This was an essay I submitted for my cultural studies assignment as part of my degree. I am currently planning for a follow-up project for my final research paper, which will showcase a timeline of the milestones of rap lyricism in a song format presentation. If you are willing to help me out on this topic, do email me at saidaisuu@gmail.com and we will discuss the details. For now, do take your time to read through the following essay to get a rough idea of what the project will be based upon. Thank you :)
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A Review of Rap Stylistics and Rakim's Innovations
by Aiman Bin Mohd Misri
When William Griffin came to record his demo with Eric Barrier in Marley Marl's studio in 1986, Marley Marl, along with MC Shan who was the assistant engineer, both part of a famous rap supergroup at that time called Juice Crew, were left stunned and unsure of how to react to Griffin's never before seen, or heard of, style1. They first thought it was wack, but after a few takes, they were believers. Rap was about to take a stylistic turn, and Rakim Allah, or Rakim, as Griffin would later be famously known as, along with Eric B. as his DJ, would lead rap into a new threshold of aesthetics of rap music. Rakim's innovations in lyricism would later earn him the title of the God MC, among others.
So what did Rakim really change? What was so different about his style from other rap notables before him, and those who came to fame in the same period, 1986 to 1987? To answer this, a critical review of rap's development and possible roots is required, and this article will attempt at exactly that. However, tracing rap's roots in other forms of music preceding it might not do justice to the beauty of those forms, as this article will view rap as a vocal element of music influenced by only certain elements that exist in those genres be it vocal or instrumental, but not necessarily the main characteristics of them. Nonetheless, this article will also attempt to bring forward a new method of musical appreciation of rap, beyond it's content and accompanying culture. This article will be divided into 3 parts, which may overlap on certain points. The first is the technical review of rap, the 2nd is the tracing of a few interesting possible roots of rap and it's development before Rakim, and the third would be the review of Rakim's influential innovations of rap.
Technical Review of Rap
Because of it's stereotypical association with controversial and immoral contents2, discussions of rap's aesthetics is often considerably minimal compared to its historical and social background, content, commercialization and culture. Critics often do not view rap as musical mostly because of the claim that the sampling in rap's production requires little to no musical skill, and most importantly, the vocals in rap has no melodic characteristics3. The latter may be considered inaccurate through closer observation. In many instances of other genres, when the vocals are sung, the lyrics are melismatic in execution, meaning that each syllable is sung while moving through different notes, or sustained through multiple notes. Rap, on the other hand, is a syllabic approach to vocal execution. Each syllable is seen as one note. This was amazingly displayed the other way around by John Coltrane in his Love Supreme release, on the track Psalms, where he played a saxophone rendition of his poem4. Coltrane 'pronounced' every single syllable, giving a haunting impression that the saxophone had a human voice.
Added to this, rap's main characteristic is it's rhythm5. In a musical analogy, rap utilizes the vocal element of music as a rhythmic or even almost a percussive instrument, where the syllable placements in bar roughly follows that of a hi hat rhythm, syncopated like that of a unique drumming style of its own. In drumming, a drum element may be played accented or unaccented in a pattern that would present itself as rhythm. Rap applies the same technique rhythm-wise by way of having stressed and unstressed syllables. The rhythm of these stress patterns follow that of the Old English poetic rhythm where it is closer to natural speech than a forced rhythm, much like the sprung rhythm as described by Gerard Manley Hopkins5,6. Through this perspective, rap music seems to utilize a dual-rhythmic pattern when laid on a musical accompaniment, unlike other melismatic song forms that are tied to the backing music's melodies and main rhythms5. It is much like polyrhythm and counterpoint, where the vocal element has it's own distinctive rhythm against the musical accompaniment, only that rap is performed to fit into, or flow along to, the rhythm of the music even while having it's own rhythm.
In the beginning, DJ Kool Herc, along with his friends Clark Kent and Coke La Rock, only used chants and short rhyming phrases and sentences that served its purpose to hype up the crowd. This later developed from party to party by various individuals into longer raps, but fairly simply structured, party-themed, and even included rhythmically executed non-sense syllables similar to the jazz element of scatting, as clearly seen in the song Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang7. Melle Mel then came in and rode the beat almost always on point with the two and four beats, while spicing it up with almost randomly occurring internal rhymes and sometimes complex structures7. The basic rhythm was becoming apparent at this point, which seemed to be the backbone of rap's ever-growing complexity, although the rhymes were fairly simple and the structures at this point seemed almost monotonous except for the syncopation and the occasional high pitched delivery.
Notable Roots and Development of Rap
Before going into what Rakim changed in rap, lets look at some of the possible roots of rap. It may be argued based on the social make-up of Hip Hop that rap is deeply rooted in African or African-American music, which is often claimed to be brought in by the generations of slaves from Africa. However, as with early jazz musicians applying African folk music into European marching band instruments3, rap does the same in it's use of English poetry. The Anglo-Saxon tradition of accented or stressed meter is applied in Melle Mel's style where there are mainly four stressed syllables per bar based on the 4-beat bar, as with the common form in poems such as Beowulf being a four stress syllable pattern per line and often split in half by a slight pause after the 2nd stress syllable, again, preceding and similar to rap. In between these stressed syllables are, of course, unstressed syllables, which are arranged in an almost equal meter between the stressed syllables in every line5.
However, the slight variations in the syllable count in every bar is where a rapper's creativity comes in. Unlike the sonnet, rap's syllable count per bar is based upon the oral performance of the syllables formation. Every syllable has its own weight in a word and sentence, and knowing these weights is the basic skill in rap5. This may not always mean that, say, in a 1/8th beat measure, a 'heavier' syllable would carry 2 beats or 3. Some syllables can even be executed well in a 1/16th beat. The problem rises when the a consonant demands a pause during a transition from a vowel, and not simply flowed into or overlapped together, depending on diction, which varies among rappers. The main point is that rap is unlike the strict syllabic rhythm of poetry, but rather integrated with the showmanship nature of rap to fit into an orally musical bar, much like the sprung rhythm described by Gerard Manley Hopkins that is closer to the rhythm of natural speech5. We will later see how Rakim built upon this.
As mentioned earlier, DJ Kool Herc utilized chants and short rhyming phrases rhythmically over the music to hype up the crowd. This was not new. In fact Kool Herc witnessed how important the men behind the sound systems in parties were, back when he was growing up in Jamaica in the 1970s1. He understood then that those in control of the sound systems could shape the community. The sound crew with the best sound quality and the hottest selection of records would triumph. More than that, it was really about entertaining the crowd. It was around the same time that the practice of toasting by the Jamaican Djs had gained popularity through people such as U-Roy, characterized by boastful commentaries, chants, and half-sung rhymes10, performed over dub versions of hit records. A close observation to such performances by toasting DJs may not reveal what is noticeably rap, but the vocal rhythm improvisation executed were not unlike what Kool Herc attempted in his early gigs. The main difference, however, was the backing music, which commands different rhythms altogether for the vocals to fit in.
This difference is also the reason why The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron may sound far from actually rapping in the sonic rhythmic definition of the art as we recognize today. In the case of the toasting Jamaican Djs, the music was laid back, and the distinctive rhythm of that period were closer to the roots of reggae. On the non-melodic vocal performances on Gil Scott-Heron songs such as The Revolution Will Not Be Televised10, the rhythm of the vocal execution is more of poetic free verse and occasionally in sync to the rhythm of the backing music, which sounded as spontaneous as the music itself. In the house parties in New York of which Kool Herc attended after he moved from Jamaica, the upbeat party songs such as those from James Brown ruled the dance floor. A huge part of Kool Herc's success as a DJ was his realization that most people waited for the breaks of a song to dance to, and delivering exactly that in his own parties, apart from a selection of crowd-favorite records which main aim was to rock the party1. Kool Herc did what came naturally as with the previous cultures of rhythmic vocal practices, only in a totally different musical environment.
While listening to blues compilations from the 1920s to 30s, one may argue that rap is lyrically rooted in the work songs in early blues8. In fact, when tracing the roots of rap, vocals have been the centre of attention, much like the free verse form that lacks the rhythm of modern rap such as that of The Last Poets9 or Gil Scott-Heron, or the melismatic and melodic sing-song vocals of blues and jazz. It is also common to look too much into the themes of the lyrics9. Again, rhythm is overlooked. Much like jazz, rhythm is the core element of rap. Jazz, as was rap, started as dance music. Although jazz was largely melodic compared to rap, the techniques built to develop the jazz style revolved around its rhythm. In fact, the rhythm that jazz musicians were moving to is now present in rap3. For comparative purposes, we may view every syllable sound as a unique note, and an ensemble of a few syllables as melodies. So what we have left with in similarity is, again, the rhythm. What rap has inherited from jazz is the improvisational nature of the rhythm execution. When Coltrane executed his solos, he was not so far detached from the main rhythm of his fellow musicians, as he only used it as a launching pad into his own rhythm that would in turn compliment the main rhythm, similar to rap's dual-rhythmic nature.
Such is the case with rap. However, this may seem more to coincidental, as the complexity of structure of rap which led to the innovative rap rhythms of today could not have come without Kool Herc and later Melle Mel laying down the backbone of rap within the rhythmic constraints of the beat. In comparison, new school rappers from Rakim onwards who broke the boundaries of structure and rhythm were much like Cecil Taylor and later John Coltrane when they broke the formal structures of jazz into free jazz11. A more obvious possible influence of rap within the jazz world may as well be the art of scatting, or scat-singing. Scat-singing is a vocal execution of nonsense syllables in jazz singing, and it places the vocal element side by side with the instruments, accompanying and complimenting the instruments12. Again, improvisation based on the core rhythm is performed, as with the beat motivates the rapper to grab the mic5, so does the backing band sets the feel for the jazz singer to scat12. While it may be observed from an Ella Fitzgerald scat performance that it is more improvised compared to rap lyrics in the sense that a comparably complex execution may only be possibly achieved through a written rap lyric rather than a freestyle, it is the rhythm that puts both the scat-singer and the rapper together. Upon encountering a beat, a rapper will sense the rhythm he or she has to execute, and as with the scat-singer, the only thing left to do was to vocalize the rhythms by filling in words instead of just nonsense syllables.
The main point in these highlighted possible origins of rap is that, although a more musically-detailed examination on the genres preceding rap may give a more obvious link to what rap was built on, rap could not have came about if not for the culture of rhythmic execution in music and poetry combined. The Hip Hop generation in the 70s and 80s New York picked this up when growing up around their parents' record collection1. It was the musical conditioning by these records that shaped the musical backbone of rap. And while Gil Scott-Heron may seem to be arrhythmically rapping, his influence among others, combined with the natural Anglo-Saxon rhythm5, paved the language for rap. This was then further rhythmically shaped by the breaks being looped by Kool Herc and later more precisely by Grandmaster Flash1, executed in the manner of the scat-singer but with much less nonsense syllables compared to intelligible sentences. In terms of structure, execution of rhymes and wordplay, one need not look as far as the Greeks or even Shakespeare. A mere glance at an excerpt from the lyrics of Tracks of My Tears by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles below, rearranged to resemble that of rap's structure, would make it seem obvious that songwriters were already incorporating poetic thought into songwriting. Bob Dylan himself expressed the thrill of rhyming when writing his songs13.
“..Since you left me if you see me with another girl,seeming like I'm having fun,
Although she may be cute, she's just a substitute, because you're the permanent one..”
Rakim's Innovations
When Jeff Chang described Rakim as rap's Coltrane, it is possible he might have overlooked how strikingly similar these two individuals are in terms of contribution to their respective genres, much deeper than the fact that Rakim was also a gifted tenor saxophonist1. Upon closer observation, there are noticeably two stylistic periods of Rakim, marked by his first two releases with Eric B. : Paid In Full in 1987 and Follow The Leader in 1988. A critical observation on the songs in Paid In Full shows that Rakim's main innovation was the extensive and consistent use of structured patterns of internal rhymes, and clever metaphors. The occurrence of internal rhymes were no longer as incidental as the style of Melle Mel. He was also introducing the extensive use of multi-syllable rhymes, as occasionally displayed by Kool G Rap around the same time. An example of his incorporation of his general structured patterns of internal rhymes within the Paid In Full period can be seen within these lines from the song Move The Crowd, which also displays the application of multi-syllable rhymes(in bold):
“My mind starts to activate, rhymes collaborate/
coz when I heard the beat, I just had to make/
something from the top of my head/
so I fell into the groove of the wax and I said/...”
Notice how the third and fourth lines did not have an internal rhyme. Amazingly in the Paid In Full period, most of Rakim's lyrics were based upon the repetition of this order. 2 lines with an execution of internal rhyme, not necessarily in the above fashion, and usually followed by another 2 that most of the time would only have end-rhymes, although occasionally this will also include internal rhymes, as the next example will show.
His rhythm, also consistent, was mostly still based on that of Melle Mel, following the main four-stress syllable per bar structure with all the familiar placements of pauses, with slight but not entirely unheard-of improvisations. All of this was absorbed and applied with seemingly flawless consistency. He accounts this stage as making a name for himself15, although he did describe his approach to rhythm in the song My Melody as:
“..rhymes are poetically kept and alphabetically stepped/
put in an order to pursue with the momentum except/
I say one rhyme out of order, a longer rhyme shorter/
or pause, but don't stop the tape recorder.”
Naturally, Rakim added more syllables per bar, but what blew MC Shan away was his deep level of wordplay which was rare if not revolutionary at that time. Lines like “I start to think, and then I sink/ into the paper, like I was ink/ when I'm writing I'm trapped in between the line/ I escape, when I finish the rhyme” from the song titled I Know You Got Soul in the debut album, is just an example of how poetic Rakim was, compared to the mostly direct and straightforwardness of the language the rappers before him communicated in, albeit the incorporation of similes and metaphors, which again, were not as planned and structured as Rakim. While Busy Bee Starski used the simple but witty wordplay “Busy Bee is my name, and that's a fact/and you cant beat that with a stick ball bat” in the 1982 movie Wild Style, Rakim amazed MC Shan by rhyming more elaborate metaphors, such as “my unusual style will confuse for a while/if I was water, I'd flow in the Nile”. He also displayed carefully thought of wordplays like “my name is Rakim Allah, and R and A stands for Ra/ switch it around, it still comes out R”(which is pronounced as 'ar' as the wordplay describes).
The structural order of Rakim's verses could be explained by how he writes his lyrics. Rakim claims to write his verses from the bottom up, from the last line of the page to the very first15. Although he did not specify when exactly did he started this, he did mention that he started this practice because he was already envisioning whole songs before he started writing them down anyway. This surprising claim shows how strikingly planned his lyrics were, similar to how Thelonious Monk envisioned an entire song before composing them as the interviewer suggested. This also explained how the complex wordplays were made possible.
In fact, the jazz world heavily influenced his flow. In the Follow The Leader period onwards, Rakim bombarded the bars with syllables, shaping a different rhythm, one that still rides the beat, but with a more natural delivery. This can be clearly seen from these heavily alliterated lines from the title track, which also deeply describes the musical form that Eric B. brought forward for Rakim to work on. On that note, alliteration alongside multi-syllable rhyming was also becoming more and more apparent in his lyrics:
“Music makes mellow, maintains to make/
melodies for MCs, motivates the breaks.”
The main difference was that in the four-stress syllable form, the accented syllables are more naturally flowed and the stress patterns were not forcefully executed into the beat's rhythm, relying more on the natural stress patterns that emerged in the words when forming the sentence itself, detaching the rhythm even radically further from the beat. It was in this 2nd stage that Rakim fully freed himself from the constraints of the Old School. He was now in full control of his rhythm, in a way that he mastered the rhythm of the four-stress syllable, and then flipped it into a seemingly continuous flow of syllables, both stressed and unstressed in its own rhythm but again, falls 'in the pocket'. He executes this in the form of improvised structures. Instead of pauses that mark a group of rhythmic sentences after every two and four beat, the groups may be placed rhythmically anywhere and at any length within the bar, depending solely on the arrangement of rhyme, as seen in the next example. This was not new at the time, but again, Rakim's consistency with all the techniques he compiled into his style was what made him revolutionary.
“..Stop buggin', a brother said, dig em, I never dug 'em
He couldn't follow the leader long enough so I drug 'em
into danger zone, he should arrange his own
Face it, it's basic, erase it, change ya tone..”
This mastery of rhythm that allowed Rakim to experiment with his flow was much similar to how Coltrane not having to worry about going off beat when doing his signature 'sheets of sound'14, which was basically a rhythmic overflow of notes over the jazz beat. Rakim himself described in an interview that listening to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, among other jazz musicians, influenced how he structured his lyrics15. As mentioned earlier, he is also a gifted saxophonist. Influenced the way Coltrane flowed on the beat in jazz, we can safely assume that Rakim had a different scatted rhythm to vocalize compared to those before him. This opened up new possibilities of structuring rap rhythmically.
The impact was readily apparent after Follow The Leader, as observed in the following lyrics written by MC Guru in the 1989 Gang Starr debut single Manifest. The rapid-fire syllabic flow of rhythmically persistent improvisation of rhyme placement was clearly influenced by Rakim, bearing not much difference from Follow The Leader, except from the different forms of music that the Djs of both rappers sampled. Again we go back to the musical foundation that shapes the rhythm of the rap of which Eric B. & Rakim mostly played with funk elements15 while Gang Starr incorporated jazz elements16. In an ironic, Rakim applied jazz flows onto funk beats, while Guru adapted Rakim's jazz flow innovations and applied it to jazz beats.
“I profess and I don't jest cause the words I manifest/
they will take you, sedate you, and I will stress upon/
you the need for, you all to feed your/
mind and soul, so you can lead your-self..”
Beyond the musical conditioning of the beat that will continue to progress as rapid as the world wide spread of rap music, Rakim paved the way for lyrical innovation. He was single handedly pivotal in bridging the Old School into the New School through his consistency in application of internal rhymes, rhythmic structural improvisation, extensive use of multies and alliteration, and a much more poetic language interwoven to street slangs in levels of which was never seen in his time. The rest was history.
Notes;
1. Can't Stop Wont Stop, Jeff Chang, Picador, 2005
2. The Rap On Rap: the “Black Music” That Isn't Either, David Samuels, retrieved by Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman, Taylor & Francis Books, 2004
3. The Rhythm of Rhyme: A Look at Rap Music as an Art Form from a Jazz Perspective, Reginald Thomas, retrieved in 2001 by James L. Conyers, McFarland & Company
4. Psalm, John Coltrane, Impulse!, February 1965
5. Book of Rhymes; The Poetics of Hip Hop, Adam Bradley, BasicCivitas Books, 2009
6. "sprung rhythm." Encyclopedia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 20 Sep. 2009 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/561472/sprung-rhythm .
7. The Rapper's Handbook, Blake Harrison with Alexander Rappaport, Flocabulary, 2006
8. Oral Tradition And The Blues, http://www.pbs.org/theblues/classroom/deftradition.html , Vulcan Productions Inc. 2003
9. The Difference Between Poetry & Rap, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, http://www.grandfatherofrap.com/rapdefinition.htm , 2001
10. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron, Flying Dutchman, 1971
11. Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the 60's, Robert Levin, June 2006
12. Jazz Jargon: Scat, http://www.40north.org/jazzthreads/jazzyarns/jazzjargonscat.html ,Board of Trustees, University of Illinois, 2004
13. Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, Benjamin Hedin, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004
14. Liner Notes for John Coltrane: Giant Steps (Deluxe Edition), Nat Hentoff, Rhino Entertainment, 1997
15. Hip Hop Icon Series : Rakim pt1 & pt2, Jbutters, http://halftimeonline.com/hip-hop-icon- series/rakim-2/ and http://halftimeonline.com/hip-hop-icon-series/rakim-pt-2/ , Halftime Online, posted on July 6th 2006
16. Biography, Virgin Records, http://www.virginrecords.com/starr/index4.html# , accessed on 20th September 2009
Discography & Filmography:
Psalm, John Coltrane, Impulse!, February 1965
Rappers Delight, The Sugarhill Gang, Sugar Hill Records, October 1979
Natty Rebel, U-Roy, Virgin, 1976
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron, Flying Dutchman, 1971
Ella Fitzgerald : One note Samba (scat singing) 1969, uploaded by diegodobini2 on January 26 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbL9vr4Q2LU
Wild Style, directed, produced, and written by Charlie Ahearn, Rhino, 1982
The Tracks of My Tears, The Miracles, Tamla, June 1965
Move The Crowd, Eric B. & Rakim, 4th & B'way/Island, July 1987
My Melody, Eric B. & Rakim, 4th & B'way/Island, July 1987
I Know You Got Soul, Eric B. & Rakim, 4th & B'way/Island, July 1987
Eric B. Is President, Eric B. & Rakim, 4th & B'way/Island, July 1987
Follow The Leader, Eric B. & Rakim, Universal/MCA, July 1988
Manifest, Gang Starr, Wild Pitch/EMI, 1989
