them
great and could express it, it's just that some of the things that
make someone great are harder to put into precise language than other
things.

The Composer's Corner: What have you been up to since How To Rap 2? Will there by a third?
Why or why not?

Paul Edwards: Right after “How To Rap 2” I got a deal to do “The Concise Guide to
Hip-Hop Music” with St. Martin's Press. That book just came out, it
was released in February this year, and so writing that and preparing
for its release was what I did between “How To Rap 2” and now.

That's a book I thought was really important to do, as often people
know some hip-hop knowledge here and there, but they don't have an
overall framework of how things developed and how they fit together –
they don't have a fundamental template to work from basically. I
wanted to give people that in a clear, brief way, like what things
hip-hop fans listen for and how listening to hip-hop is different from
listening to other music genres. I also look at how rapping and
beatmaking developed and things like “hip-hop instruments” (different
types of samplers, etc.) as well as debunking some popular myths along
the way. It's written a bit differently from How To Rap, because with
the How To Rap books those are 100% my own interviews, while with this
new one I used a mix of my own interviews and quoting existing
sources.

I'm not sure at the moment if there will be a How To Rap 3, though
it's possible. There's plenty of stuff left to cover and more info
from the same set of interviews that hasn't been used yet, but I also
have some other book ideas that I would like to do first, before
thinking about a potential How To Rap 3.

If I do another one, it'll probably go in depth in areas that really
aren't covered that much, things I think are really interesting and
are things that would push hip-hop forward. Areas where there is still
a lot of room for innovation that haven't been fully explored yet.

The Composer's Corner: It’s occurred to me that listeners know how they themselves
understand and relate to rap music, and they obviously know that
rappers understand and relate to rap music in some way, but most
listeners, not being very close to the rappers themselves, haven’t
ever really thought of just how and in what ways rappers relate to
their art form. That’s why the ability of Jay-Z or Lil Wayne or
Notorious BIG to write rhymes without paper, or for Kendrick to rap
“Rigamortus” on just the 3rd take, is so popular and incomprehensible.
In all of your interviews, what have you learned about how rappers
think of rap?

Paul Edwards: I think it's different from rapper to rapper – there are definitely
some who like to keep a kind of secrecy around it or try to
mythologize it, because it makes them seem more impressive. If it's
seen as some kind of magic power or where you write songs in 30
seconds and things like that, it makes it all seem more mysterious to
people who don't know how it's done.

But the rappers who really open up about how they do it, they talk
about it in a very matter-of-fact way, as one rapper described it to
me: “a bunch of grown men and women just sitting around writing some
raps.” They usually see themselves simply as writers and vocalists.

The unusual thing with rapping is that most rappers have learned
independently from each other, not really knowing how other rappers do
it. In contrast, something like playing the guitar doesn't have that
kind of disconnect from other guitarists – you know when you begin
playing how most other people have done it, either through learning
chords from a book or getting lessons with a guitar teacher most of
the time. No one really tries to figure out the guitar and all the
chord combinations from scratch, or just from listening to records
with guitarists on them.

So what was funny was often at the end of the interviews, the rappers
would ask me what other rappers did, especially when they heard who I
had interviewed already. They were interested to know how other
rappers were doing it and if they were doing something different or
similar to the “rest of the crowd” or if there were any weird methods
they hadn't heard of before.

The Composer's Corner: As someone who has interviewed tons of rappers, what advice would
you give to a music journalist who wants to get better at interviewing
them?

Paul Edwards: I think it really depends what you're interviewing them for – doing it
for a book is probably a lot different than doing it for a magazine or
website, especially if it's a book where you're using bits and pieces
rather than printing the entire interview in the order it happened.
With my books, I had very specific information I wanted to find out,
so I put together questions that would hopefully draw out the kind of
info I needed.

As I was doing the interviews and hearing the answers I was thinking
things like, “ok, that sentence he just said will fit over there to
help explain that technique, but maybe try to get a bit more info on
this other specific thing, as I know I need more quotes for this
section”... it's like you're partially piecing together the book as
you're interviewing. And with a book, you're normally doing it all on
one subject, so you don't really want to go off on any big tangents,
as interesting as they might seem at the time.

While for a website or magazine or a radio interview, it can really go
anywhere and it usually needs to be interesting just as a conversation
all the way through, because people are going to read or listen to the
whole thing in the order it happened. So for me personally, it helped
to ask specific questions that drew out answers that would fit in
certain sections of the books and I had to really stay on topic as
much as possible. But that kind of advice probably won't help someone
doing a “regular” interview, because it's so different.

Though the one big piece of advice that probably applies across the
board is to make sure your recording set up is good if it's a phone
interview or in person, as you don't want to lose all the answers! I
had two tape recorders set up to my phone back when I did my
interviews, where one of them was a backup.

The Composer's Corner: Was there one rapper you really wanted to ask these questions but
never got a chance to? Who would it be?

Paul Edwards: Oh man, there were lots, particularly MCs who are no longer alive.
Those are the ones where in hindsight there was only a narrow window
for journalists and historians to interview them and preserve their
methodologies, so it's a shame from a historical perspective that that
info hasn't been documented in some cases. For example, interviewing
Big Pun would have been great, he was really the next MC to really go
all out with that compound rhyme style after Kool G Rap did it, and of
course Big L as well, it would have been great to ask him about
writing “Ebonics” as that's such a clever concept. Guru from Gang
Starr and Pimp C from UGK are rappers I actually tried to get hold of
at the time, but unfortunately those interviews never happened.

The Composer's Corner: What do you think of Kendrick Lamar as an MC?

Paul Edwards: I think he's a great MC, especially from a technical point of view –
his flow, content, it's all there, so it's great there is someone at
the forefront who has that ability and is taking some risks,
musically. He's not actually someone I listen to for my own enjoyment,
just because I don't really like his voice (or the different ones he
uses on different tracks), but that's a very subjective thing, whether
you like someone's voice or not.

Also the beats really have to be in a style I like for me to enjoy the
music, even if the rapper is incredible. I'm a big fan of raw, sampled
beats with a lot of texture and grit, so like Sir Jinx in the early
90s, DJ Muggs on the first couple of Cypress Hill albums, Dr Dre on
the second NWA album, Large Pro, DJ Premier, DITC, those types of
beats, and guys who pushed sampling forward like DJ Shadow and Cut
Chemist, where they were chopping up samples and putting them in
different time signatures and things like that.

So probably with the right production he would be someone I'd listen
to a lot more, just because my taste in beats is quite different from
the ones he tends to use.

The 5 Most Unbelievable Stories of 2013 As Told Through Tweets

Lucky for us, Twitter acts as an immortal showcase of the stupid things we do and say. That goes for rappers too. (I'm just saying, I hope no one ever does a story like this on me. It will probably start with asking why I re-tweet Jean Grae lyrics at 10 PM on Fridays.) But the math behind this article is easy: people do and say crazy shit/rappers especially + Twitter saves it = here are the 5 most outlandish rap stories of the past year as told through Tweets:

Normally, a rapper would want you to find out about them through their music, and not because of something wildly inappropriate they did. Unfortunately, the second scenario was the case for when I heard of French Montana, and kinda made his music hard to take after that. On February 29 this year, Montana performed at the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia a.k.a. PHIL-TOWNNNN!!! (Okay, no one calls it that.) And as it happens someone got shot and died outside of the concert. Police later stopped Montana to question him about the incident. Montana responded with the above tweet and an instagram photo of him looking pissed off, clearly not going anywhere. Came off as rather dick-ish. Whatever, let's go to a less harmless egotistical rapper act instead:

When this story broke, I had to explain to my non-rap fans, all of who were still familiar with Kanye's antics ("George Bush doesn't care about black people," "Beyoncé had one of the best music videos of all time," etc., etc.,) that this was actually a real story. To promote his recent Yeezus album, Kanye broadcast a music video all across the world at the same time. The video largely consists of Kanye's own face, over dozens of feet of square area, rapping his song "New Slaves." Check it out:

 Only Kanye could think of something like that. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of the man. If he is one of the few people in the world with almost endless resources at his disposal for advertising and publicity, why not do something completely outlandish? I am going to have definitely disagree with Kanye's recent characterization of the 2nd verse of "New Slaves" as the greatest verse in the history of music, as he recently proclaimed on music. I'd expect nothing less from Kanye, though.

 I'm not gonna give you any context for this one. Just sit with this reality for a while, a quote which hopefully they engrave on Lupe's tomb:

"Dear God! I didn't get kicked off Twitter for talking about Karl Marx! Jesus Fucking Christ....who said that?" - Lupe Fiasco, Born 2/16/1982

On a recent song, "U.O.E.N.O.", Rick Ross has the following lyric:

"Put Molly all in her champagne, she ain't even know it
I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain't even know it"

Understandably, there was a lot of outrage over Ross' apparent glorification of date rape. Ross felt the pain in not just his public image but his wallet as well when he lost an endorsement deal with Reebok worth millions of dollars. However, the message may not have hit Ross right away, as he offered up the above lukewarm apology. Maybe he just meant apologies are awesome with the #boss tag?

The outcry over Ross' lyrics is similar to other public debates over rap lyrics that have taken place recently, such as over Lil Wayne's "Emmett Till" lyric and Kanye West's recent lyric about "keeping it shaking like Parkinson's". While being a sign of current problems in rap's lyrics, the fact that these debates are taking place at all is a good sign. This is because they can eventually lead to change. Rap has had lyrics like this for years, but as rap matures, it is time to move on.

Tim Dog's tweet from 2009 seems damn near a premonition now. In 2011, Tim Dog pleaded guilty to grand larceny for conning a woman. Facing a long prison sentence and having to pay back tens of thousands of dollars to the victim of the scheme, TD reportedly died of complications from diabetes. However, none of the usual events surrounding a death were found: an autopsy, a funeral, or death certificate. An arrest warrant has now been issued for him in Mississippi. As he says on a song off his "Do or Die" album, he may have "Skipped To His Loot" one too many times.

So, what's the equation answer? If you, as a rap fan, are not on Twitter, I highly suggest it.

First Chapter, "Check Out My Melody: How To Listen To Rap Music"

This is the first chapter of my work-in-progress book, called "Check Out My Melody: How To Listen To Music". It sets out how the rest of the book will proceed. If you would buy it, let me know! You can comment, or like my facebook page here.

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Check Out My Melody: How To Listen To Rap, Chapter 1

We all know those people.

It could be anyone: your friends, your family, random strangers on the street.

Could be the bus driver who gives you a look as you get off at your stop, playing your mp3 player just a little too loudly for her taste.

Could be your parents, who talk about the songs and bands from their younger days as if the time was a Golden Age for the entire art of music.

Could even be your classmates who talk about “real” music, with “melodies” and “chords”, as if they could even define what those words actually mean if asked to do so.

We all know those people. They’re people who just don’t get it.

“Can you believe all the disgusting things rappers talk about?”

“It’s just a bunch of no-talent gangstas who found a mic and put a bunch of random loops together until they had a song.”

“Rappers are sexist, racist, homophobic bigots who don’t know a thing about music.”

It is useless to try and refute any of those criticisms. Not because it can’t be done, but because their criticisms betray such a misguided understanding of rap, and music more generally, that they have already defined the argument so that rap will always appear devoid of any and all value. In a way, these people cannot be blamed. You hope that they would take some time to actually get to know the genre, but such an approach is not often found today in our 142-character world. Besides, it is not often nowadays that a person comes into contact with an entity, especially an art form, as devastatingly honest as rap music is, in every sense of the term. When one of the most celebrated pieces of music in the 20^th century is five minutes of silence, where can someone go to hear the reflection of deeper thoughts that the listener by themselves could not put into words?

Do you know why Eminem has a song, “Kim”, a murder fantasy of killing his wife that ends with him screaming, “Bleed, b*tch, bleed!”, while his real life daughter cries in the background?

Why Nas casually raps about a ghetto shoot-out against a rival gang on the song “Represent”, from his album “Illmatic”?

Why Notorious B.I.G. describes the rules that every drug dealer should follow to become successful, on his song “Ten Crack Commandments”?

Because that crap actually happens. Yes, in real life. Yes, in our neighborhoods, our cities, our schools. Rap has the audacity to talk about such difficult topics because of its counter-culture origins. For every violent rap song like those just described, there are even more songs like Eminem’s “Mockingbird”, where he apologizes to his daughter for everything his career has put her through. There are songs like Nas’ “Thugz Mansion”, where he imagines a heaven with no ghetto violence, or Notorious B.I.G.’s song ”Juicy”, where he describes how he had to deal drugs just to feed his daughter. And instead of receiving credit for starting a conversation about a multitude of hot-button issues, rap gets blamed for making these issues worse in the first place by daring to talk about it openly.

It is a myriad of factors that leads rap to become part of the national debate every time a new moral panic breaks out. Rap, because of its ubiquity, devastating breadth of variety, and unique demographic origins, has now become a mirror in which the beholder sees whatever contemporary crises they think deserve the most attention.

                        Bigotry.

                        The sexual revolution.

                        The urbanization of today’s youth.

                        Rising violent crime rates.

It’s hard to recall any electronic dance, jazz, folk, pop, or classical pieces from the era that dealt with major social problems in such a direct way. And yet politicians blame musicians like Eminem for creating a “culture of violence”. Such criticisms miss the point, because it critiques a version of rap that simply doesn’t exist. If we took every rapper’s word for how many people they’ve killed, there wouldn’t be a single human being left on the planet. Eminem didn’t actually kill his wife. Nas never actually shot anyone. They expressed the powerful, darker side of their emotions in public yet safe ways, in ways one hopes that more people would adopt instead of actually picking up a gun. If Eminem and Nas had really committed those crimes, they would not get on a microphone and then brag about it. Rappers are largely the only pop artists to not only adapt completely new names for their work but also completely new personas, with histories and everything, that often have nothing to do with their previous life in the real world.  They adapt these personas to such extents that they are even called these names in conversation by their friends, family, and new acquaintances, as if there was no Curtis Jackson before 50 Cent, or at the least, Curtis Jackson is simply another persona for the same rapper.

And so critics deal with an imagined version of rap that is made up of only text and words, or, if the critic happens to be somewhat attuned to the changing tides of modern literary criticism, modern-day poetry (Heaven forbid!) As we shall see though, that is only half of the rap equation. More than just text, rap is the rhythms that the rapper speaks on the mic. More specifically, rap is the rhythmic structure that arises from the interaction between a rapper’s words and the strictly musical rhythms of those words as he or she says them.

And the perception of that rhythmic structure is exactly what this book will teach you.

Because if all you hear when you listen to the opening of Busta Rhymes song “Holla” is, “Team select, please collect, Gs connect these niggas direct with trees to the smoke fest,” well then a criticism of stupid subject topics in rap would be completely valid. But if instead you hear, “team seLECT / please COLLect / Gs connect / THESE niggas DIRect with TREES…to the SMOKE fest,” where all of the words are separated into different groups simultaneously by italics (rhymes on “team”), underlines (rhymes on “select”), capitalized letters (the underlying beat of the song), and slashes (the grammatical phrasing), you start to understand why rap is both a poetic AND musical phenomenon. And you will understand why the rapper’s words only make sense in the context of the rhythms, not the other way around.

            This book will begin by giving you all of the tools you need in order to follow along to a rapper’s rhythms in a song. We’ll then describe the 5 major factors that altogether are able to quantitatively describe a rapper’s flow. There will then be some case studies of different famous rappers, like Eminem, Nas, Kanye, and some more underground ones like Jean Grae and Talib Kweli as case studies that will put our newly gained vocabulary into use. After that, we’ll finish up with some extensions of this system in order to describe more unique instances of flow, and the perception of rap in general.

            So sit back, and prepare to show all those people just how wrong they are.

Rap Analysis - Jean Grae Interview

Jean Grae Interview

            On December 27^th, I had the chance to live out a personal and professional dream of mine when I got to interview rapper legend Jean Grae. Besides from being an extremely genuine and nice person (sorry, does that ruin Style Wars for you?), I can also confirm her work from the “Cookies or Comas” mixtape: she’s funny as shit, and yes, does use the word “fuckery” in every day conversation. However, it was a dream not to be able to express my appreciation, but also being able to ask her the questions that I always wonder about when I approach rap music as a craft: how much of her work is inspiration, and how much comes from actively working on it? What idea comes first: words or rhythm? What do they know of music theory? Hopefully the interview below helps dispel some misconceptions around rap music being a “poor man’s music”, so to speak, because “anyone can rap”, but also it hopes give a window into something that we all, as rap fans, get too little information on: how a rap takes its final form on the record. Thus, my mission was to trace the development of the musical idea from its first conception, through to its editing in the studio, to its final manifestation on the CD. Thus, this interview touches on a little bit of everything. Rather than offer my analysis here, I want to present the interview in as raw a form as possible, and let you make of it for now what you will.

When you generate your rap, how much of what you come up with is inspiration, and how much of what you come up with initially do you have to shape and work on further?

It’s never reworking. There’s only one piece that ever took longer than an hour. I work best completely under pressure. The one song that didn’t work like that was ”you and me and everyone we know.” I try to write beforehand, but it just doesn’t work. I write usually directly before I record, and that’s it. I record a lot of stuff at home in my studio, or if we set a studio date…but yeah, I don’t have a really big process beforehand. My process beforehand is more I need to have a bunch of experiences in life. I never do first draft, second draft. I self-edit as I go along. I write really fast.

How did you, Mos Def, Pharoahe, Talib Kweli, Jean Grae, all 4 extremely technically complicated and accomplished rappers, find each other, and come to have such close personal as well as professional relationships?

I think for myself and Kweli and Mos it was just generally New York. We just kind of knew each other, and it was the same time and era, and we just never stopped being friends…outside of all of the rapping, you’re friends first. Pharoahe I met years ago and I guess we really started to be friends a couple years when I started working with some partnerships with him, and when we started hanging out, we were like, “Oh shit, I know who you are!” I call it finding the other mutants – “Oh man, I know exactly how you think!” But in a good way. But people who see me writing and creatively generally come the same way…so that’s how I look at it. We do hang a lot, but mostly we are never coming up with amazing raps. When you write, and I think as frequently as all of us write, all of that hanging out and experiences is exactly what goes into the rhymes, not happenstance, not random – it’s your experiences, what you heard, where you’ve just been. It’s absolutely all in there.

If you had to compare yourself to another rapper, who’d you pick?

I think Pharoahe and myself…we’re really different, but technically we focus on the same thing. I think we approach it in different ways, we’re really meticulous about using rhythms and patterns and words…I’m more word focused, and I think he’s more kind of rhythmically focused, just phrasing-wise, there’s shit I don’t think I could come up with.

What is your compositional process? Do you have a schedule, or do you just write as it comes along?

I absolutely set up a schedule, but whether or not I’m sitting there writing music? Hahaha…sometimes it happens, but usually not.  Something I wouldn’t have done before, I set aside time: “These are my hours when I’ll focus on this project or this project.” I can do a lot of organizing beforehand, but the writing seems like the smallest part to me. Sitting down and saying everything about the album is one thing…but it never happens until it’s the last second and I have to hand it in. My brain doesn’t get that spark until I’m under the gun.

When you start writing, do you start with words or music?

I don’t think that they’re different. I don’t separate the rhythm from the actual word. The word is exactly what is creating the timing…I guess I look at them as beats and notes in themselves. So I’m very conscious of what sort of patterns feel right…and you know it’s the best rhyme when you’re fucking the beat. You’re not competing, you’re not lying somewhere there, you’re getting in there, finding all the spaces where you’re supposed to be. It’s choosing the right words…the first idea, the one I always have and that takes the most time, is the opening line. And it all grows from there…there are people who are absolute masters at writing opening lines, that’s what you want, that’s how you know a song, that’s how it goes…Prodigy [from Mobb Deep]. Might be my favorite. There are so many fucking great ones…and when you find it, it’s absolutely an introduction for people who have never heard you before, it sets the tone for the song – it does so much, it’s a first impression. It happens really quickly – you can decide how many bars it will take – 1 bar, 4 bars, 8 bars – and once that goes, everything else finds its place.

So does the word suggest a rhythm?

Again, it doesn’t suggest, it is the rhythm. It suggests an emotion, whether you’re using triplets or whatever it is, I think certain patterns and certain syllables convey emotions, and that’s really my goal at the end of it. It’s not only using the right word, it’s selecting a word and usually one I haven’t used, words that draw emotions out of people. Words that are relatable are the most important things.

Do you have any favorite words? What kinds of words do you like?

           

I’ve always really liked words, and syllables are great. Words that feel good in your mouth! There’s a saying that, when we find one word that rhymes or a statement that rhymes, I know this is true for my friends and I, you can’t stop coming up with more words – we’ll just keep texting each other back and forth. I remember, talking to Pharoahe, finding out that we both have the same favorite word: it’s amalgamate, or amalgamation, is just an amazing word. I don’t write those kind of words down, but I’ll save them somewhere.

So you’re overarching guiding principle is the emotion you elicit in the listener?

I’d say so.

Is your approach top down or bottom up? For instance, it could be like making a hammer, where you start with a blueprint of a hammer and then put all the parts together until you have one? Or is it like legos, where you start with blocks, just start putting them together, and see where you end up?

It is more like the legos…I can’t visually see a whole puzzle, I’m not great at word searches. What I can do take the word search and make it something new. I work backwards, I work from the future. In my mind when I start with a song, I’m already at the video and accepting awards for the video. I can see the song and the video, it’s all done – what I have to do then is figure out how to go back and time and make the song. It’s like taking a giant ceramic pile. This is already a whole thing, I like this. I take the hammer, smash it, and then have to reconfigure it back into a whole picture. I need to know the innerworkings of it. I absolutely work backwards. When I start with an album, the album is already done. I know what I want it to sound like, I know what I want it to feel like, I just have to go figure out how to do it. I know what it looks like, I know how I want the videos to look – absolutely everything. It’s working from the future.

Based on that answer, and for you this question might not even have an answer, so I just want to hear whatever you have to say: Do you purposefully structure sentences to fall across the bar line to create a better flow, but I guess for you is the answer very case specific?

The rap has to make you feel a certain way. Whether it’s something like “Style Wars”, where it’s supposed to feel a little threatening, and unhinged, and energetic– and even if it’s something that’s the same tempo, you can’t go into “Love Thirst” threatening and unhinged because that would be fucking weird! Yeah, there are secrets that the general consumer doesn’t understand, that rhythms and chords all make you feel a certain way, words too. Even pop songs – hits are hits. These songs make you feel a certain way. I absolutely have finally come to understand that in music – I can play around as much as I want. There are songs I can go back to and listen to as an adult. Like, I heard Katy Perry’s “Fireworks” for the first time the other day, and this is kind of how I know people who appreciate music, like oh, you get it, and that song is fucking brilliant! Like fucking fireworks, are you kidding me? There’s a really deep technicality to making those kinds of songs so I think it’s going into that world understanding it, and when people are like, “This is underground, that is underground,” I’m like, well, a lot of people don’t actually know what they’re writing. If there’s a song I want to be an underground song, I know exactly how to write that. I’m not trying to sell it or license it. But if I want it to be in a specific kind of movie or TV show, then I’m going to include those words, those emotions, those feelings.

You went to La Guardia, a school for the performing arts. There, you learned music theory, both harmonic and rhythmic. Can you read music?

Yes, I can. I learned music when I was much younger, from my parents and I took a gang of piano lessons. I have my dad’s piano now since my parents moved, which is great, I was like, “I really need to go back in and play,” I play somewhat and play it by ear, and I just started going back into reading sheet music again. But it’s been a long time. I stopped doing formal training when I was younger, and really used to like going to places, like Carl Fisher, and picking up sheet music and learning how to play stuff. I love musicals, “Annie” for instance, I would get those books and really, really learn how to play those songs. I think there’s a certain amount of technicality that’s great, but I think mine also just came a lot of genes. It was just kind of innate feeling of knowing things, and then going into music theory class and being like, “oh, that’s what that’s called! I totally know how to do that!” They just gave it a name. That’s kind of how I’ve approached most of myself when I go to learn, I’m like I have ADHD, and this is a lot of money, thank you for telling me these 3 things I needed to know, now I’m going to go do that.

In 1989, you would have been 13 years old, around your time at La Guardia. At that time the big rappers were Kane, Rakim, and KRS-One, all technically accomplished rappers that moved things forward and influenced a lot of the trends today, such as Rakim’s internal rhyming. Did you hear them?

Yes. I especially loved Kane. I loved his “aggressiveness” – not necessarily that he would rap fast, but that his delivery was so forceful. Some others would be people like Cool Keith – he wasn’t even trying to rhyme!

What’s your notation scheme?

I don’t write as much by hand anymore, but when I do, it’s usually in slashes, for instance for a double beat it gets a double slash, but I also tend to space them on the page. I have to be super neat about it. Computers have been great for me because I write so much more and it looks like so much less and when you go back in, you’re like oh shit, that is not 16 bars, that’s 64 bars! So I need to relax. And because 64 ars on a note pad looks very very different.

So you know all that theory, counting bars and so on?

Yes, it’s really important for me.

In most public discussion of rap, that all usually gets glossed over. If you’ve never tried to rap, it is really difficult!

There are nuances and subtleties, and it is fucking difficult…you do have to learn how to count bars, and for some people, it’s just a term, saying “bars”… you know, like a hot 16. It’s absolutely necessary, and some people won’t even recognize it that much.

There’s this conception that “anyone can rap” because all you need is a voice, and a brain, and a microphone, and there’s this conception that rappers, since they don’t go to a formal educational musical setting to learn to rap, that rap is somewhat of “a poor man’s music”.

There is that conception out there, and again, I’d like to thank you. Not enough people recognize it.

Would you ever teach people to rap?

I think you can teach people to write, but I don’t think you can teach people to rap.

So you don’t notate your rhymes in “traditional” music notation?

No, I think I probably do that more so in my head. You know there’s times when I go back. Say when you’re going back and doing the ad libs, and you’ve already got the verse down, it would be easier to go in if you wrote it down and if you’re doubling something with pro tools, a lot of people go in and do one ad lib, and they’re like let me throw in another one on top of it. So it’s to go back in and say in bold, “These are things I’m going to emphasize.” These words are the words that need emphasis, or syllables…I probably focus more on nailing the ad libs. To me, it’s accents…the words that you should be getting right. Usually it’s the first time I’m hearing it, and if I did this right, then here is where I go in and figure out what needs to be accented.

What kind of experience have you had with “classical” poetry, such as reading Shakespeare?

Before I started rapping a loud for people, I was definitely doing poetry readings of my own written poetry for audiences, back when I was 12 or 13. We probably should not have been allowed in those clubs, but it was New York at that time and nobody cared. And I thought that it works for me, and again, it was immediately pulling emotions out of people. What words am I using to get to the emotions of people?

Have you had any kind of formal schooling in poetry? For instance, the metrics and accents of iambic pentameter, or anything like that?

I think I had great teachers at school, great English teachers, who actually focused on some of these things and I was really, really lucky to have that and be able to translate it to music, and be like, oh okay, this is the same thing. Good teachers who understood that those things were important.

So when you bring accent to a rap, it matters where they fall?

Absolutely, and it comes from having in my early career been super monotone about things, that I was reliant a lot on rhythms and accents but not necessarily doing it with my voice. Not on purpose, I think I was generally young and literally had not found my voice. So yeah, I think all of that forced me into it. It’s learning how to do stuff with a blindfold on, and then when you’re good enough you take the blindfold off, you’re like, “Oh shit! Well now I can fucking play around.” This would have been around “Attack of the Attacking Things” [from 2002], and going back and listening to it, it doesn’t sound young material-wise, but voice-wise, I can hear it. I didn’t really know what to do. I was definitely playing around more in the poetry world than the rap world. Really, really breaking rules and rhythms in a real conversational tone, and definitely not as technical, even just starting with the next album, “This Week” [from 2004].

Would you see “This Week” as a transitional album then, in terms of delivery and technical side of things? I’m thinking of songs like “Style Wars” – monotone, technical, as compared to the song “Going Crazy”, where you’re delivery is sing-songy almost.

This Week was a transitional album, just learning how to play around more. It was just having things in my head that I was kind of afraid to do. Sort of letting go of that fear, and being like, “Oh no you can totally play around, it doesn’t have to be one thing, not one sound.” It established that I knew what I was doing. You have to take it out of the level that came before. I was really happy about learning how to evolve.

On “Attack”, you had songs like “Live For You”, with a focus on poetry, almost like a book: there were characters, plot development, and resolution. But then a song like “Style Wars” from “This Week” has no linear narrative. There are people and places that are alluded to, but these things may or may not be real. What went on between those two albums? What led to that shift? Was it just opening the toolbox you have open to you?

General life just happened…when I change in life and go through more experiences, my writing has to evolve. It has to! If you haven’t done anything in those 2 or 3 years, and learned new lessons, met new people, formed new relationships, and you’re writing the same shit, the same way? I can’t do that.

How much of your rhythms at the microphone are improvised, or is it the same take every time?

Interesting for me, because it’s so new for me when I get in there, it just happened, so it depends. A lot of times where I go in and I absolutely nail it first take, and sometimes when you do that first take you go back and listen to it and you’re like, “Nope, don’t change a fucking thing.” Even though there are some imperfections, there’s magic in there. Usually, it’s a couple times, like 4 or 5. Just to kind of play around with it and get the energy right. I think that’s what it is, trying to figure out what I already have. I know the words are there, I know what it’s supposed to sound like, I can hear it in my head. But I try to justify the words, give them the life they deserve. You don’t want to let them down now because they look so good on the page. Not much editing or revising is going on though, generally really small stuff…figuring out vocally what I need to do. You put Frankenstein together, and bring him to life!

So when you start to write, you always have the beat first?

Yes, I definitely need the beat first.

How does that play out over the whole recording process? For instance, once you have the beat, do you just add the rap to it? Or will you go back and forth between the two – start with the beat, add rap, change beat to fit, then change the rap, and so on? How much do you coordinate with the production side of things?

I am really involved on that side. It’s a continual back and forth, not changing the beat, but definitely adding things…again, probably things that the general public doesn’t notice a lot. When we’re picking drops, even if you’re just dropping off the snare, or the hi-hat, or the kick, or everything for a second, it’s a huge part of constructing a song. It’s the backdrop, it’s the reason you’re going to feel the way about something, it’s the reason you’re going to take a breath and then come back in when you’re listening. And adding instruments, live instruments, or whatever sounds right…there are times when my manager comes back in the studio, and they’re like, “Yeah, Jean put a glockenspiel on it”, laughs, and he’s like “Really?” and then he’ll listen to it and he’s like, “This is why I hate you, because you’re right! Now it feels better.” It’s just wanting to have the right ear. If I’m going to add something, what is it going to be, where is it going to go, and how do I arrange it so that I’m pulling the same emotion that these words are driving at? So I’m really, really involved as far as that goes.

So you won’t ever mix and match raps to a beat?

Sometimes there’s a great moment when that happens. You might have something that goes with a certain beat…I don’t really write a lot of extra stuff, because I’m not just writing to write, but there are definitely times when you’ve written for something else and it might not ever get used or come out, and then you hear something, and you try that over that beat, and you’re like, “Oh shit, it’s perfect! Absolutely perfect! I” think that’s the only time that happens for me just because I don’t have a surplus of rap.

Sometimes, you listen to an entire verse from a certain rapper, and you just get the feeling that it was put together piecemeal. The first 4 bars all fit together, they’re a unit, they all go together musically, thematically…

 [Cuts in:] And then something else happens, and you’re like wait, what? That doesn’t go there!

Yeah, and you wonder how that jump got made…to me, that just means the creative process was they carry around a book, put together a lot of one or two liners, until you get a full 16 bars.

Sometimes, that happens. I definitely know rappers who do that. I sometimes call it “rappity rap” – you’re just rhyming cat with hat, nursery-rhyme stuff. I don’t do that. No, for me, everything is tailor made, with that really small exception that I can’t remember the last time that happened. I thought of that today, I had a verse, and I was like, “I’m sorry that song never came out”, but for me it’s different, because then I can go and create a different beat for it. But you know there are a lot of emcees who do that. I think there are some rappers who are better at doing that seemlessly, because I don’t know 2 people who write the same. I write differently than Kweli, and Pharoahe…I go in and if I’m in the studio session, I’ll be like, “let me see how you write.” And there are people who write in paragraph form, using ABCD phrasing. It’s really interesting to see everyone’s writing process, and even if they don’t think it’s a process, it’s fascinating.

So much discussion of rap centers around flow: what it is, how to create it, who has it, and so on. What is good flow to you?

Flow is different for each particular person – everybody has their own flow. What doesn’t work for one rapper might work for another. You have to get to know your voice as if it was an instrument. Know what you can get away with – how you sound, almost what the frequencies of your voice are. I hear beats that I really like, but pass on them because I know my voice won’t fit. I hear other rappers say certain words and raps that I really like, but I know that I couldn’t get away with it. It’s like certain accents, like Southern, can use certain words that others can’t. I think rappers should think more about what words they can use in a certain order. For instance, if you change the rapper of a verse, but keep the rhythms and words the same, the feel of the verse completely changes.

What is the first advice you’d give to a start rapper music-wise?

           

Learn an instrument, it doesn’t matter which one: recorder, piano, whatever. You need that different musical perspective in your work. Always rap a loud too – some things that look good on paper might not work in performance.

What is the future of rap musically? Is there any corresponding trend you see today that will continue into the future, like Rakim’s internal rhymes?

I think things go in 20 years cycles…what you’re hearing today kind of mirrors the early 90s. I’ve got no problem with that, because it’s like the people now never heard that stuff back in the 90s, so they can recreate it. But as far as specific things, I don’t see it right now. I haven’t had a moment in a while where I’m like, “I’ve never heard that before!” Andre 3000 is great at doing that.

Alright, let’s try a small composition experiment. I’m going to give you a line and you tell me how you’d continue it. How about the final line of your song “Style Wars”: “Slit your neck open from your chest/ who’s next to duel?”

I actually don’t think that was the end of verse, I think I cut it off for the song. I would do the obvious thing and continue that 3-syllable pattern, “next to duel”, which I was doing right before that point on the song, with lines like “Catch you hiding in a darkened VESTIBULE”…Maybe mix it up by using 2 words to fit that 3 syllable pattern, just like vestibule was 1 word for 3 syllables. Eminem is great at doing stuff like that.

How about a line you didn’t write: “Give me some more reason to have the women in your mama’s church…” (From “Oh No” with Pharoahe Monche, Mos Def, and Nate Dogg”)

Well, the words that stand out are “gimme”, “women”, and “mama”…I’d probably continue the pattern of the m sounds. I like when Mos sticks in one place for a while, which he doesn’t do too often…his verse on “Thieves in the Night” [from Blackstar] is one of those times.

Do you have any other favorite verses?

Pharoahe’s on “Extinction Agenda” [from Organized Konfusion’s album “Stress: The Extinction Agenda.”]

Who do you think is the best rapper ever?

Ooooo…um…I can’t tell you that.

You can’t tell me, or won’t tell me? Even off the record?

Yes, I have someone in mind. I do, but I can’t.

Can I ask why you won’t tell me?

Probably because…I’ll just say no, because that’d give it away too. I probably have a top 2 or 3.

Can I hear those?

Nope. Maybe I’ll tell you on my deathbed.

If you had to make a single recommendation of one Jean Grae song for someone to hear that had never heard your stuff before, which would it be?

I think it’s changed for me, and I think it’s difficult to say. Right now, it’d probably me, “You and Me and Everyone We Know”, because I think there’s a lot of evolution of things on there. But then there’s a downside to that, which is introducing that, with the reaction of, “Oh, okay, you’re more of a laid back type of rapper”, and “I;m like no, not really,,,go check me out on Assassins.” It’s difficult for me to do that, but I do get that question. What happens is that that becomes the perception, and then they go listen to other stuff.

Could you pick an album?

I think it’s a really slept on album, I actually went back and listened to it the other day, because there’s a lot of shit on there…I think of rap as a snapshot as what I’m learning at the time. I’d pick “This Week”, for a full, complete thought.

Are you always running ideas through your head in the course of your normal day?

My brain doesn’t ever stop working. I operate in terms of writing, just everything: dialogue during the day, different ideas…it absolutely never stops and there’s no way I’d be able to get all the projects done that come up in my head every hour.

Do you ever get tired of it?

I am exhausted right now. I just finished the Christmas album, and I’m simultaneously working on this video, writing, directing, editing, and then working on “Gotham Down”, the next album out the 22^nd, and I’m producing, and mixing, and writing, and then my show, “The Life of Jeanie”…my mind keeps jumping around to so many things, and I enjoy the business of it, but it was like 9 o clock this morning and my eyes just hurt! I just wanted to go to sleep! So I kind of had to force myself to sleep. It’s a lot, it’s an interesting time of year…but I think when there’s this great creative overflow of stuff, you have to take advantage of it. You know, the scene in old school where he does the debate team and he comes on, and he just fucking blacks out for a second, and then he’s like “Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God!” and then comes back, that’s kind of how it works for me.

Do you have any pets?

           

No…I love animals, we grew up having a lot of pets in the house, hamsters, mice, snakes, frog, fish….but not right now because I travel. It’s something else to take care of, probably not a good idea right now. I don’t have any pets because I like pets. They don’t deserve that!

#15 - The Pharoahe Dynasty Rap Analysis

I’ve analyzed a lot of rappers here at The Composer’s Corner over the past year and a half or so. I’ve done Jean Grae’s all-around game here, Mos Def ‘s rhyming ability here, Eminem’s repeated rhythms here, Nas’ command of flow here, Common’s storytelling ability here, and still more. So if you know your shit, we’re talking the best of the best, not the flavor of the week. (Let’s see if Macklemore sticks around, is all I’m saying.) But that means that from time to time, some rappers don’t get the look they should just because of the reality of things - I simply don’t have the time to analyze all the great rappers there are out there. We fixed that a few months back by giving Mos Def that look. Today, we fix another mistake on my part, only because I didn’t really find out about him until recently, when I came to know him through his associations with Jean and Mos. (P.S. – My exclusive 1.5 hour interview with Jean will come out soon. And hopefully if our rapper under the magnifying glass here likes this interview, I will interview him too! Goes for any of these dudes, in fact.)

That rapper is Pharoahe Monch. A monarch without the A&R. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to his puns/jokes eventually.)

The inverse relationship between Monch’s rapping abilities and the amount of radio play he gets is, unfortunately, a summary of the current situation the music industry finds itself in today. As I explain on my exclusive feature on RappingManual.com found at this link here, the only things that all pop rappers have in common is good delivery. It is pretty much a given for any rapper you’ve ever heard of that they have good delivery. Unfortunately, that might be ALL of the rapping ability a dude’s got. I mean, does 2 Chainz have anything BESIDES good delivery? Dude doesn’t even rhyme sometimes. From the inexplicable hit, "I'm Different"- “Hair long, money long / Me and broke niggas, we don’t get along”, and then has the audacity to repeat that line.

And that’s what we’ll be discussing today. We’re gonna talk about next level shit – what separates the good from the “ehhh, they alright”, and the great from the good. Because that’s the standard we hold ourselves to over here at the Composer’s Corner. Yeah, I get it, Drake gets the best hooks and beats and you’re just trying to go out and get drunk on a Friday night, but when you got options like Jean/Talib/Mos/Monch when you're on your own, why would you settle for less?

So first thing that separates good from great: a rap that leads the listener tantalizingly on by making sense through a continuous narrative, whether musical or textual. That is, every rap idea has to lead from one to the next. Although he’s a great rapper, and I hate to mention him in a negative context, Busta sometimes fails this test. Observe the following rhyme, from “Get You Some” (my 4th greatest Dre beat of all time, found in the count-down under "Rap Analysis" and at this link here): “A lot of niggas shit sound dated/ I’m like Shaq, the franchise player just got traded.” Okay, we get it. You left your old record label for Aftermath (a union that was too short for my taste.) But what does that have to do with other rapper’s shit sounding dated? Nothing! You gotta keep talking about related things the whole way through.

And that’s what a rapper at Monch’s level does. In the song that will form the cornerstone of this analysis, Monch keeps talking about the same thing: the general topic of how amazing he is. He doesn’t swerve off into unrelated material, on “Oh No!” with Mos Def and Nate Dogg: “Very contagious raps, should be trapped in cages / through stages of wackiness, Pharoahe’s raps are blazing, and it amazes…” (Hear the song here.) And so on. He doesn’t quickly change subjects. You thus get the feeling that he wrote these rhymes all the way through in one sitting, rather than just picking and choosing his best one-liners and hashtag jokes, adding them together until they made 16 bars (…lil wayne, post-Carter II…lil wayne…lil wayne.) But that’s not all there is to it.

In rap, there are 2 major song sections: the verse and chorus. The chorus, also called the hook, is the part that’s repeated, and the verses are all different. And the order usually goes verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and continues to alternate. So…wouldn’t it be a REALLY good idea to musically lead from one to the other? And we’re not just talking throwing in a one-syllable, “yeah” or “because!”, at the end of a verse to kinda, sorta make that connection. I’m looking at you, Eminem, 2nd verse, on 50’s “Don’t Push Me”: “You know you not dealing with some fucking / marshmellow, little, soft yellow punk pussy whose heart’s jell-O…CAUSE” [chorus now] ”Right now I’m on the edge, so don’t push me”, etc., etc. [Disclaimer: I still think Eminem is one of the greatest MCs of all time. Same for Busta]. But how could you better lead into a chorus?

In one of the major ways to create continuity in flow (which will get its own much more in-depth article later), why don’t you end the verse rhyming on the same vowel sound that the chorus rhymes on?

Monch ends his verse on “Oh No” by reeling off 11 rhymes in 2 bars, a rate of 5.5 rhymes per bar (which compares well, if not better than, the rates we saw with Eminem, Nas, and Jean.) It is: “PhaROAHE’s FLOWS BLOW SHOWS like aFRO’s / we HATE Y’ALL THOUGH, that’s when NATE DOGG GO,” where all the capitalized syllables rhyme. It’s…amazing. And that’s just looking at the rhyme by itself, without what comes next. Because when you consider that Nate Dogg immediately comes in during the same beat, starting his chorus with the words, “OH NO!”, and continuing to rhyme on that sound through the rest of the chorus- “Niggas ain’t scared to hustle...” (Nate says it so that it rhymes) - it just flows like butter. That’s the kind of shit that separates great from good.

And this isn’t even considering the structure of the rhymes themselves, which are internal multisyllabic rhymes that occur in different places inside the bar and against the beat!

And it wouldn’t be Monch if we didn’t give him credit for the crazy vocab he’s got. Vocab, although it doesn’t get the respect it should in popular rap and rap in general nowadays, has always been an important part of the rapper’s tool box. As the Fugees asked back in '94, "Who Got The Vocab?" Or as Busta says, “Vo – cab u – lary’s necessary / when digging in to my library” (shouldn’t have to quote what song). Just off the top of my head though, in various Monch songs he uses, correctly mind you, the words “epiphany,” “rigorous”, “epitome”, “audacity”, “tenacity”, “magnanimous”, “ignoramus”, “banish”, and even more $20 SAT words. Fine, maybe the college graduates among you are unimpressed (to be fair, I had to look up “magnanimous.”) But the fact isn’t that he just strews them willy-nilly among his rap; he features them prominently and rhymes them all. On “No Mercy”, with M.O.P., he raps, “This rhyme…will remain in the minds of my foes forever in INFAMY / the EPITOME of lyrical ePIPHANIES / skillfully placed home, we carefully plan SYMPHONIES.” (You can hear the song at this link here.) Once again, there’s good…then there’s great.

And all of this doesn’t even mention that all those capitalized words there are 3 syllable rhymes that occur in different places inside the bar and relative to the beat. So at this point, we are pretty much taking for granted and assuming that Monch is a master rhymer, on the level of someone like Eminem. Em can drop, “I’m zoning off of ONE JOINT / STOPPING A LIMO / HOPPED IN THE WINDOW / SHOPPING A DEMO at GUNPOINT” on “Still Don’t Give A Fuck”, where 15 out of 16 straight syllables are rhymed with 3 and 2-syllable long rhymes. But Monch has got, on “Behind Closed Doors” from the album of the same name, “Ex-MaRINE you DRAG QUEEN, WE TAG TEAM / QUEENS FINEST, the ALLIANCE DEFIANT WE BAG FIENDS”, where 17 out of 21 syllables rhyme. You can hear that song here.

Good…great.

Finally, his jokes. These are way beyond what I like to call the Childish Gambino variety of metaphors, (seriously, how many different puns are there to make on, “I’m fly”?) You can find a nice summary of them on reddit at this link here. These are always plays on run-of-the-mill slang words, like “hot”, “fly”, “the shit”, and so on. Just miles, miles away from, “Serial numbers is Braille / so when you rub against, it feel all twos” (Raekwon, “About Me”, my 2nd greatest Dre beat of all time.) I don’t talk about puns on here too much, but when they’re as good as Monch’s, you gotta pay attention. So simply to pique your appetite, I will explain one that I think not a whole lot of people get on first, second, third, or fiftieth hearing. It took me a while. The line is this: “Fill ‘em with so much lead they call / Berger and Associates!" You might think, “Okay, pretty straightforward: Monch is gonna shoot them until they call lawyers to throw him in jail.”

Not so fast.

The Berger Attorney Firm, formerly known as “Berger & Associates”, is a New York law firm located at 321 Broadway in New York City, where Monch (and M.O.P.) are from. Their website:

Found Here

says that the Berger Attorney firm takes up cases dealing with worker’s compensation, sexual harassment, birth injuries, and injuries to children. Some real shady shit, as far as lawyering goes. In particular (now quoting their website), “The law firm Berger Attorney helps children with lead poisoning. Children with lead poisoning from lead paint or dust can have very serious problems including brain damage, learning disabilities, and behavior problems.”

So, Monch will fill ‘em with so much lead that they call some shyster lawyers to sue him for lead poisoning!

If you’re dying for more puns like I think you are, you can thank me later for telling you about his song from his “Internal Affairs” album, called, “Official,” found here.

Good…great.

As usual, support the artists! Even youtube vid views are good. Of course all these songs are on itunes and the internet elsewhere.

If you liked this, check out the link analysis, and please tell your friends! Or follow me @composerscorner or email me at mepc36@gmail.com.