Book of Rhymes (3 page)

So what does rap mean when we aren't paying close attention or can't comprehend the words? “I can go to Japan, not speak the language or communicate whatsoever, but a beat will come on, and we'll all move our heads the same way,” remarks Evidence of Dilated Peoples. “It lets me know
that there's something bigger than just making rap songs.” Less obvious but equally significant is that rap's poetic language also finds meaning in pure rhythmic expression. “Poetic forms are like that,” literary critic Paul Fussell explains. “They tend to say things even if words are not at the moment fitted to their patterns.”

Poetry was born in rhythm rather than in words. The first poem might well have been a cry uttered by one of our ancient ancestors long before modern language emerged. As poet and critic Robert Penn Warren once noted, from a groan to a sonnet is a straight line. In its simplest terms, then, a poem is a reproduction of the living tones of speech, regardless of meaning.

When the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats observed that poetry is “an elaboration of the rhythms of common speech and their association with profound feeling,” he understood what I had only begun to comprehend on that beach in Brazil. Part of rap's appeal comes from its proximity to conversation; the rest lies in its necessary distance. Rap insists upon being understood. At least for those initiated into the culture, rap talks directly to us in a language we understand. But even plainspoken MCs—perhaps especially them, because they flow so low to the ground—rely upon those essential qualities that elevate rap beyond everyday expression. No matter how conversational an MC's lyrics may sound, their rhythm makes them poetry.

Rap is what results when MCs take the natural rhythms of everyday speech and reshape them to a beat. The drumbeat is rap's heartbeat; its metronomic regularity gives rap its driving energy and inspires the lyricist's creativity. “Music only needs a pulse,” the RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan explains.
“Even a hum, with a bass and snare—it'll force a pulse, a beat. It makes order out of noise.” Robert Frost put it even more plainly: “The beat of the heart seems to be basic in all making of poetry in all languages.” In rap, whether delivered in English or Portuguese, Korean or Farsi, we hear two and sometimes many more rhythms layered on top of one another. The central rhythmic relationship, though, is always between the beat and the voice. As the RZA explains, the beat should “inspire that feeling in an MC, that spark that makes him want to grab a mic and rip it.”

Rappers have a word for what they do when the rhythm sparks them; they call it
flow
. Simply put, flow is an MC's distinctive lyrical cadence, usually in relation to a beat. It is rhythm over time. In a compelling twist of etymology, the word
rhythm
is derived from the Greek
rheo,
meaning “flow.” Flow is where poetry and music communicate in a common language of rhythm. It relies on tempo, timing, and the constitutive elements of
linguistic prosody:
accent, pitch, timbre, and intonation.

Like jazz musicians, MCs boast about staying in the pocket of the beat, finding the place where their voices are rhythmically in sync with the drums. When Kanye West raps on “Get 'Em High” that “my rhyme's in the pocket like wallets / I got the bounce like hydraulics,” he is bragging about his flow. An effective rap lyricist must satisfy the listener's innate desire for order by rapping, for the most part, in the pocket. This doesn't mean simply flowing in lockstep with the track at all times; that can sound dull after only a few bars. Instead, a talented MC creates moments of calculated rhythmic surprise. Good rappers combine the expected metrical scheme with altered or exaggerated speech intonations
to create a distinctive sense of rhythm, a flow all their own. They know when to switch up their flows to fit a new beat or a new lyrical mood. They know how to deliver variety without violating the integrity of the rhythm.

Part of the synergy of beats and rhymes is that they protect each other from their own potential excesses. Beats without voices soon become monotonous. Rhymes in isolation expose the frailty of the human voice and the fallibility of the rapper's vocal rhythms. Together, however, beats and rhymes find strength: The voice gives the beat humanity and variety; the beat gives the rhyme a reason for being and a margin for error. This essential relationship is rap's greatest contribution to the rhythm of poetry: the
dual rhythmic relationship.

Rap's dual rhythmic relationship liberates the MC to pursue innovations of syncopation and stress that might otherwise sound chaotic were it not for the reassuring regularity of the beat. The beat and the MC's flow work together to satisfy the audience's musical and poetic expectations of rhythm: that it establish and maintain distinct patterns while creatively disrupting those patterns, through syncopation and other pleasing forms of rhythmic surprise. The rapper Q-Tip remembers the moment when he first realized this dual rhythmic relationship for himself. “Well, initially, [I would] probably just [write] my rhymes, spitting over the beat and making it fit,” he recalls. “Then I realized that my voice was an instrument, and, slowly but surely, I started to get into rhythms, cadences, and becoming another instrument along with what was already there.” When beats and rhymes work together, they achieve an organic unity of rhythm that is more powerful than most literary verses can likely achieve.
To hear lyrics set to the beat for which they were written is to experience an epiphany of sound.

Rap is poetry's greatest throwback to rhythm. Even new-school rap is old-school poetry. At the same time, rap has advanced the metrical tradition in startling ways by crafting a dual rhythmic voice that both maintains an old-school allegiance to meter even as it engages in a new-school exploration of rhythm. This does not mean that MCs write their lyrics in iambic pentameter and trochaic trimeter; rap's lyrical relation to poetic meter is more informal and improvisational than that. Rather, rap's meter is the drumbeat and its rhythm is the MC's flow on top of the beat.

Among the many things that distinguish hip-hop lyricism from literary poetry, rap's dual rhythmic voice is the most essential. Rap makes audible a rhythmic relationship that is only theoretical in conventional verse. In literary poetry, the difference between meter and rhythm is the difference between the ideal and the actual rhythms of a given poetic line.
Poetic meter
, in other words, is structured rhythm; it defines the ideal pattern of a given sequence of stressed and unstressed (also known as accented and unaccented) syllables. To quote Paul Fussell, meter is “what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance.”

Poetic rhythm,
on the other hand, is the natural pattern of speech in relation to a given meter. Along with rhyme, it is the music of words. Where meter is ideal, rhythm is real. In poetry the only rhythm that is “audible,” either in the reader's head or in the speaker's voice reciting the poem, is
the imperfect rhythm, not the perfect meter. A literary poet creates variety by working with and against a silent and implicit metrical perfection. Stray too far from the meter and the poem can lose all rhythmic order, stay too close and it begins to sound like a singsong parody of itself.

Scansion
is the technique by which we identify a poem's meter by marking the stresses (or accents) and determining the overall rhythm pattern of the verse. A stress is nothing more than the vocal emphasis naturally given to a particular syllable when spoken compared to the emphasis given to those around it. Anything written can be scanned, from an individual multisyllabic word to the sentence you are reading now. Scansion is most useful, however, when the poet has patterned his or her language to follow an established metrical order of accented and unaccented syllables organized into repeating units, or
feet.

Scanning a poem often requires as much art as science, because we must read the verse with possible metrical patterns in mind, but also with an overall sense of the natural rhythms at work in the lines. To take an obvious example, we identify the meter of Shakespeare's sonnet 18 (“Shall
I
com
pare
thee
to
a
sum
mer's
day
?
/ Thou
art
more
love
ly
and
more
tem
per
ate
”) as iambic pentameter not because it is perfectly composed of five sets of unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables per line but because the verse as a whole
approaches
this ideal. Even Shakespeare—especially Shakespeare—wrote lines with irregular scansion, both out of measured poetic effect and the inevitable rhythmic imprecision of the English language itself. Shakespeare's rhythm is born of the creative tension between an established metrical pattern and its natural intonation when spoken by a human
voice. He fashioned a rhythm that is both recognizable as iambic pentameter and distinguishable enough from that metrical ideal to give his sonnet a human voice.

Historically, Western poetry has favored such regular metrics. However, contemporary verse has shifted decidedly toward less-predictable accentual rhythm patterns. “Today,” writes poet Timothy Steele, “one almost hesitates to say that most poets write unmetrically; such a statement suggests that they know what meter is, which does not appear to be the case. Rather, it seems that versification, as it has been understood for millennia, is for the majority of contemporary poets an irrelevant matter.” This may be putting it a bit too strongly; many free-verse poets are still concerned with rhythm, creating smaller rhythmic motifs in their verse. But by rejecting regular metrical patterns and often rhyme as well, literary poetry has lost a good share of its popular appeal.

If you ask most people to describe a poem, they'll tell you that it rhymes and that it has discernable rhythm. That so many modern literary poets have chosen not to fulfill these expectations in favor of experimenting with a broader range of formal possibilities undoubtedly accounts for some of literary poetry's greatest innovations in craft but also for its decline as a popular medium in our time.

Understanding accentual meter means understanding how sounds join together to make sense. English, more than most other languages, relies on stressed syllables to convey meaning. Linguists recognize four or even more different weights that syllables can carry in English, and true adherents to metrical analysis have devised any number of notations to account for the subtle valences of stress in a given line of verse. For our purposes, however, it is most useful to
distinguish between syllables that an MC accords significant stress and those delivered with less inflection. As a general rule, the more significant the word (or part of a word), the more stress it receives. Of course no two people will read the same sentence in exactly the same way. Any arrangement of words embodies a range of potential accentual interpretations that can change depending on anything from tone to the speaker's accent to his or her emotion. The heightened prominence of one syllable in relation to others can be rendered by any number of means, from volume to pitch to length of stress. Depending on the meaning the speaker wishes to convey, stress alone can make a world of difference.

Patterns of accent form the ground upon which rap's poetry and music meet in shared sound. It is particularly fitting that the word
accent
derives from the Latin term
accentus,
which means “song added to speech,” for it is precisely the arrangement of accents that gives language its music. For rap lyricists, then, the stresses they put on syllables are the means by which they arrange the music of the human voice. This is another definition of flow: the song the rapper's speech sings. Take these lines from a rap song even people who hate rap probably know: “Now, this is a story all about how / My life got flipped, turned upside down.” Without hearing the track or Will Smith's (aka the Fresh Prince's) flow, we can already glean a wealth of rhythmic information from the words themselves and their arrangement across the lines. We hear the
enjambment
(or break in the syntactic unit) between “how” and “my”; we note the unresolved tension of the slant rhyme (“how” and “down”) as it plays itself out in the rhythm. Reading alone, however, has its limitations. If we wish to understand rhythm in rap's poetry, we must begin with the beat.

Beat is something we talk about in both rap and literary verse, but in strikingly different ways. Chuck D breaks it down like this: “Poetry makes the beat come to
it,
and rap pretty much is subservient to the beat.” This subservience, of course, is not absolute, yet even the most rhythmically daring MCs—Busta Rhymes, Ol' Dirty Bastard, E-40—pledge allegiance to the beat. Unlike the rhythms of literary poetry, then, the rhythms of rap are governed by something outside of the MC's own literary conceptions. Rap's beat serves an analogous purpose for the MC that meter does for the literary poet: Namely, it sets out the terms of a rhythmic ideal. One might even consider hip hop's beat as poetic meter rendered audible, clarifying the relationship between metrical perfection and rhythmic innovation.

Rap flaunts its metric perfection even as it allows for rhythmic invention. The beat's integrity, however, is not absolute. While hip hop usually employs 4/4 time—meaning that it has four beats per measure—not every measure is composed of quarter notes. Measures can consist of eighth notes, sixteenth notes, half notes, whole notes, held notes, etc. Though drum machines and digital sequencing make it possible to achieve superhuman perfection, most producers embrace the slight flaws found in sampled live instrumental performance. Rhythmic variety, therefore, exists even in the beat itself. Still, the beat's relative predictability compared to human voice clears a space for the MC to stray from expectation even as the overall performance satisfies it. Rap has succeeded where most contemporary literary poetry has not; it has retained its popular appeal for predictability while still liberating the MC to explore the formal possibilities of rhythm.