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

Logic, Growing Pains, Rap Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excuse My French, But Is This REALLY French?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

coloRAdo

But French people would say:

coloraDO

We might say:

TEXas

But French people would say:

texAS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bone Thugs...Explained!

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

Enjoy guys!

Peace,

Martin

Bizzy Bone, Analysis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"DEEP in my TEMple and HAD to get".

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

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

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

with regards to:

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

and so on. See how deep this is?

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

Kweli Vs. Beethoven: What Does Jazz Really Mean In Rap?

After having dealt with how jazz has influenced rap in a general sense, I’ll now mention the specific, strictly musical aspects that these two types of music definitively do share.

The first is something known as “playing behind the beat.” This means that a musician plays their notes slightly later than the actual felt beat of the music. It is a very small delay, though, so it doesn’t feel like a shorter duration length of note. Instead, it’s simply expressive. In rap, you have to have a very discerning ear to hear it, but a pretty clear example is Mos Def’s verse on “RE: Definition:”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr6SrRQnZv4

The most obvious one is at 2:10, on the “-ssem-“ syllable of “assemble it.” That syllable “-ssem-“ is still accented heavily, and it feelslike it’s on the beat, not syncopated like the word “did” back in his line “Like Moby Dick did Ahab.” But he’s actually way after it, to an almost startling extent.

This expressive delay also happens at 1:52, on the “sti” of “Palestinians”; The word “day”, at 2:00; The “syn” of “synonym” and the “fem” of “feminine”; and even others.

Compare this to a video of Miles Davis’ solo on “Freddie Freeloader”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14zAa_PBfRI

It has the notated music in the video. But, actually, that sheet music (note that it is Western music notation) is all wrong. Those notes that are written down don’t actually fall on the beat, as the notes indicate; they fall way after, as you can hear.

This is something African drumming music, and jazz, does a lot as well.

Another thing people will compare between rap and jazz or African drumming music is “polyrhythms.” But, just like jazz is being used to justify rap, “polyrhythms” isn’t really the right word, if they want to make the comparison such a commentator thinks they’re making. Polyrhythms is when more than one rhythm is being played at the same time, and since a rapper can only say one note (or word) at a time, it’s hard to see how they could ever make polyrhythms.

Instead, what I really think such commentators are alluding to is the fact that rappers can touch on many different metric divisions of the beat, all in a short span of time.

For instance, a polyrhythm, such as that from Western African drumming music, might be one where 1 drummer plays 3 notes in the same time duration during which another drummer plays 2 notes. This is what that sounds like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8tKbd91kFA

And if rappers are using polyrhythms, they could, at most, only be switching between alluding to that level of 2 notes at a time, and alluding to that level of 3 notes at a time. But again, I’d maintain this isn’t a polyrhythm, but complex rhythmic subdivisions of the beat, since the rapper is only saying one note at a time. That is, they aren’t thinking bottom up (add 3 notes together, then 2 notes, etc.); they are thinking top down (divide the beat/bar however I want.) This doesn’t reflect how the rapper is consciously thinking at the time they are making their rap, but the different musical traditions they are working with (classical, which would be bottom up, vs. jazz/African traditions, which is top down.)

At a much more complex level, this is what Kweli is doing in that same notation from “RE: DEFinition” that we looked at last week. As a reminder, this is it:






You can hear that song here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr6SrRQnZv4

To help you understand those rhythms, I've isolated them and had them played back by a simple triangle:

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

For a while I have been notating rap rhythms exactly as they sound — behind the beat, all of these complex rhythmic subdivisions — while other people simplify them. When you simplify them into straight notes, you lose much of what I’m talking about: rapping behind the beat, displaced accents, complex subdivisions. But if you look at that notation from Kweli, you will see all of it. In order to see the complex subdivisions I’ve just been talking about, compare how many different note lengths there are. Sometimes this, (called a sixteenth note), as on the first instance of the word “is”:



Sometimes there is this other length of a note (called a dotted sixteenth note), as on the word “so”:



Sometimes there is still different length, that of the dotted 32nd note:

And still others. Again, you don’t need to be able to read music to get this; just see how many different note lengths there are, and how quickly Kweli changes between all of them. Compare this now to a zenith of Western music, the “Ode To Joy” melody from the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th’s symphony. This is the first 3 bars:

Unlike Kweli’s music, here, there is 1 length of notes: a quarter note. This is a great, physical example of the difference between Western music and African-influenced musics (like jazz or the blues.)

Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly Review - Rap Music Analysis

Let me set the tone for this piece right off the bat: To Pimp A Butterfly is the greatest rap album of all time.

Now, I know a lot of rap albums, and practically study them over and over through playing them not just all the way through in one take, but also on multiple mixes and playlists. For instance, one single song — “How We Do” — occupies 4 different playlists on my computer (a swag one, a Top 10 Dre Beats one, a workout one, and another playlist.) In fact, iTunes tells me that I’ve listened to Cam’ron’s song “Dip-Set Forever” 95 times, which is about 4 minutes long. That works out to 372.4 minutes, or about 6.2 hours. That’s almost a week’s total of listening to only that single song, and that play count doesn’t even take into account how many times I’ve listened to “Dip-Set Forever” elsewhere, like on my iPhone. I mention all of this for two reasons: 1.) To show that I can judge Kendrick’s TPAB against a lot of other rap albums, and 2.) To show what kind of listening treatment To Pimp A Butterfly got from me.

One of the contexts I want to judge TPAB against is the format of the rap album throughout the genre. Now, for me, the format of rap albums breaks down into two basic categories that really describe a spectrum. First, there are rap albums where every track has a completely different sound from the next one. On the other side are rap albums where every track leads in a very unified manner from one to the next. In the first category falls a lot of the mega-albums, like Lil Wayne’s The Carter III. “A Milli,” by Bangladesh, has an electronic, chopped and screwed sound. Meanwhile, Kanye’s beat “Let The Beat Build” has a soul sample that sets it completely apart from Bangladesh’s production. The fact that these albums sound so different from one track to the next is primarily a result of the fact that there are different producers for every track. 

But then there are albums that largely have only one sound world, and each track then works to explore and expand out that sound world. A great example of that album is Dr. Dre’s Chronic: 2001.It’s no surprise, then, that Dr. Dre produced every song on that album. His ability to guide the album in a single direction means that all the songs sound similar, without ever being repetitive. For example, many of the songs use the minor scale, which gives the album that dark feel, as between “Forgot About Dre” and“Let’s Get High." 

Kendrick’s TPAB, then, is an album that falls into the latter category. It has an incredibly unified sound, even though there are many different producers on it. For example, we have Pharrell, Flyin Lotus, and Boi-1da as credited producers. But it’s actually Sounwave who appears the most on tracks, a total of 7 times. But every track except 1 has more than 1 producer listed in the credits on Wikipedia. In fact, “Complexion (A Zulu Love)” has a grand total of 4 producers listed! But somehow, overall, Kendrick managed to pick beats that all sound related. Jay-Z probably has one of the best ears for a beat in the game — discovering Kanye, discovering 9th Wonder — but Kendrick is right behind him. The difference is Jay-Z follows the sound of his time, while Kendrick, like Kanye,is currently defining it. What I think is interesting about Kendrick’s own unique type of unification is that it doesn’t consist primarily of subgenres of rap, or the sounds of his songs; it actually consists of strictly musical aspects, like harmony. For instance, there are tons of jazzy chords on “For Free?”.

On this song, normal, triadic (3-note) chords are replaced and extended to have lots of notes (into chords that include 4 or even 5 notes.) These extended, spacy chords are reflected all over the album, as on“Institutionalized,” or the opening of “Hood Politics.” Jazz has been in rap for a while, as on Tribe Called Quest’s songs. But those were always samples. TPAB sometimes comes across as a live performance of a jazz quartet where the lead singer just happens to be rapping. But, of course, most of those aesthetic choices were made by session musicians, not Kendrick himself, who almost definitely doesn’t know any harmonic music theory. In this way, then, Kendrick shows the ability to guide his unofficial artistic collective as well as RZA did Wu-Tang, or Dr. Dre did Aftermath records. RZA coached all 9 members of his clan to huge success, making all of their beats and business decisions (such as what label each group member, like Raekwon, would sign with.) Dr. Dre, meanwhile, also obviously made beats for Snoop Dogg, N.W.A., and others, but he also launched Aftermath Records, which directly or indirectly discovered Eminem, 50 Cent, and Game. Kendrick, in picking unified beats and session musicians that worked great together, displays the same kind of foresight and genius. 

I’ve always thought it interesting that rap is almost inherently a collaborative process. No one blinks twice when a producer makes a beat and then gives it to a rapper, with almost no interaction or aesthetic discussion between the two. In fact, 50 Cent wrote the raps for “In Da Club” without ever having heard the beat. This would make almost no sense in other arts, or musical arts. For instance, classical composers write their own complete music, and then give it to musicians to play. Kendrick seems to be an excellent mediator of this relationship. In fact, I wanted to pitch an article to one of my freelance media outlets, WatchLoud or Pigeons and Planes, that would be a complete review of To Pimp A Butterfly without ever mentioning Kendrick Lamar once. That’s how essential part I think the session musicians and unheralded or unnamed contributors are to this project. 

As for Kendrick’s rap itself, this album continues a general theme in Kendrick’s music. Since Section.80, and down through good kid, m.A.A.d city on to To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick has slowly simplified his technical style. Since “Rigamortis” on Section.80, Kendrick hasn’t ever utilized a musical motive to the same complex, sophisticated extent, an idea that I covered for Pigeons and Planes here. But, somehow, this doesn’t really matter to me. That’s because his poetic message is so strong. There are some interesting musical aspects to it though. 

But he does do something melodically (strictly musically) that I’ve only heard once before, from Pharoahe Monch. I want to compare Kendrick’s own rap verses and the variations form in classical music. In classical music, variations is a form where a composer takes a small idea and creates a series of somewhat different sections of music that places that small idea in extremely different contexts. The idea is to show that the composer can come up with a great melodic idea that is flexible and inventive enough to appear in tons of different places, like an imitative canon, or a dance. Such an example is the “Variations On A Shaker Melody” form Aaron Copeland’s masterful 1944 piece “Appalachian Spring,” which you can hear here. 

If you listen closely, you can tell that sometimes the opening musical idea is played quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes in by one group of instruments, sometimes by another, and so on. In this way, the entire piece is unified, and Copeland displays his versatility and originality. 

I noticed on TPAB that Kendrick does something similar. On the opening song “Wesley’s Theory”, he raps these words: 

What you want? 

You a house or a car?

Forty acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar?

Anythin', see, my name is Uncle Sam, I'm your dog

Motherfucker, you can live at the mall… 

This song “Wesley’s Theory” has a musical speed of 120 Beats Per Minute (BPM.) This speed is quite fast for a rap song. 

Later on in the album, on the song “Alright”, Kendrick actually raps an extremely, unmistakably similar verse: 

“What you want, you a house, you a car?

40 acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar?

Anything, see my name is Lucy, I'm your dog

Motherfucker, you can live at the mall…” 

But the speed of “Alright” is actually much slower than when that same exact verse is rapped on “Wesley’s Theory.” The speed of “Alright” is 56 BPM, much less than the 112 BPM of “Alright.” It’s also important to mention that the musical rhythms from one song to the next on those bars are also the same, allowing the astute listener to recognize them as the same melodic idea. In this way, then — by placing the same melodic idea in a new musical context — Kendrick is engaging with the variations form in a way that rappers often don’t. 

So, yes. That whole 1500 page article is actually only a small, small part of why I think To Pimp A Butterflyis the greatest rap album of all time.

Godïus R.ichard Oasis & Cartier Jones Interview

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

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

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

Paul Edwards Interview, Part 2

This is part 2 of an ongoing series of interviews with "How To Rap" author Paul Edwards. You can see part 1 here.

-----

1- What formal training or education do you have in anything that
might help you analyze or talk about rap in an in-depth manner? For
example, are you a rapper, do you have a degree in
music/African-American studies/literature/journalism, etc?

As far as my academic background, I have a masters degree in
Postmodernism, Literature, and Contemporary Culture and a BA in
English literature, both from Royal Holloway, University of London.
With both of those I wrote the final dissertations on hip-hop music
and I also worked hip-hop into many of the other essays as well. My
lecturers were really open to me studying hip-hop and gave me a lot of
support, I think it helped they were big music fans and were like,
“yeah, of course you can study The Chronic!”

Then musically, I play the Arabic drum, the doumbek—I grew up in the
Middle East and so I heard a lot of that kind of music, some of it is
very percussion heavy. So learning the rhythms for that really
influenced my interest in the rhythmic aspects of rapping. I also
always loved making beats, usually using step sequencer types of
programs, where the percussion notes are laid out visually in a grid,
so that fed into how I looked at rapping as well.

Also most of the best education came from interviewing so many rappers
directly, because you get to hear so much first hand information from
the actual people who developed the art form. You get to know which
rappers everyone learned from and what they listened to pick up the
techniques.

2- Kool G Rap and Gift Of Gab both wrote forewords for these 2 books.
How did those collaborations come together?

I had already interviewed them so I was already in contact with them
and their management, so when it came time to get forewords I reached
out to them again—it was really about finding a good fit. I felt like
Kool G Rap was perfect for the first book, as he's a very technically
adept MC and a true pioneer and Gift of Gab fit the second book, as he
has such an incredible range of flows and deliveries.


3- Consider a hypothetical but logical extension of the project found
in these 2 books. If there was a complete school, with classes and
curriculum and everything, where people learned “how to rap”, what do
you think it would look like? Is it even possible?

Going towards that, there are already rapping courses that the How to
Rap books are on, in different universities—I've seen the books pop up
on a number of reading lists. For example there is one at University
of California, Berkeley called "Tupac, The Evolution of Hip Hop, and
How to Rap" where they write a "two verse rap song" by the end of it
and “Words, Beats, & Life” also have MCing classes using How to Rap –


http://www.wblinc.org/classeslocations/emceeingrapping/ ...and


University of North Carolina have their “Next Level” program where
they travel around teaching rapping and DJing and dance, I'm not sure
if they use books for doing that.

As far as a complete school specifically set up to teach just rapping,
I'm not sure if that's entirely feasible, but then again there is
Scratch DJ Academy for DJs, so it's a possibility. As far as the
actual classes, I would assume it would be split up in terms of
content, flow, and delivery, with different specialists teaching those
parts and at some stage there would be drills and exercises, the same
as learning anything. Like first you learn the theory behind
everything, then you move onto the practical stuff where you write a
lot of metaphors or story raps, or on the flow side you learn how to
do triplets and practice them over and over until you get to a certain
level, and then you're taught a new area to master.

4- Based on your knowledge of where rap — strictly rap, not its beats
or anything — has come from, can you make any guesses or informed
conjectures about where it might go?

I would hope eventually we would get some kind of “prog-hop” type of
thing, like how rock went through a prog-rock phase, with lots of
different time signatures, weird structures, intricate back-and-forth
vocals, maybe really off-the-wall stylistic raps that are the
equivalent of experimental guitar solos, maybe with distortion and
wild effects on the vocals and that kind of thing. I think that would
bring us some really interesting music. It would probably come to a
natural end as well once it had exhausted itself, just like prog-rock
did, but it would be great phase to go through just to see what
hip-hop would sound like in that framework.

Those things have been done briefly in little bursts here and there by
groups like Latyrx doing two verses at the same time that interacted
in certain places and great back-and-forth sections, Blackalicious
with tracks like “Chemical Calisthenics” with rapping that followed
all the changes in the beat, the Beastie Boys had “B-Boy
Bouillabaisse” with an unusual structure and they used distortion on
their voices on other tracks, and Freestyle Fellowship had tracks with
melodic jazz scatting type of things going on. But I'd like to see
that sort of thing become a full sub-genre with lots of artists all
pushing the boundaries like crazy for a while.

Then maybe that would be followed by the equivalent of punk, where it
would all get stripped back down to just huge drums and raw distorted
sounds, a bit like early Run-DMC tracks. That would be an interesting
movement to see as well.

Now that's where I hope it will go at some point, but being more
realistic I think it's likely to stay as it is. And that's staying
reliant on successful hit formulas, where the rapping is simpler so
that the vast majority of people can understand it, with keyboardy
club beats that you can dance to, and either R&B choruses or simple
chanted catchy choruses taking up most of the song. That's the hit
formula that brings in the money and so I think few people are willing
to divert from that formula at the moment.

5- If there was one thing about rap as a genre that you could change,
what would it be?


I would bring back sampling in a big way. Breaks and samples are where
the music came from and in the late 80s and early 90s the boundaries
were really pushed with sampling as an art form, and it resulted in
hip-hop's “golden age” with all types of different styles and sounds
and influences. Unfortunately that ended when more and more lawsuits
started popping up around sampling and it became more popular for
people to just sample really obvious hit records instead of creating
innovative sound collages.

And I think those beats with a lot of sampling brought the best out of
the MCs as well because the beats were more organic and had a more
textured, layered sound, so it inspired the MCs to make
timeless-sounding records. It also meant that people brought in
samples from jazz, blues, rock, classical, dance, country, pretty muc

everything you can think of, and that made hip-hop from the golden age
a lot more varied and colorful.


6- Rap, as an art form, is treated with less respect by the media and
society at large than other musics. For instance, no rap artist is
ranked higher than 44th on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “100
Greatest Artists Of All Time”:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists-of-all-time-19691231/public-enemy-20110420

Furthermore, rap lyrics have been admitted as evidence in criminal trials:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/opinion/rap-lyrics-on-trial.html?_r=2

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/10/nation/la-na-nn-rap-lyrics-at-heart-of-murder-trial-20120510

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/nyregion/seeking-clues-to-gangs
and-crime-detectives-monitor-internet-rap-videos.html

while violent rock lyrics are not.

Also, President Obama was criticized by some in the media:

http://nation.foxnews.com/common/2011/05/09/michelle-obama-hosting-vile-rapper-white-house

when he invited Chicago rapper Common to the White House in 2011. The
administration was attacked by critics for supporting Common, a
supposedly “controversial” and “vile” rapper, even though Common’s
real message at the small concert was specifically against violence,
as he performed such lyrics as, “Destiny’s children — survivors,
soldiers — in front of buildings, their eyes look older / It’s hard to
see blessings in a violent culture.” There was little similar protest
against past White House guests like musician James Brown in 2001,
who, unlike Common, has been convicted of multiple crimes that
involved drugs, weapons, and domestic violence.


Finally, a 2013 article by Juan William:


http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324619504579028691595414868

decries the supposed differences between African-American music made
at the time of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have A Dream Speech”
in Washington, D.C., and the music supposedly made by African
Americans today. As he writes, “The emotional uplift of the monumental
march is a universe of time away from today’s degrading rap music —
filled with the n-word, bitches, and ‘hoes’ [sic] — that confuses and
depresses race relations in America now.” While focusing on one 2013
song from a rapper he criticizes by name, Jay-Z, Williams ignores
other empowering songs by the same artist.

Why do you think there is this difference in how rap is treated, when
compared to other types of music?

That's an interesting question, but for me personally, I try to give
as little time and thought as possible to anything to do with how
outsiders see hip-hop. And by “outsiders” I mean anyone who doesn't
already “get” and appreciate hip-hop or isn't willing to try to
appreciate it. It's tempting for me to write loads of words trying to
rebuff every criticism every person has of hip-hop and to try to
understand why people might treat it differently to other types of
music, and I did briefly deal with some of the common criticisms of
hip-hop in “The Concise Guide to Hip-Hop Music,” because that book
called for a little of that.

But I honestly find that time is much better spent simply studying and
preserving hip-hop and not getting drawn into the agendas of
critics—critics who usually aren't willing to take the time to
understand hip-hop even if you present them with perfect arguments. I
do my work and research for people who already love hip-hop and
respect it and people who genuinely want to know more about it. I find
it's much more rewarding giving people information they appreciate,
rather than trying to change the minds of people who already made up
their minds about hip-hop a long time ago.

I think a bigger problem than outsiders criticizing hip-hop is the
problem of actual hip-hop fans not knowing that much about hip-hop.
There are millions of hip-hop fans out there and ideally they should
all know who Melle Mel is and why he is important and who Kool Moe Dee
is and the sort of rapping techniques he pioneered. They should also
know how different types of beats are made and the difference between
a SP-1200 and an MPC 60. I think this should be basic, entry-level
stuff that all hip-hop fans know, but sadly it's not at the moment.

Rap Music Analysis - Kool G Rap

**This is from a request I got on my weekly newsletter to analyze a certain song, "Ill Street Blues" by Kool G Rap, and so it's addressed to that person. Join the newsletter and you TOO (2) could get analysis articles whenever, wherever, on whoever!**

Hey man,

I checked out and really liked "Ill Street Blues," which you can hear here. I frankly was not expecting that, haha. Not because I have anything specifically against Kool G Rap, but because the rap that I listen to from that earlier period is very, very select. The earliest rappers I'm likely to turn on just for pleasure are Wu-Tang, 2pac, Notorious B.I.G., and Run-D.M.C. But beyond that, mostly everyone I've checked out was because I was writing a post on them and kind of had to, haha, like Rapper's Delight, by the Sugarhill Gang. I mean, that's a great, important song, but just not one I'm personally going to put on for pleasure.

I don't really like rappers who go that far back because, frankly, I think rappers have gotten better as time has gone on. Rakim might be held up as a great rapper for his innovations, but I truly believe that his innovations have been assimilated and improved on by other people. He might extend and shorten his lines in unexpected ways poetically and musically, but he was never able to put them into structures that fit as well together as those of Notorious B.I.G., like on "Hypnotize." Kool G Rap might have long, complex, multisyllabic rhymes, but I wasn't sure if he ever combined production genius with a completely novel, complex rhyme scheme like Eminem did on "Lose Yourself."

However, I really enjoyed this Kool G Rap song, which, like I said, was unexpected. On this song, though, I wasn't looking for his rhymes, which is generally the last thing I pick up on a song, but the rhythms of his words. What I enjoyed so much about his musical rhythms on this song was the one, small, but very unique/characteristic idea he kept repeating. It was honestly music to my ears — pun intended — when he started repeating the idea that he first mentions around 0:11, on the words "front of my." The important aspects of this idea are that it's 3-notes long, and faster than his other rhythms, and are triplets (which is a technical, musical term, so I won't go into it.) This 3-note and fast rhythm, which I'll call rhythm 1 just for simplicity's sake, stands out from his other rhythms, which are generally slower.

Now, let me walk you through how I heard this song. I heard this rhythm 1 idea once, and it stuck out because it was so unique from the other rhythms he was rapping. When he repeated it around 0:14, on "raggedy," I knew that something was going on. However, it was up to Kool G Rap to get the most out of this idea. At 0:15, he does rhythm 1 again, on "kickin a." Again, everything I'm quoting has 3 notes/syllables (they're the same thing,) and they're all fast rhythms.

Having mentioned rhythm 1 three times already, I was dying, dying, dying for him to mention it throughout the rest of the song. But from 0:17 to 0:34, he doesn't at all. That might not sound like a long time, but in music that's 7 bars, which is a long time in terms of musical time. At this point, I was incredibly disappointed, and thought I'd be able to dismiss KGR as just another good-but-not-great rapper. However, when he brought rhythm 1 back at around 0:35, on "thinking a-", my heart leapt for joy. He even does it again, right after, on "gotta get". I now knew this was a rapper to be reckoned with.

That's because this is clearly a musician who understands how to unify an extended musical structure, a 4-minute long song, in unique ways. His simple repetition of a unique rhythm is a great way to keep the thread of dramatic tension throughout this entire song taught. After 0:36, I'm not paying at all to the words Kool G Rap is saying, but instead listening for that unique rhythm. Every time it comes back, it's a relieving satisfaction of my musical expectations. For instance, he does it again at 0:45 and 0:55. I'll let you track down the rest of the times it occurs, because it's honestly so much fun to do so.

Thanks for passing him along!

Peace,

Martin

Kendrick Lamar Structural Elision - Rap Music Analysis

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book Check Out My Melody: The Expert Musicianship Of Master Rappers, which will be fully published next year on McFarland Books. If you'd like regular updates on this book, with more excerpts on Kendrick and other rappers, drop me a line at mepc36@gmail.com

Thanks and Love, - Martin

-----

After displaying his prowess on his first major CD Section.80, on which “Rigamortis" appears,” Kendrick Lamar upped the anticipation for every new song he comes out with on his next album, good kid, m.A.A.d city. That album’s song “Backseat Freestyle” is an excellent example of how the poetic aspects of rap inform how it is to be understood musically, and how rap’s musical aspects inform how it is to be understood poetically.

As we’ve already seen, Lamar is apt to blend the lines between different sections of his verse, as well as slightly differentiating between different iterations of the sections of his songs that repeat multiple times. “Backseat Freestyle” is no different, and these trends show up right away. Kendrick begins the song at 0:25 with a 4-bar, shortened preview of the material that will appear in the full 8-bar chorus later:

/ [all my life i want money and power] [re-

/ spect my mind or die from lead shower] /

[pray my dick get big as the eiffel tower so

/ i can fuck the world for 72 hours]

Afterwards, he launches into his first verse, which lasts 8 bars. Afterwards, the real chorus appears at 1:02 and lasts 8 bars:

/ [all my life i want money and power] [re-

/ spect my mind or die from lead shower] /

[pray my dick get big as the eiffel tower so

/ i can fuck the world for 72 hours] [goddamn

/ i got bitches] [damn i got bitches] [damn

/ i got bitches] [wifey girlfriend and mistress]

/ [all my life i want money and power] [re-

/ spect my mind or die from lead shower] /



Already, we see some deviations from the norm in Kendrick’s structuring of his lines. For instance, he both begins and ends the chorus with the same lines: “all my life i want...” This is notable because he has flipped the structural arrangement of this line, and this is what he’ll manipulate in the third verse to play with the listener’s expectations.

In the chorus’ first 4 bars — again, the number around which all musical sections in rap are based — the line appears in the first half of this sub-section. But in the second 4 bars, the same line — “all my life…” — appears in the second half. This leads to an ABCA phrasing form, where the As represent lines that are exactly the same, and the BC letters represent phrases (“pray my dick…” and “damn I got bitches…” respectively) that are different from both each other and the A phrase. This mirror form will allow Kendrick to blend the line between verse and chorus in the chorus’ 3rd appearance at 1:53.

This 3rd chorus, coming after a verse of 8 bars, opens exactly the same way as the choruses we heard at 0:25 and 1:02:

/ [all my life i want money and power] [re-

/ spect my mind or die from lead shower] /

[pray my dick get big as the eiffel tower so

/ i can fuck the world for 72 hours] [goddamn

/ i got bitches] [damn i got bitches] [damn

/ i got bitches] [wifey girlfriend and mistress]

Although opening the same way as our first few choruses, its normal rhyme pattern is thereafter slightly changed during its final 2 bars at 2:12, after those opening 6 bars from above:

/ [all my life i want money and power] [re-

/ spect my mind or nigga it’s go time] /

Here, Kendrick doesn’t rhyme on “power,” as he had previously, but on “mind.” He next continues that rhyme on “mind” on “grind,” “-ton,” and “mines” in the section that comes after this 8-bar section, which would normally be a verse, as it was after the chorus at 1:02:

[i / roll in do with a good grind] [and i run at ho with a baton] [that’s a /

relay race with a bouquet] [she say “k, you go’n marry mines?”]

This is where Kendrick’s symmetrical flipping of the “all my life…” line above turns out to be so important: it allows him to be musically flexible. We supposedly thought the 8-bar section at 1:53 was the chorus, since it’s a repetition of the material from 1:02, but these lines above have forced us to reconsider that. That’s because the “chorus” at 1:53 and the “verse” at 2:18 are so tightly tied together in their poetic and musical aspects that they blend into one another. They both have rhymes on the same vowel sound, those from “mind” and “time” during the chorus, to “grind,” “-ton”,” and “mines” from the verse. Additionally, all of those rhymes come at the end of sentences, as well as at the end of bars. And because the first and last lines of the chorus are the same, this forces us to ask the question: is this chorus an 8-bar section that is elided into the verse, as I’ve so far asserted? Or is it a truncated, 6-bar version of the chorus whose opening is then repeated only in part for the next 2 bars before a verse of a more traditional length?

That second question deserves special consideration because, although the first and last lines of the 8-bar version of the chorus are the same, when the section is repeated in a unique form at 1:53, there are no distinct musical ideas in the accompaniment which could otherwise help us separate the verse from the chorus. Such ideas are paramount in the crafting by a producer of a musical beat that is both satisfying but engaging, as we saw on Dr. Dre’s “Oh!”

So we have no distinct musical ideas for us to distinguish the two sections from each other, and as we’ve heard on other songs, even on Kendrick’s own “Rigamortis,” verses can last a number of bars other than those that are multiple of 4, even if it is comparatively rare. But since the same 8-bar chorus shows up at 1:02, 1:53, and 2:55, it makes elision more likely than truncation, although it is far from a settled matter. Since there is no clear answer, the listener is left with nothing to do but go back and forth between the interpretations, and this deliberate ambiguity makes the song replayable over and over again.

As icing on the cake, in addition to playing with structural truncation and elision, Kendrick also uses structural extension during this mysterious 3rd verse at 2:43 when he makes this final verse last a length that’s longer than the 8 we’ve been expecting, as was established during the first 2 verses. And at 2:55, the chorus appears for a fourth time, in the same way as it had at 1:02. Thus, we see a careful balancing between exact repetition (choruses at 1:02 and 2:55) and variation (chorus-ish material at 0:25 and 1:53.)

Hip Hop Headlines Support

The "Hip Hop Headlines" app, from www.RapAnalysis.com, is easy to use. Just tap any of the rapper's name on the intro screen, and you'll be taken straight to a feed with customized news stories about that rapper. There are also included top sources for news on any rapper that you can click: The Source and Watch Loud, for instance. A custom search can be located on the button in the very bottom left with the title "Search." Just input the name of a rapper you'd like news on, and you'll get top news stories on that person.

For questions, comments, or restaurant suggestions, email mepc36@gmail.com

Thanks for downloading! And please think about donating.

Love,

Martin Connor

P.S. - This app, available for iPhone (and hopefully Android soon) was developed in March 2015 by Martin Connor. The names of the rappers and sources were compiled from the top posts on the reddit forum /r/HipHopHeads.

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What's up! My name's Martin Connor, a 20-something freelance writer and musician from Philly, PA, and it is I who made the rap news aggregator you now hold in your hands. Do you want to see more stuff like Hip Hop Headlines? Maybe a news aggregator for other music genres? Great! You can help make those other projects happen by donating here:     
                                        

$1 or $2 would, seriously, mean the world to me. I don't ever forget anyone who furthers my vision through their support, monetary or otherwise. So if you could find it in your heart to help make this day unlike any other in your life by right now trying to correct the structural inequities of capitalism, well, then, why wouldn't you? Right?

Look man, I get it. You expect to get everything free online: music, video games, whatever. Shit, I do the same damn thing, so I'm not saying that's wrong. But I am saying that, as of yet, there is a disconnect online between the quality of someone's work and how they are in turn compensated for that work. I've gotten over 500,000 page views, had my work featured on the biggest media outlets in the rap industry, and never seen a dime from any of it. And you know what those-magazines-who-shall-not-be-named did with my articles that went viral? They copied and pasted my work, and straight up stole my content. Not only did I not see a fraction of a penny from any of this, but I didn't even get the puerile satisfaction of seeing my page views go marginally up.

But I know it's a balance. If people did have to pay to see my articles or download my apps, I probably wouldn't have gotten 500,000 page views in the first place. I'm not saying what I'm proposing to you now is the be-all, end-all answer. But I am saying that I'm at my fucking wits' end trying to make this work, because bussing tables every weekend on back-to-back graveyard shifts isn't what I want to do the rest of my life.

So, thanks. And, as always,

Love,

Martin

Rap Music Analysis - Kendrick Lamar - Rigamortis, Pt. 2

*This article is a continuation of the first part of how to listen to "Rigamortis," which you can read here. You can hear the Kendrick Lamar song here.

As I mentioned in the first article, these exact lines below — what I'll call Refrain 1 — occur at 0:21, 0:59, 1:26, 1:36, 2:31, and 2:42, and last 4 bars:

[got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll /

crack the egg in your basket, you /

bastard] [i’m marilyn manson, don’t /

ask for your favorite rapper]


Below is the second refrain, Refrain 2. These exact lines occur at 1:31, 1:42, and 2:36, and also last 4 bars:


[he dead] /

[amen] /

[he dead] /

[amen] /


When you combine these 2 refrains, the entire 12-bar chorus that happens at 1:26 and 2:42 is this. It's Refrain 2 + Refrain 1 + Refrain 2.


[he dead] /

[amen] /

[he dead] /

[amen] /

[got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll /

crack the egg in your basket, you /

bastard] [i’m marilyn manson] [don’t /

ask for your favorite rapper] /

[he dead] /

[amen] /

[he dead] /

[amen] /

However, there's a mismatch here. Refrain 2 happens at 0:59, but the chorus (which, again, should mention both Refrain 1 and Refrain 2) happens only at 1:26 and 2:42. How is this possible?

Just like what we see in part 1 of this article, the answer is in how Kendrick manipulates the musical material that he already has placed in the chorus. At 0:59, he raps only the first 2 bars of Refrain 2, so that “amen, he’s dead,” is repeated only once. Right after, at 1:01, he cuts right back into his proper verse rap by continuing the thread of semantic meaning from the refrain into the verse. He does this by extending the sentence of “amen, he’s dead” in explaining who it is exactly that’s telling him his rap adversaries are deceased.

The astute reader will also have noticed that a Refrain 1, at 1:42, was also left out in the cold. It doesn’t appear to be part of any chorus, or at the least, it appears to be an extra Refrain 1 on the end of a chorus. How is this to be interpreted?

Here, Kendrick once again demonstrates an unfailing lack of the means by which a rapper creates semantic and musical meaning. That’s because when he starts the completely new material of his second verse at 1:47, he continues a rhyme on the final vowel pattern of the last word of Refrain 1. He takes the word “rapper,” from Refrain 1, and rhymes it on “casper,” “nasa,” and so on.


[got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll /

crack the egg in your basket, you /

bastard] [i’m marilyn manson] [don’t /

ask for your favorite rapper] [i /

wrapped him and made him casper] [i /

captured the likes of nasa] / …

Not only are the rhymes from Refrain 1 continued into this new musical section, but they are also the same types of rhymes musically. That’s because they also all happen at the end of bars.

This strong similarity means that instead of interpreting the chorus at 1:26 as the real chorus that lasts 16 bars, and the ending chorus at 2:42 as a shortened chorus of only 12 bars, I interpret the real chorus as lasting 12 bars, and this addition of another Refrain 1 as an elision into the verse. Thus, the Refrain 1 at 1:42 is really part of both the verse and chorus. On the one hand, it’s material from the chorus that we’ve heard before, but on the other, it’s part of the verse because Kendrick goes on to rhyme off its words. Kendrick has blurred the lines between what a chorus is and what a verse is. And without an aid from the production, such as a distinct musical idea that separates the verse from the chorus, we’re left answering that this section is both.

You're welcome.

Love,

Martin

P.S. If I'm Internet-famous enough to have what I think they call "haters," please click here.

Rap Music Analysis - Kendrick Lamar - "Rigamortis"

All of the rappers in my own personal Top 10 are unique and special in their own way, just like their mamas always told ‘em. However, there are also certain overlaps between their artistic oeuvres. For instance, André 3000 and Nas have both utilized metric transference, which stands as a good measuring stick for just how technically complex a rapper is. But Kendrick Lamar, along with Eminem, is one of those few rappers about who it can truly be said that they’ve made certain songs in rap music that have never been done before, and have never been imitated since, even poorly.

“Rigamortis” is one of those songs.

The title of the song alone bespeaks some sort of consciousness of the history of rap or its poetic themes, as it recalls his West Coast godfather Dr. Dre and his lines about turtles dying from the 1987 N.W.A song “Express Yourself.” Poetic? Not the most. Rhyming? Yep, and that’s often good enough for Dre when he isn’t using a ghostwriter.

That, of course, is not true when we talk about Kendrick’s lines. As I say over and over in my articles — I should really get it tattooed somewhere  — we can only appreciate rappers' musical abilities when we understand the musical conventions that they’re working on top of. The important convention in “Rigamortis” is how choruses (also called hooks) are written in rap. This knowledge will allow us to see how Kendrick cleverly deviates from what used to be unquestioned musical commandments in order to make something knew. To see this, we need just the tiniest bit of music theory. Rappers brag by saying, "I got bars, I got bars." Well, what the hell's a bar?

A bar is the base unit for the musical system of time, just like a second is the base unit for a chronological system of time. Musicians use bars though, and not seconds, because seconds always last the same amount of time, while music can be either fast, like Macklemore's "Can't Hold Us," or slow, like The Roots' "Boom!". Hence, bars can come at different speeds, because they don't always have to last the same amount of time. The use of a bar, and not a second, expresses this difference. But just like seconds, bars are repeated over and over in order to make up longer lengths of times, like a whole musical section of a verse or a chorus. About 99.99% of the time, those bars are added up in groups of 4 to make those larger sections. For instance, verses usually last 16 bars, and choruses usually last 8, although there are small, differing exceptions sometimes.

The chorus of “Rigamortis" seems at first to be no different, because it lasts for 12 bars. What Kendrick innovates here in a way few other musicians have before is in just how his rap over those 12 bars interacts with the musical accompaniment behind it. That's because this song's actual chorus of 12 bars occurs only twice, while material from the chorus as a whole is mentioned at least 5 times in the song. How is this mismatch possible?

In order to keep track of all of these moving parts, we’ll consider the following lines to be the first refrain, called Refrain 1, and say that multiple refrains add up to 1 full, 12-bar chorus during this song. You can hear "Rigamortis" here. In the below transcription, brackets [ ] surround the start and end of sentences, and the slashes / indicate where each succeeding bar stops before the next one begins.

These exact lines below occur at 0:21, 0:59, 1:26, 1:36, 2:31, and 2:42, and last 4 bars:

[got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll /

crack the egg in your basket, you /

bastard] [i’m marilyn manson, don’t /

ask for your favorite rapper]


Below is the second refrain, Refrain 2. These exact lines occur at 1:31, 1:42, and 2:36, and also last 4 bars:


[he dead] /

[amen] /

[he dead] /

[amen] /


When you combine these 2 refrains, the entire 12-bar chorus that happens at 1:26 and 2:42 is this. It's Refrain 2 + Refrain 1 + Refrain 2.

[he dead] /

[amen] /

[he dead] /

[amen] /

[got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll /

crack the egg in your basket, you /

bastard] [i’m marilyn manson] [don’t /

ask for your favorite rapper] /

[he dead] /

[amen] /

[he dead] /

[amen] /

However, the real chorus doesn’t appear until an unusually long time into the song, at 1:26. That’s because the first time the listener hears these lines it is in a far different musical structure than that more traditional, 12-bar chorus chorus. The first time a listener hears Refrain 1, it is in the varied form of what we can call Refrain 1B, at 0:13:


[got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll /

crack the egg in your basket you /

bastard] [i’m marilyn manson with /

madness] [now just imagine the /

magic i light to asses] [don’t /

ask for your favorite rapper]


Kendrick has now inserted a new line in the middle of Refrain 1. He’s added, “…with madness, now just imagine the magic I light to asses.” This makes refrain 1 not 4 bars long, but 6 bars long. Why did Kendrick do this? Put another way, why does this new refrain not just work, but work well?

The key is that those opening 6 bars just quoted start 10 bars into the song.

“But wait!”

Yes?

“Neither those 6 bars or 10 bars are a multiple of 4 bars that you said every rap section is made out of!”

Ah! You’ve got me. But what’s 6 bars plus 10 bars?

“Enough happy hours to put Bobby McFerrin out of business!”

Yes! But also…16 bars. Which is a multiple of four.

On the one hand, Kendrick could have repeated Refrain 1 in the exactly correct way so that it lasted only 4 bars. But that would have left his rap ending at bar 14. This is a problem because the musical loop behind him — made up of those melodically spiraling jazz instruments — is 4 bars long, so he would’ve ended the opening of the song halfway through his loop, which would sound awkward without some kind of explicit support (like a beat drop) from the musical accompaniment.

On the other hand, Kendrick could’ve again repeated Refrain 1 exactly and started at bar 8 or 12, which would line up the end of his opening with the end of his rap. But this would have been really, really boring, because that's what 99.99% of other musicians do. So he decided to do what was on the other-other hand, and balance the 16 bars into 10 bars of an instrumental intro, plus the 6 bars of a slightly modulated Refrain 1. This is so musically groundbreaking that if all of my dozens of articles could be summarized in short, I would need only those 16 bars.

That relationship that’s just been described — the one between the lines of Kendrick’s verse and the lines of his chorus — is what drives this entire song, in a way that previously seemed impossible in rap. This is the core musical game that Kendrick is playing throughout this entire song. 

If you want to hear how, check out part 2 of this article here.

*If you want more stuff like this — exclusive articles, sneak peeks of upcoming posts, excerpts from a book I'm writing — sign up for a weekly newsletter here.

Rap Music Analysis - Why I Do What I Do

Hey there! My name's Martin, it's nice to meet you. If I gave you a link to this post, it's probably because you criticized me on Reddit, or some other site, for something. You may have called me out for supposedly shamelessly promoting this website (in which case, go to bullet point 1); you may have said I was over-intellectualizing rap (please press 2); you may have made fun of a clearly white guy talking about an art form with African-American origins (press 3.) I want to talk about each of these criticisms one by one.

1.) "Martin, stop! You're shamelessly promoting your website!"

I humbly disagree. First, the proffering of this criticism insinuates that I somehow benefit in an untoward way from this site. Well, rest easy, because I don't. I don't make money off this site, even with the ads there; I make a fraction of a penny every month, even. This website doesn't even forward any of my professional goals; I am not using this website as a launching pad to pad my resume or something. The only payoff I get, a rather modest one, is seeing my page views go up, and thereby knowing that someone enjoyed my website. There is no bigger prize for me than checking my site analytics and seeing someone spent half an hour on my site viewing over a dozen articles. I sincerely hope you would not begrudge me this one advantage to my site, when everything else in my life is largely drudgery, haha.

2.) "Martin! You're just over-intellectualizing an art form whose very popularity relies on how accessible it is!"

Okay, fine. I agree to a certain extent. But no one is forcing you to look at rap this way. But I know for a certain fact that there is a non-negligible section of rap fans who do enjoy this kind of stuff. I know this, because I have almost 250,000 page views (Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal.) So if you don't like this stuff, skip it! Just know when you downvote it, you kill my soul. I spend a lot of time and energy on this, and like I said, my only payoff is having people enjoy it. If you downvote it because you don't think it belongs in the subreddit, fine, but if you're downvoting it because you object to my motivations, then I disagree.

Besides, I can't help it; this is the way — almost the only way — I think about rap. To not do this would be deny a part of who I am, which is totally mad bullshit. I try to balance the intellectual stuff with more straightforward articles, like my one on Pharoahe Monch. Neither am I claiming this is the only way to think about rap; I greatly appreciate outlets that are more general in their approach, like HipHopDX. But that's not how I do things.

3.) "Yo dude! You're a white guy talking about an African-American art form!"

Yes, I am. But I am also constantly paying respect to the forebears and predecessors who made my analysis possible. This doesn't make me a card-carrying member of pro-black unions, but after doing my due research, I sincerely think Iggy Azalea is racist. I think parodies of Hip Hop, like Bo Burnham's song here, are racist. I completely agree with Kanye West when he says, "Racism still alive / they just be concealing it," and that George Bush really, really, just didn't like black people, even if he himself didn't know it. I already knew everything that Q-Tip tweeted to Iggy Azalea, because I've read "Can't Stop Won't Stop," by Jeff Chang, which is, as the sub-title says, "A History Of The Hip Hop Generation."

Look man, what I'm saying is that my engagement with Hip Hop didn't stop at these articles, the Internet, or even the music. I read Chinua Achebe's book "Things Fall Apart" after I found the source of The Roots album by the same name. I'm probably one of the few people who can name an anti-apartheid activist besides Mandela because of the Tribe Called Quest song "Steve Biko." I read Malcolm X's autobiography twice after so many rappers mentioned him, like on Run-D.M.C.'s "Proud To Be Black."  I actually know who and what the Zulu nation is, because Mos Def pointed me back to Afrika Bambaataa.

This isn't to establish my cred with rap fans, or any demographics of the population, whatever the color of their skin might be. It's to show that I truly, genuinely love this music, and I'm not just piggybacking off it for some kind of Internet popularity (as groundbreakingly important as that is to some people.)

4.) Do you even know anything about rap? What makes you so qualified to talk about rap music?

Good question! The answer is that I've studied rap music for years, as a job, and have built up my knowledge over that time. If you think money talks, well, people have paid me to teach them how to be better rappers, and colleges have given me freelance work to transcribe rap rhythms.

Think of it this way. You know how you went to school, in high school or college or whatever, and studied math for hours and hours? You went to class multiple times each week for hours at a time, where someone who had studied math for a lot of their life then taught you what you knew. You did homework every day, took quizzes, took tests, and studied a lot. Thus, by the end of it, you knew a lot about math.

Well, that's exactly what I've done with music. It's my job. I don't doubt that you know a lot about rap music, and that you even love rap music. But it most likely isn't your job to know rap music. You didn't take tests on rap music. You didn't transcribe rap music, and then study it for hours at a time. You would never tell a lawyer, "Hey, you're not lawyering well!", if you hadn't been to law school. You wouldn't tell a psychologist, "Hey! You're doing it wrong!" So when someone who's studied music for 15 years of their life, plays piano, plays guitar, tells you something about rap music, don't be surprised if it turns out you might just be able to learn something from it.

So please, over all, I'm begging you to please think before you speak. Do your research on my articles, just like I've done on Hip Hop, so you get the full picture, not just some title and the first paragraph after browsing through.

Love,

Martin

Rap Music Analysis - Black Hippy

-Steven Bruno is a 22 year old author from Toronto Canada who writes short scary stories, you can find his work on his blog Blood In My Pen.”

Black Hippy Analysis: Kendrick Lamar & Ab-Soul

Intro:

This article was written to compare and contrast each member of the rap group Black Hippy and highlight the differences and similarities in their lyrical ability and content. I’ve chosen to split this article into two parts: the first centering on Kendrick Lamar and Ab-Soul and the second comparing Schoolboy Q and Jay Rock. The reason I’ve chosen to do this is simple: Kendrick has a lot more in common with Ab-Soul (in terms of their technical ability, what they rap about, their use of metaphors, etc) than he does with either Schoolboy or Jay Rock. Schoolboy Q on the other hand has a style that is more similar to Jay Rock than it is to Kendrick or Ab-Soul. This article aims to point out the more subtle differences between two similar rappers instead of the more obvious differences between two rappers who are not that much alike.

This brings me to another detail that I should mention. Before you begin reading, you must realize that each member of Black Hippy imitates eachother’s style to a certain extent across the whole of their music. They have spent countless hours in and out of the studio together, so it is expected that they have inspired eachother’s flows to a small degree. What this article tries to focus on is how the rappers tend to rap, or what techniques make up their own unique signature style. Okay, now let’s start with a (very) brief history of Black Hippy and the rappers we will be looking at in this article: Kendrick Lamar and Ab-Soul.

Black Hippy was formed in 2009 and consists of rappers Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Schoolboy Q and Jay Rock, who are all signed to the label Top Dawg Entertainment. The group was purposefully formed after each artist had established themselves individually, which was revealed by Kendrick in this interview. “We had a plan with this shit. We said we was gonna get each individual artist off first, let the world identify them with these artists, and at the end, bring them together was a collective.” Each artist has publicly stated that they doubt a Black Hippy album will come to fruition, and Ab-Soul has jokingly called it “Detox 2” (the joke being that it will never come out).

Kendrick Lamar Duckworth is a 27-year-old (born June 17, 1987) rapper from Compton, California. He released his mixtape “Youngest Head Nigga in Charge (Hub City Threat: Minor of the Year)” under his rap name K-Dot in 2003 while he was just 16 years old. This led to him securing a contract with Top Dawg Entertainment. He changed his name to Kendrick Lamar soon after he dropped his 2009 mixtape “C4”.  His most widely known records are “Section.80” (2011) and “good kid, m.A.A.d city” (2012).

Herbert Anthony Stevens IV is a 27-year-old (born February 23, 1987) rapper from Los Angeles, California. Shortly after his birth, he moved to Germany with his family until he was 5 years old, when he moved back to a suburban area of California. At ten years old he was diagnosed with Steven-Johnson syndrome, which is a rare condition that is responsible for his dark lips and light sensitive eyes (hence his nickname “black lip bastard” and the fact that he is always wearing sunglasses). He recorded his first song in 2002 but didn’t sign to TDE until 2007. He released his first mixtape “Longterm” (one of four) in 2009 and then his second one, “Longterm 2: Lifestyles of the Broke and Almost Famous” in 2010. His first studio album “Longterm Mentality” was released in 2011, followed by “Control System” and “These Days…” in 2012 and 2014, respectively.

FLOW:

Let’s start off by taking a look at Kendrick’s flow. I think it’s safe to say that Kendrick is a very complex and unique rapper. He’s able to weave bars and rhyming patterns together so effortlessly that you often cannot detect where exactly he transitioned from one pattern into to another without taking a closer look at his lyrics. There are a few general techniques that he utilizes when writing lyrics, and I think an examination of the first verse of the song “Rigamortus” will help serve as an introduction into identifying these techniques.

            [and this is RIGAMORTUS and it's GORGEOUS when you DIE]

      [ali RECORDED, and i'm MORPHEUS, the MATRIX OF MY MIND]

      [i'm out the ORBIT, you an ORPHAN and a hairdresser COMBINED]

      [i'm on the TOILET when I RHYME, if you the SHIT THEN I DECLINE]

      [i CLIMAX where you BEGIN and then i END on CLOUD NINE]

      [and that's IMPORTANT when you MORPH INto a ANGEL IN THE SKY]

     

If you haven’t heard the verse before, I highly suggest listening to it before continuing with this article, which will emphasize how smoothly he blends together each rhyming pattern. Although this song is not a prime example of the speed he usually rhymes at, it does showcase a few important pieces that contribute to his signature style.

First let’s break down and categorize some of these rhyming patterns. Although I capitalized every rhyming word, is it still difficult to see on the surface exactly where each pattern intersects and combines to form a new pattern. If we start with the first line,

[and this is RIGAMORTUS and it's GORGEOUS when you DIE]

you can already see two patterns begin to emerge. We can classify Pattern A as words containing both the long –o sound and the short –u sound and Pattern B as words containing the long –I sound.

Pattern A	Pattern B
(long –o, short –u)	(long –i)
rigamortus	die
gorgeous

The structure of the bar is pretty simple here. He uses two internal rhymes containing two rhyming syllables and one end rhyme containing one rhyming syllable. Let’s look at the next line:

[ali RECORDED, and i'm MORPHEUS, the MATRIX OF MY MIND]

Here he adds two words to Pattern A ([RECORDED] and [MORPHEUS]) but pay attention to the rest of the bar. [MIND] is a close family rhyme of [DIE], so it fits perfectly into Pattern B. But [MATRIX IN MY MIND] as a whole rhymes with [ANGEL IN THE SKY], which he spits four bars later, and integrates the one syllable rhyme from Pattern B (the long –i) into a new three syllable pattern (long –a, short –e, long –I, if we ignore the syllables in [IN], [MY] and [THE]), which we’ll call Pattern C. A lot of popular rappers do this, but what makes Kendrick’s approach so unique is the consistency of which he utilizes this technique. In the next few lines he sandwiches the same type of combination pattern in between Pattern C. Let’s quickly categorize the rhymes in the next line first before addressing this:

[i'm out the ORBIT, you an ORPHAN and a hairdresser COMBINED]

[ORBIT] and [ORPHAN] both loosely fit into Pattern A because he stresses the long –o syllable in each, and [COMBINED] can fit into Pattern B because [-BINED] stresses the long –i sound. [hairdresser] does not rhyme with [ANGEL IN THE] at all, so it cannot be put into pattern C.

He follows the same structure basic structure as the first bar, using two words from Pattern A in an internal rhyme and one word from Pattern B as an end rhyme. Again, this is nothing too out of the ordinary for a skilled rapper. So:

Pattern A	Pattern B	Pattern C
(long –o, short –u)	(long –i)	(long –a, short –e, long –i)
rigamortus	die	matrix in my mind
gorgeous	mind	angel in the sky
recorded	combined
morpheus	sky
orbit
orphan

But the real genius lays in the next few bars.

[i'm on the TOILET when i RHYME, if you the SHIT THEN I DECLINE]

[i CLIMAX where you BEGIN and then i END ON CLOUD NINE]

Here he changes the structure of the bar a bit, while adding a third multisyllable rhyming pattern that utilizes words from Pattern B. Instead of internally rhyming two words from Pattern A, only one word belongs to the pattern this time ([TOILET]) and the second word belongs to Pattern B ([RHYME]). His entirely new pattern (Pattern D) is created when he rhymes [SHIT THEN I DECLINE] with [END ON CLOUD NINE] (the short –o vowel is [CLOUD] is stressed almost like a short –e sound, which rhymes with the short –e vowel from [DECLINE]). This new pattern is created in between Pattern C ([MATRIX IN MY MIND] and [ANGEL IN THE SKY]).

But that’s not all he does. He transitions to the next bar by stressing the long –I vowel in [climax] at the beginning of the bar, which is stressed in [DECLINE] at the end of the previous bar. [Climax] does not belong to any pattern, but carries the same vowel sound and two of the same consonants in the same order (“cl-”). This is part of a larger technique that Kendrick uses to transition between bars that I will talk about more in depth later. The bar also contains two internal rhymes [BEGIN] and [END], which belong in an entirely new pattern themselves but also fit into Pattern D. Then he finally returns to the structure that he used in the second bar with:

[and that's IMPORTANT when you MORPH INto a ANGEL IN THE SKY]

by utilizing two words from pattern A and then ending it with pattern C.

So now the his rhymes could be categorized as:

``Pattern A	Pattern B	Pattern C	Pattern D	Pattern E
(long –o, short –u)	(long –i)	(long –a, short –e, long –i)	(short –i, short –e, long –i)	(short –i)
rigamortus	die	matrix in my mind	shit then i decline	shit
gorgeous	mind	angel in the sky	end on cloud nine	begin
recorded	combined			end
morpheus	rhyme
orbit	decline
orphan	nine
toilet	sky
important
morph in-

Or if looked at differently:

A	A	B
A	A	C
A	A	B
A	B	E	B
E	E	B
A	A	C

He manages to create 5 different rhyming schemes in 6 bars and continues to create and intermingle new ones during the rest of the verse, all while staying inside the 4/4 time signature. He consistently hits anywhere from 14-17 syllables per bar, going as high as 21 syllables per bar in the second verse. This may be 10 syllables fewer than the fast part of Eminem’s Rap God but it’s still a respectable number to hit, especially considering how smoothly he integrates his different patterns together and how efficiently he creates new ones.  

So how does Ab-Soul’s style compare to Kendrick’s? Let’s take a look at the first verse of one of his most well known songs “Pineal Gland”:

*Side Note: As I said in the introduction to this article, each member of Black Hippy has their own unique style, but you can also hear them copy and emulate eachother’s techniques during their songs. I did not choose to look at “Pineal Gland” as a comparison to “Rigamortus”, I chose it to serve as an overall look into Ab-Soul’s unique flow and how he raps in general. Try to read this verse in Kendrick’s voice or any verse from “Rigamortus” in Ab-Soul’s voice; you simply cannot do it. This is because these two songs perfectly encapsulate each rapper’s distinct style, whereas the first two verses of “Say Wassup” are a lot more interchangeable, for example.*

[it was all a dream, i swear it NEVER HAPPENED]

[i WROTE LIKE EDGAR ALLAN, i was PO' LIKE EDGAR ALLAN]

[let me hit the WEED, you know i really NEED THAT]

[MISSING SCREWS, BENDING RULES like KNEECAPS]

[i don't even know what's real, i'm just BEING REAL]

Pattern A	Pattern B	Pattern C	Pattern D	Pattern E	Pattern F
(short e, short –a, short –a, short –e)	(long –o, long –i)	(long –e)	(long –e, short –a)	(short –i, short –i, long –u)	(long –e, long –e, short –e)
never happened	wrote like	weed	need that	missing screws	being real
edgar allen	po’ like	need	kneecaps	bending rules	being still
edgar allen

[making moves, you just another human being BEING STILL]

Instead of going through each individual line, I am just going to group together the rhyming patterns and then expand on a few things that make this song a perfect example of Ab-Soul’s signature flow.

A
B	A	B	A
C	D
E	E	D
F
F

Right off the bat you can see that this verse is not as structured as Kendrick’s. Ab-Soul is capable of organizing verses like Kendrick does (and vice versa), but normally his verses are structured in a style similar to this. You can see that he tends to switch rhyming patterns a lot more and the transitions between them are more prominent and a lot easier to spot. In “Rigamortus”, Kendrick references words from Pattern A in the first and sixth bar, while Ab-Soul ends Pattern A in this verse after the second bar and doesn’t go back to it. Kendrick tends to stretch his schemes a lot more than Ab-Soul does, as well.

Let’s look at how he utilizes internal rhymes in this song. Pattern E contains a set of internal rhymes ([MISSING SCREWS] and [BENDING RULES]) that do not intermingle with any other patterns in the song (although [MISSING SCREWS] comes at the beginning of the bar, I count it as an internal rhyme because it only rhymes with [BENDING RULES], which comes in the middle of the bar). This is how he commonly utilizes internal rhymes. Kendrick on the other hand often mixes his internal rhymes into other patterns, as seen countless times in “Rigamortus”.

Although this is how they most commonly use internal rhymes, examples of them doing the opposite can be found too.

 [the bass bit the BAIT, I'm STRAIGHT, you a GAY COUPLE]

From “Black Lip Bastard (Remix)”, Ab-Soul rhymes two words internally ([BAIT] and [STRAIGHT]) but mixes one into the end rhyme ([STRAIGHT] is a family rhyme of [GAY], which is part of the pattern [GAY COUPLE])

[in RETROSPECT i REMEMBER DECEMBER being the HOTTEST]

[squad CARS, neighborhood WARS and stolen MAZDAS]

From “Ronald Regan Era”, Kendrick uses an internal rhyme ([REMEMBER] and [DECEMBER]), which is not part of any other pattern.

There are a couple of other things that Ab-Soul does in this verse, but I will come back to them in the appropriate section.

I now want to talk about each rapper’s unique usage of homonyms in their songs. First let’s go over a few definitions in case you were sick that day in grade three.

A homonym is a word that looks or sounds the same, but has a different meaning. There are three important subsets of homonyms that we should keep in mind when analyzing Kendrick and Ab-Soul’s flow:

1.    Homophones are words that sound the same but have different spellings or meanings (i.e. “ate” and “eight”).

2.    Homographs are words that are spelt the same and have the same or different sounds, but have different meanings (i.e. “content” meaning happy and “content” meaning material).

3.    Heteronyms are a subset of homographs, which are spelt the same but sound different and have different meanings (i.e. “dove” referring to the bird and “dove” referring to the act of diving).

Now let’s take a look at these bars from the song “Hol’ Up” to see one of Kendrick’s utilizations of homonyms:

[BACK in this BITCH in the BACK of that BITCH, with my BACK against THE WALL]

[and your BITCH on the edge of my DICK, JUMP-OFF]

These lines contain examples of Kendrick’s use of (specifically) homographs because both [BACK] and [BITCH] are spelt the same but are used to refer to different things throughout the verse. [BACK in this BITCH] is a pretty common saying, meaning that he is “back at it” or “back doing his thing”. When he says [in the BACK of that BITCH], he’s referring to the back of the airplane, where he is currently writing this song [i wrote this record while thirty thousand feet in the AIR]. [With my BACK against THE WALL/and your BITCH on the edge of my DICK, JUMP-OFF] uses the word [BACK] to refer to the back on his actually body, and the [BITCH] he is referring to is an actual woman, most likely the stewardess that he mentioned at the beginning of the song [stewardess complimenting me on my nappy HAIR].

He makes use of each subset of homonyms in his music, but I’ve found that he is mostly a fan of using homographs like the previous lines. In the second verse of “Fuck Your Ethnicity” he uses them almost in the same fashion with the word [KNOCK]:

[it's TREASON and i'm TYLENOL, i KNOCK out when you KNOCK IT OFF]

[KNOCK on the doors of opportunity, i'm too INVOLVED]

Or from the first verse with the word “mind”:

[had a brain, then i LOST IT, I'm out of my MIND]

[so don't you MIND how much the COST IS, penny for my thoughts]

But in “Hiiipower” he uses homophones:

[and she always told me PRAY for THE WEAK, UHH]

[them demons got me, I ain't PRAYED in SOME WEEKS, UHH]

[WEAK] and [WEEKS] are words that sound the same but have a different spelling and meaning (i.e. homophones).

Kendrick utilizes all these different types of homonyms to fill up space in the middle of his bars while giving the illusion that he is rhyming different words together (which he technically is, since they are not considered the same word). But he also uses homonyms to transition between rhyming patterns. Here is an example from “Blow My High” of him using (specifically) homophones to do this:

[the galaxy ain't got ROOM FOR Y'ALL]

[ain't nothing gonna happen SOON FOR Y'ALL]

[while I'M HERE and every day I HEAR]

[your bullshit, SELF-PITY]

[reason why you never DEALT WITH ME]

The homophones in question here are [HEAR] and [HERE], which are used to transition between the rhyming schemes of [ROOM FOR Y’ALL/SOON FOR YA’LL] & [SELF-PITY/DEALT WITH ME]. You can catch these types of transitions in all his music but especially his older tracks.

Ab-Soul uses homonyms too, but not to the extent and amount that Kendrick does. Most of the lyrics I’ve found only show Ab-Soul utilizing two meanings of a word, like his use of homophones in “Black Lip Bastard (Remix)”:

[swung two AXES and knocked the earth off AXIS]

where [AXIS] and [AXES] are the homophone in question. Homonyms are not a part of his signature style like they are with Kendrick, but are something that he uses sparingly. The area that Ab-Soul really shines with (and is arguably a building block of rap music) is his ability to create some of the most unique and near perfect mosaic rhymes I have ever heard.

You have all heard mosaic rhymes before, even if you are not familiar with the definition. Simply put, a mosaic rhyme is a multisyllable rhyme where one word is rhymed with two or more words. For example, “jealous” and “tell us” would be a mosaic rhyme, as the syllables of one word (“jealous”) are being rhymed with the syllables of two words (“tell us”). Ab-Soul uses these types of rhymes so often and so well that I believe it is one of the only areas where he fully outshines Kendrick. To illustrate this, let’s first take a look at one of Kendrick’s general mosaic rhymes, this one from the song “Fuck Your Ethnicity”:

[i'm just a MESSENGER, yeah, i know life's a bitch, get the BEST OF HER]

The words we’re looking at here are [MESSENGER] and [BEST OF HER]. If you look at the vowel sounds, they line up almost perfectly. [MES-] and [BEST] both stress the short –e vowel while [-GER] and [HER] both stress the short –u vowel. [-EN] and [OF] stress short –e and short –o respectively, but they sound close enough to be acceptable, especially considering that they come in the middle of the mosaic rhyme and not at the beginning or end. This is an example of a standard mosaic rhyme in rap music.

Ab-Soul takes it not one but two steps further. First, the vowel sounds in his mosaic rhymes more often than not line up perfectly, which is something that not all rappers do. But instead of only the vowels lining up, Ab-Soul will also make sure that the consonants line up as well. Take a look at these three examples, all from the second verse of “Illuminate”:

[POPPING COMPTON OR TIMBUKTU]

[i might even sell my new shit FOR TEN BUCKS TOO]

[This is a shift in PARADIGM, i remember when i couldn't SPARE A DIME]

[Now i step in with a PAIR OF DIMES, on P's, y'all KNOW ME]

[i PAID DUES, even got that shit TATTOOED, hiiipower on another PLATEAU]

[i know you know we need a few PLAQUES TOO]

In the first example, the mosaic rhyme is made up of the words [TIMBUKTU] and [TEN BUCKS TOO]. As you can see, each vowel lines up perfectly:

[^1.TIM^2.BUK^3.TU] and

[^1.TEN ^2.BUCKS ^3.TOO]

1. Short –e

2. Short –u

3. Long –u

But if you look closer, the consonant sounds also match up perfectly, with the only real exception being the [S] in [BUCKS].

[TIM/TEN] = the only difference is the [N/M], which are consonants that sounds extremely similar anyways

[BUK/BUCKS] = the [K] replaces the [CK] to create the same sound, the addition of the [S] is the only exception

[TU/TOO] = both [U] and [OO] stress the long –u vowel, [T] remains the same.

He does the exact same thing in the second example with [PARADIGM] and [PAIR OF DIMES], where [S] is the only out of place sounding consonant again. I remember when I was introduced to Ab-Soul and first heard this song; this was the only line that stuck with me after the first listen. His mosaic rhymes are so memorable that it is absolutely mandatory to consider them a part of his signature style.

The third example is a bit rougher yet is still a quality mosaic rhyme, and it showcases a technique that Ab-Soul uses quite often. The [–TEAU] in [PLATEAU] is normally pronounced by stressing the long –o syllable (like you would pronounce the word “toe”), but Ab-Soul enunciates it with a long –u sound so it matches the vowel sound of [TOO] in [PLAQUES TOO]. Again the vowel sounds line up perfectly and the consonants line up almost perfectly too (the exception being the [K] sound’s absence in [PLATEAU].

He’ll also use the same principles when rhyming either multisyllable words or multiple words together. The vowel and consonant sounds in each word tends to match up so perfectly that it almost sounds like he is using homonyms or rhyming the same word. Here’s an example that illustrates this from the song “Black Lip Bastard”:

[i TOLD niggas, caught wrecked, then i TOWED niggas]

[TOLD] and [TOWED] are not homonyms but he makes them sound as if they are by stressing the long –o syllable and short –e syllable in both words and by pronouncing the [L] in [TOLD] as a [W]. It’s quite easy to find examples of him utilizing this technique, in fact he does the same thing with the word [DRAWERS] in the very next line by stressing a long –o syllable to make it rhyme with [TOLD], [FOLD] and [CLOTHES]:

[FOLD niggas like CLOTHES and DRAWERS, nigga]

Now let’s look at a technique that Kendrick has adopted into his flow, one that probably contributes to his signature style more than anything else, and that is how he manipulates root words. He will often rhyme a root words (or a very, very similar sounding word) with said root word + suffix/prefix. If we go back to the previously quoted lyric from “HiiPower”:

[and she always told me PRAY for THE WEAK, UHH]

[them demons got me, i ain't PRAYED in SOME WEEKS, UHH]

you can see that [PRAYED] is rhymed with its root word [PRAY]. He does this all the time, but usually tends to place the two words either beside each other or very close together in the bar. Here is an example from the song “Hol’ Up”:

[they checking my PASSPORT, i'm too ACCUSTOMED with CUSTOMS]

and one from “Ronald Regan Era”:

[strong enough to stand in front of a travellin' freight TRAIN, are you TRAINED?]

But he will also do the exact opposite of this by keeping the suffix or prefix the same and changing the root word instead. Here’s an example from “A.D.H.D.” where he places the words close together in the bar:

[and they probably RELATIVES RELEVANT for a REBEL'S DREAM, yep]

The prefix [RE-] is being repeated here while the root words change. But let’s take a closer look at this line to see how well he makes this sentence flow. The three words that we’re looking at here are [RELATIVES], [RELEVANT] and [REBEL’S]. Obviously the prefix [RE-] is being repeated, but he also repeats the letter [L] in the first two words, as well as two short –e vowels at the beginning of all three words. Doing this greatly adds to his flow, and he doesn’t restrict this technique to only words placed beside eachother. In fact he more commonly spaces the words out across multiple bars, as seen in this example from the song “Textbook Stuff”:

[the gang-banging and VIOLENCE, is the sweetest SONG]

[and i ROAM with the heart of a VIOLIN]

[don't VIOLATE my PATIENCE i'm WAITING, to kill a man]

[VIOLENCE], [VIOLIN] and [VIOLATE] all follow the same principle but are spaced out among the bars. This is probably one of my favorite things that Kendrick does. It gives the illusion that he is rhyming more words than he actually is, even though most of them are included in one rhyming pattern or another.

Ab-Soul sometimes utilizes the same technique, but not with enough consistency to justify including it as part of his signature style. Here is one of the better examples I found, from the song “Black Lip Bastard (Remix)”:

[PERPETRATING, bitches popping percocet and PERCOLATING]

This line is very similar to something Kendrick would spit; the similarities are uncanny. Each word has the same prefix [PER-], and both [percocet] and [PERCOLATING] take it a step further by lining up the letters [-CO-], as well as [PERPETRATING] and [PERCOLATING] being a part of the same rhyming pattern, similar to [VIOLENCE] and [VIOLINS] from the previous example. It is quite obvious that Ab-Soul can pull off the same technique but he has chose not to make it a central part of his flow.

The few times that Ab-Soul does use this technique, he really goes all out and uses it to stress the meaning of the lyrics that he is spitting instead of using it to dress the lyrics up (not to say that this is how Kendrick uses it). My favorite example of this is from the song “Terrorist Threats”:

[peep the CONCEPT]

[you've got PROGRESS, you've got CONGRESS]

[we PROTEST in hopes they CONFESS]

[just proceed on your CONQUEST]

That’s seven words with the same prefixes (PRO- and CON-) lined up perfectly within two bars. He takes it a step further than Kendrick here and uses two opposite prefixes to stress that what the government [CONGRESS] does is the opposite of what should be done to advance our society [PROGRESS]. It is unfortunate that Ab-Soul does not play with prefixes and suffixes more often, as he is quite good at it.

CONTENT:

As previously stated, the reason that I grouped Kendrick Lamar and Ab-Soul together in this article is because they rap about very similar topics in their music, although they do have a few major differences of opinion as well. The evidence supporting this is most strongly shown in the song “Ab-Soul’s Outro”, which is included as track fifteen on Kendrick’s album “Section.80”. I linked the song, but its general mood can be summed up by the variations of the same lines that Ab-Soul keeps repeating:

[what's your life about, ENLIGHTEN ME]

[is you gonna live on your KNEES, or DIE ON YOUR FEET]

[take out that student loan, and pay off your COLLEGE DEGREE]

[and do exactly what you SEE on TV]

[what's your life about, ENLIGHTEN ME]

[is you gonna live on your KNEES, or DIE ON YOUR FEET]

[is you gonna PLEAD the fifth, or SOUND the HORN]

[the TIME is NOW my CHILD, come ON]

The main theme of this song is going against the system and questioning what society dictates as the right and “proper” thing to do, which I think are major themes in both Kendrick’s and Ab-Soul’s music (although they rap about a variety of different things, a lot of it could be boiled down to this). They are both very socially aware rappers (although Kendrick seems to disagree) and are very frustrated with the way society is structured and the way people are taught to act. You can hear this frustration in Ab-Soul’s voice when Kendrick tells him to repeat the previously quoted bars, as if the audience he is speaking to just doesn’t understand him and the concepts he is trying to get across.

Kendrick’s “No Makeup” and Ab-Soul’s “Double Standards” are two songs that I think perfectly showcase each rapper’s individual desires to change the world and how the people in it think. “No Makeup” introduces the character of Keisha; a prostitute that Kendrick sympathizes with who is featured multiple times across his albums. The general message of this song is that women don’t need makeup to be sexy, and he uses the theme as an analogy for how people cover up and hide from the world (like makeup is used to hide your flaws) instead of facing reality (or being comfortable with how you really look). It points out a societal problem that is rarely addressed in rap music now adays, and it’s hard to deny that Kendrick is trying to change people’s perceptions when he says (at the end of the song) [and you ain't gotta get drunk to have fun, you ain't gotta get drunk to have fun]. In “Double Standards”, Ab-Soul delves into the double standard surrounding men and women when it comes to sex. He addresses the fact that in today’s society, men are commonly congratulated when they have slept with a lot of women but women are scolded and called sluts. He sums it up neatly in the last verse with the line:

[my auntie told me always treat my lady RIGHT]

[my uncle told me only love 'em for a NIGHT]

[you can see the IMMEDIATE DISCONNECTION]

[between a man and a woman, the REASON FOR REGRESSION]

But as much as they tend to be similar, they also tend to have very different views about a couple of subjects. Kendrick tends to speak about societal problems involving the hood and issues that are faced on the street; a good percentage of “good kid, m.A.A.d city” is about these kinds of topics, including songs like “The Art of Peer Pressure”, “m.A.A.d City”, and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”. Ab-Soul is concerned with the state of the streets as well, but his major topics pertaining to societal problems tend to be on the subject of control (specifically governmental control). This is most strongly evidenced by the fact that he named his second studio album “Control System”. The song “Terrorist Threats” is the best example of him attempting to tackle this issue; in it he mentions not wanting to be “chattel” (a slave), Aleister Crowley, the city of Babylon and “Selassie’ eye”. The difference in subject matter between the two rappers can most likely be contributed to the environment they grew up in. Ab-Soul was born in Los Angeles, California, but relocated with his family to Germany and spent the first four years of his life there. (Read the whole story of his childhood here). When they moved back to the United States, his family settled in the suburban part of Carson, California, so he was not raised around constant violence of drug usage, and his family was not poor. He says, “I was broke but not broke in a sense of poor. I come from Carson, CA. It's the suburbs. So, I was safe.” Kendrick on the other hand grew up in Compton, California, which is well known for its abundance of gang violence, sex and drugs. This is what he was exposed to growing up in Compton, which is evidenced by the fact that the album “good kid, m.A.A.d city” is essentially a retelling of his childhood. It’s quite obvious how their respective childhoods have influenced their views on societal issues and what they choose to talk about in their music.

The main subject that they stand starkly in contrast with is their views on drugs. Ab-Soul is a user of drugs and a firm believer that drugs can be taken to enhance consciousness and spiritual connectedness. His song “Pineal Gland” talks about one of the most potent (and, in the United States, one of the most illegal) psychedelic drugs known to man: DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine). With lines like [enjoy your mind trip but don't trip on your MIND, no man is safe from the war going on OUTSIDE] he is stressing the point of safe drug usage, asking his audience to enjoy their psychedelic trips but not use them to escape reality or forget about their troubles. His viewpoint on drugs has clearly affected the content of his album, as the “war on drugs” and “government control” are two subjects that go hand in hand. He is also an avid weed smoker, which can be evidenced by a brief listen to any of his albums.

Kendrick on the other hand doesn’t do any drugs, but he also doesn’t avidly detest them. The song in which he speaks most bluntly about this subject is appropriately called “H.O.C.” (which stands for High Off Contact). In it he has lines like [i go in studio sessions and feel like a NERD, cause i'm the only nigga there not smoking no HERB. You telling me the kush make you think on LEVEL FOUR? i'm on five, you saying that I can LEVEL MORE?]. He’s simply telling the world that he doesn’t smoke weed but can spit better than anyone who does. People will often urge him to smoke weed, saying that he’s “crazy with it now but if you smoke this blunt you’ll be thinking like a motherfuckin’ alien on steroids” or something to that effect, but Kendrick is adamant about the fact that he doesn’t need weed to rap on a higher level, he can do it despite being sober. And although he doesn’t personally smoke, he doesn’t speak against it much either, and he actually has a few songs that advocate it somewhat (The song “The Recipe” featuring Dr. Dre comes to mind). When it is mentioned, he often treats it as a metaphor or symbol for some greater concept, like in “Kush and Corinthians”, where the image of kush and a bible are meant to paint a vivid picture and symbolize his quest for finding answers and questioning life. He is also not silent on the matter of drug abuse either, with songs like “A.D.H.D.” and “Swimming Pools” (remember, alcohol is a drug, guys) being on the forefront of these issues.

Wordplay

I originally wasn’t going to write this section; after a month of having both Kendrick Lamar and Ab-Soul on repeat in my car, I still found it difficult to decide who has the best wordplay, as “wordplay” encapsulates so many different things. I can talk about something as subtle as how Kendrick pronounces [fuck that] (like “fuck thought”) in “A.D.H.D.” to contribute to the underlying meaning of the song, or I can talk about his more obvious lines: [hotboxing like George Foreman grilling the MASSES of the WORKING WORLD]. Ab-Soul and Kendrick pack their music with so many different forms of artistry that it’s hard to analyze all of them, so to keep it simple we’ll look at one verse in one song by each of them that I think summarizes their general individual approaches to wordplay.

The first song we’re going to look at is “HiiiPower” by Kendrick Lamar:

[back to put you backstabbers back on your spinal BONE]

[you SLIPPED YOUR DISC when i SLID YOU MY DISC]

[you wanted to DISS but jumped on my DICK]

We have already talked enough about Kendrick’s use of homonyms to refrain from mentioning it again in detail in this segment; it’s quite clear what he’s doing with the words [back] and [DISC]. Also, as a side mention, it’s interesting to note how well these bars flow, with the b/b/s/b/s/b sounds being stressed in the first line and then it switching to s/d/s/d/d/d.

So what exactly is he saying in the first line? Well, the definition of a backstabber is someone who metaphorically “stabbed you in the back” or did you wrong in some way. Your [spinal BONE] is a reference to your spine, and [SLIPPED YOUR DISC] is referring to the intervertebral discs that make up your spine. So on the surface you can group each of these words together in the same category (having to do with the back). But the head is also attached to the spine, so when he says [back to put you backstabbers back on your spinal BONE], he is saying that he has come to put your head back on straight. He reveals that you [SLIPPED YOUR DISC when i SLID YOU MY DISC], referencing to the fact that your spinal disc slipped out of place (your head came undone) when he handed you his CD, and you had the urge to jump on his dick instead of diss him. This wordplay is not spelt out for you, but you also don’t have to delve too deep into it to figure it out.

[I got my finger on the mothafuckin' PISTOL]

[aiming it at a pig, Charlotte's web is going to MISS YOU]

This line is very surface level and an easy to understand play on words with “pig”. It doesn’t need to be explained.

[my issue isn't TELEVISED, and you ain't gotta TELL THE WISE]

[how to stay on beat, because our life's an INSTRUMENTAL]

This line is a bit more difficult to understand. First, notice the wordplay with [beat] and [instrumental] and the fact that they are synonyms. [THE WISE] refer to his fellow members in the HiiiPower revolution; you do not need to have their issues [TELEVISED] because they will always be aware of the issues [STAY ON BEAT] because they live with them and see them everyday [life’s an INSTRUMENTAL].

[this is physical and MENTAL, i won't SUGAR COAT IT]

[you'd die from diabetes if these other NIGGAS WROTE IT]

Another easy line to analyze. Diabetes is a disease directly related to the amount of sugar in your blood. When Kendrick says he won’t [SUGAR COAT IT], he’s telling the audience that we don’t have to worry about him “dressing up” issues to make them look better because he will always be blunt with us. Other rappers will dress up and sugar coat the issues so much that they will not only give you diabetes, you will also die from the disease (It’s very possible to live with diabetes).

[i don't want PLASTIC NATION, dread that like a HAITIAN]

Calling something “plastic” is another way of saying it’s fake, so Kendrick is simply stating that he doesn’t want a fake nation (one where people worship material goods, listen to everything the government says, etc). The simile used here is very easy to understand too: Haitians often have their hair styled in dreads.

Now I know Kendrick has a lot of other high quality metaphors and intricate wordplay examples, but I think this song is an accurate sample of his general usage of wordplay. If you are interested in analyzing a song with more intricate wordplay, I suggest listening to his “C4” mixtape or “The Art of Peer Pressure”Now let’s look at the second verse of “Illuminate”. I chose this song because we have already gone over some examples of wordplay from it,

[POPPING COMPTON OR TIMBUKTU]

[i might even sell my new shit FOR TEN BUCKS TOO]

[This is a shift in PARADIGM, i remember when i couldn't SPARE A DIME]

[Now i step in with a PAIR OF DIMES, on P's, y'all KNOW ME]

but he packs a few more genius bars in this verse. Here’s one that I would have never fully gotten if not for the amazing analyst skills of the people over at RapGenius:

[COLD SHIT, i'm HOT THOUGH, like COAL GET, ab-SOUL]

On the surface, this line doesn’t seem too hard to analyze. Rappers use the adjective “cold” to mean “amazing”, “great”, “sick” or any variation of the sort. They call themselves “hot” to mean the same thing. Pay attention to the duality of the line; he’s calling himself “cold” and “hot”, two opposite adjectives that he uses to describe the same thing about himself. This is a nice example of wordplay, but it is not what makes this line so attractive. He tells us that he is hot like [COAL GET], because once you light fire to coal, it gets hot. But the way he enunciates [COAL GET] sounds like “Colgate”, a brand of toothpaste that provides both a hot and cold sensation in your mouth. This gives a whole new meaning to the bar, and is a prime example of the sort of wordplay that Ab-Soul tends to use in his music.

[and as WE PROCEED to follow THESE DREAMS, i ain't losing no SLEEP]

[NO, NO on them NODOZ, just KNOW "NO" if it's NO DOUGH]

Once you know that NoDoz is a caffeine pill, the line is quite easy to understand. He’s following his dreams and he’s not losing any sleep in the meantime. Therefore he says “no” to any caffeine pills, and tells you to understand that if there’s no money involved, his answer will also be a “no”.

This is a beautiful example of him combining multiple techniques into a short space. [NO] is used four times in a slightly different context but is also matched with its homophone [KNOW]. Not too mention that [NODOZ] and [NODOUGH] is a near perfect mosaic rhyme, where only one consonant sound (the “Z” in [NODOZ] and the “GH” in [NO DOUGH]) is different.

[SO high but i'm SOULO]

Although this line looks very easy to analyze, there are actually four different meanings behind it. I’ll let RapGenius explain because they already did an amazing job of it.

[TOO ILL WHEN I JOT THESE WORDS, TRUE EEL WHEN I SHOCK THE WORLD]

This line is pretty easy to understand as well. [TOO ILL] = [TRUE EEL], and what does a [TRUE EEL] do? It shocks things. I mentioned this bar mainly because Kendrick has a very similar line on the song “Phone Home” off his mixtape “C4”, and it’s cool to note the comparison:

[i'm sick and electrifying, that's double ILL]

WILL BE CONTINUED WITH PART II: SCHOOLBOY Q & JAY ROCK, PART III: BLACK HIPPY