Book of Rhymes (19 page)

Rap style, however, is not simply about counting bars or building verses. It's not even about ill metaphors and dope rhymes. It is more than the sum of its forms. In addition to the conscious level of craft, it contains an ineffable quality of art. “I honestly never sat down and said ‘OK, here's my style,' because my whole thing was knowing everyone's style,” explains Bun B, half of southeast Texas's legendary UGK. “Everything I've ever written has bits and pieces of everything I've ever heard. Any rapper who tells you different is a liar. You can't write a book if you've never read a book. . . . So the more rap I learned, the more I was able to bring to rap when I decided to rap. But this was all subconscious.” Rap, explains Bun B, is an amalgamated art. It relies upon the vernacular exercise of the individual artist working through the influences close at hand to create something new. The fact that this often occurs subconsciously is part of the mystery of poetic creation.

Poets and songwriters of all types often speak of a zone they reach during the process of composition, a mental state that approximates that of a trance. William Butler Yeats described it this way, echoing Bun B's words across three-quarters of a century, “Style is almost unconscious. I know what I have tried to do, little what I have done.” Yeats suggests a difference between artistic aims (“what I tried to do”) and artistic achievement (“what I have done”) that mirrors the relation between creation and consumption, the artists and the audience.

The poet Frances Mayes offers a more concrete definition, defining poetic style as consisting of “characteristic words and images, prevalent concerns, tone of voice, pattern of syntax, and form. When we read enough of an author, we
begin to know the kind of power he has over language and the resources of language at his disposal. What makes us recognize the author, even if a poem is not identified, is style.” Style is therefore something that the artist constructs, though often in an “unconscious” state, that the audience can ultimately identify.

Rappers, like anyone else, are subject to popular taste. When a rapper introduces a truly distinctive style—like Melle Mel or Big Daddy Kane, and more recently, like Eminem or Andre 3000—they are bound to have imitators. And while cynics might suggest that these imitators are simply trying to cash in on the popularity of a new sound, they might simply be trying to master rap's difficult form. Every artist in every genre goes through an early phase of imitation. But where a painter or a jazz pianist will likely be able to hone their crafts and develop their personal styles away from the attention of a mass audience, rappers are more likely to be scooped up and packaged for sale well before they've finished their artistic maturation. This is partly because rap is dominated by men who debut at a young age, from their teens into their twenties, and only rarely after thirty. And, yes, it is also a result of a revenue model in which A&Rs are constantly on the lookout for young talent that fits a certain preestablished (and profitable) artistic profile.

Rap's growing commercialization risks stunting the music's stylistic diversity. “Today we take rhyme styles for granted,” hip-hop legend KRS-One said. “On
Criminal Minded
those rhyme styles you hear were original. They hadn't been heard before. The album had originality and we lack so much of that today. It seems that if one rapper comes out with a style, twenty others come after him. Hip hop now,
what it has become, is just not what we intended it to be. When
Criminal Minded
came out, Big Daddy Kane had his own style, Rakim still has his own style, Kool G Rap, Biz Markie. We've lost cultural continuity because hip-hop has gone from being a culture to being a product.”

The product-oriented approach to hip hop that KRS-ONE talks about creates a stylistic tension, resulting in a host of rappers who sound alike in an art form that celebrates originality and shuns imitation. Among rap's many paradoxes is this one: It is an art form based upon borrowing, and yet it punishes stealing like no other. Rap is a vernacular art, which is to say it takes its shape from a fusion of individual innovation and preexisting forms. Think of Missy Elliott borrowing the chorus from Frankie Smith's “Double Dutch Bus,” but flipping it into a funky hook on “Gossip Folks.” Or DJ Premier sampling Chuck D's counting for Notorious B.I.G.'s classic “Ten Crack Commandments.”

Rap is nothing if not an amalgamated art, comprising bits and pieces, loose ends reordered and reconceived in ways that both announce their debt and assert their creative independence from their sources. If the case for the musical virtuosity of the DJ hasn't yet been made, then it should. Wynton Marsalis couldn't build a track with as much rhythmic variety and sonic layering as the RZA or Hi-Tek or Just Blaze. These men are musicians, even if their instruments are two turntables, a mixing board, and ProTools. It is the ultimate postmodern musical form. Born of pastiche, rap instrumentals often assemble something new out of the discarded fragments of other songs, shaping order out of chaos.

The same process of repetition and re-creation holds for the MC's lyrics as well. Think of how many MCs have started
their rhymes off, à la Rakim, “It's been a long time. . . .” Rap relies on shared knowledge, a common musical and lyrical vocabulary accessible to all. At the same time, few charges are as damning to an MC as being called a biter. Biting, or co-opting another person's style or even specific lines, qualifies as a high crime in hip hop's code of ethics and aesthetics. Rap polices the boundary between borrowing and theft in ways that at times seems arbitrary.

In early 2005 a mix started circulating through hip-hop radio that featured a litany of Jay-Z lines preceded by their source in other MC's lyrics. Depending on where you stood, “I'm Not a Writer, I'm a Biter” was either proof positive that Jigga was bringing nothing original to rap or, to the contrary, further evidence of his greatness—his ability to be original while still referencing some of the classic lines in hip-hop history. Jay drew his inspiration most often from the Notorious B.I.G., sometimes repeating his lyrics word for word, albeit in the new context of his own verse. The fact that Jay-Z, regarded by many as one of the greatest if not the greatest MC of all time, would so often resort to such lyrical allusions (and that he would also be the source of other artists' borrowing) testifies to one of the foundational truths about rap. Rap is an art born, in part, of imitation.

Imitation, however, is not always biting, though the line of demarcation is sometimes blurry. Biting suggests a flagrant disregard for the integrity of another's art, a lazy practice of passing off someone else's creativity as your own. Imitation in an artistic context means charging another's words with your own creativity and, in the process, creating something that is at once neither his nor yours, and yet somehow both. Art through the ages has followed this same creative practice of
free exchange. Shakespeare drew many of his plots, including classics like
Hamlet,
from Holinshed's
Chronicles.
T. S. Eliot's
Waste Land
riffs on everything from ragtime lyrics to sacred Sanskrit texts.

What happens, though, when such artistic freedom meets rap's culture of commerce? Rappers and their fans often talk in a language of ownership, as if something as illusory as style can come with a deed. Sometimes this protection is simply a reflex, a habit of being perhaps drawn from what KRS-One called the “reality of lack” that many rappers experienced growing up in poor communities. If you have something that's valuable, hold on to it so that everyone knows that it's yours. Add to that the fact that signature styles, even signature lines, can be the stuff of significant wealth in today's rap marketplace and the stakes of what might otherwise have been an aesthetic tussle become much, much greater.

While one can certainly make a reasonable claim to a limited kind of ownership, the natural state of any art form is freedom. Culture is a commodity, not simply in a capitalistic system, but in
any
human society. Artists learn from other artists. Artists “steal” from other artists—and it is not simply the inferior artists who do so. “If there is something to steal, I steal it!” Pablo Picasso once said. The concept of theft in art is complex. While we should resist any effort to misrepresent the history of culture, we also must resist attempts to restrict its free exchange. The moment an MC records a rap—in fact, the moment that MC spits a verse in front of someone other than his own reflection—is the moment culture liberates itself from context.

Speaking about black American culture as a whole, Ralph Ellison once noted that despite our reasonable desires
to protect it from outside influence, the fact of the matter is that all cultural creations become common property in a way when presented to the public. “I wish there could be some control of it,” Ellison said in a 1973 interview, “but there cannot be control over it, except in this way: through those of us who write and who create using what is there to use in a most eloquent and transcendent way.” The individual artist's eloquence and transcendence confer stylistic originality upon shared cultural sources. “I'm not a separatist,” Ellison explains earlier in the interview. “The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new—by putting something else with what you've got.” Here Ellison is defining the vernacular process, the act of “putting something else with what you've got.” Rap may be the best contemporary example of this principle in action.

Lil Wayne provides a perfect illustration of how conscious imitation can also achieve lyrical innovation on “Dr. Carter,” where he not only repeats another artist's line, but does so in celebration of its excellence and in defiance of the risks of being labeled a biter. “Dr. Carter” is a conceptual song in which Weezy takes on the role of a rap physician, diagnosing and treating various rap illnesses like lack of concepts, failure of originality, and wack flow. He spits the following lines on the second verse:

Riffing off Kanye's familiar line from “Can't Tell Me Nothing” (“No, I already graduated / And you can live through anything if Magic made it”), Wayne pays tribute even as he displays his own poetic artistry with rhyme (“recycling,” “reciting,” “biting,” “enlightening”) and repetition (of “re” as well as the dual meanings of “just like it”). What separates “biting” and “enlightening” is the difference between mere repetition and repetition with a difference. It comes down to a question of ownership, a fraught concept when it concerns something like art.

An equally compelling circumstance of art and ownership concerns the commerce conducted behind the scenes between writers who don't perform their lyrics and performers who don't write their own. The ghostwriter is perhaps the most shadowy figure in rap, cloaked in controversy and obscured out of necessity to protect the credibility of the performer. Ghostwriting, or one artist supplying lyrics to be delivered by another artist, usually for a fee, has been around since rap's birth. While few rappers will admit to using one, many rappers have boasted about being one. “I'm a ghostwriter, I'm the cat that you don't see / I write hits for rappers you like and charge 'em a fee,” Mad Skillz rhymes on “Ghostwriter.” Or, “Check the credits, S. Carter, ghostwriter / and for the right price, I can even make yo' shit tighter,” Jay-Z spits on “Ride or Die.”

As a consequence of this close association between writer and performer, rap has traditionally made little room for something like a cover tune. With the exception of groups like the Roots who sometimes perform other artists' songs during their concerts as tributes and as demonstrations of their musical virtuosity, rap has relatively few instances of
MCs rhyming the lyrics of another song in its entirety. Certainly rap has relied heavily on lyrical samples from past rhymes, or from allusive references to them, but rarely has an entire verse, much less a song, been repeated by another artist. Hip hop, it would seem, has no room for standards. This is true for an entire song, but many artists borrow the structure of a verse, including an entire line or set of lines, from previous songs. And reproduction on the levels of theme, image, and expression is common—even to the point of limiting the expressive range of artists to a handful of tried and true themes.

Yet as long as rap has been around, so has the ghostwriter. Sometimes the transaction between performer and ghostwriter has been behind the scenes, other times out in the open. In the 1980s Big Daddy Kane ghostwrote for a host of popular artists, but only the closest observers seemed to take notice. For Kane, as for any ghostwriter, the primary challenge was one of style. How do you write rhymes that authentically come across as another person's voice? How do you embody another artist's style? In a revealing interview with Brian Coleman, Kane offered these observations about ghostwriting for two different artists, Shanté and Biz Markie: