From the author: In my new book, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, I explore the ways that MCs have transformed the poetic tradition, extending the legacy of William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. I argue that over the last four decades rap has helped bring about a renaissance of the word, returning rhythm, rhyme and wordplay to our daily lives. What follows is an excerpt from the book in which I describe how I uncovered an important truth about rap’s poetry in an unexpected place: a nearly abandoned beach in Brazil.
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Rhythm is rap’s reason for being. I realized this several years ago in an unlikely place, a beach in a small seaside town outside of Rio de Janeiro. Unable to speak Portuguese, I had been making do by resorting to the traveler’s Esperanto of smiles and hand gestures, but I hungered for familiar words. One afternoon as I walked along the beach, I contented myself by idly reciting rap verses that came to mind. I was in the midst of Inspectah Deck’s opening lines from the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Triumph” (“I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies/ and hypotheses can’t define how I be dropping these/ mockeries. . .”) when I heard the first words uttered by another person that I had clearly understood in days.
“Wu-Tang Clan!”
I glanced behind me, half expecting to see some spectral projection of my linguistically-isolated mind. Instead I saw a brown-skinned kid of about fourteen who seemed to have emerged from out of nowhere on the otherwise-abandoned beach. Not wanting to miss the chance to converse with someone in English, I asked him which MCs he liked best. He smiled broadly, but said nothing. He’d exhausted his English, as I had my Portuguese. We parted ways, but for the rest of the day I wondered: What was it about those rhymes that spoke to him when the words could not? It must have been the rhythm.
Rhythm is rap’s basic element. Whatever else it is, rap is patterned rhythmic expression. It is the offspring of a voice and a beat. The beat, of course, is the most obvious rhythm we hear. It is the kick drum, the hi-hat, the snare. It is sampled or digitized, beat-boxed or even tapped out on a table top. The MC’s voice has rhythm as well, playing off and on the beat in antagonistic cooperation. For most rap listeners, even for those with a full grasp of the language of the lyrics, rhythm has a way of overshadowing meaning. Feminist women sometimes hit the dance floor when the rhythm is right, misogynist lyrics be damned. And even true hip-hop heads have been known to walk it out or crank that soulja boy upon occasion. The rhythm can make you do strange things. Rap, after all, is more than the sum of its sense; rhythm has a meaning all its own.
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 the way 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.
The drum beat is rap’s heartbeat; its metronomic regularity gives rap its driving energy and inspires the rhythmic creativity of the lyricist. “Music only needs a pulse,” 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: “[T]he beat of the heart seems to be basic in all making of poetry in all languages.” In rap verse, 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.”
MCs have a word for what they do when the rhythm sparks them; they call it flow. Simply put, flow is an MC’s distinctive rhythm 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.
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 lock-step with the track at all times; that can sound dull after only a few bars. Instead, a talented MC creates calculated moments of rhythmic surprise.
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 rhythm.
Adam Bradley's Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (Basic Civitas Books/2009) is available in stores and online now.
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