Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop
Adam Bradley
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0465003478
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Examining rap history’s most memorable lyricists and their inimitable techniques, literary scholar Adam Bradley argues that we must understand rap as poetry or miss the vanguard of poetry today. Book of Rhymes explores America’s least understood poets, unpacking their surprisingly complex craft, and according rap poetry the respect it deserves.
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pocket of the beat. Hand claps punctuate the twos and the fours, lending extra emphasis to the words he stresses; for instance, “hear” falls on the two and “test” falls on the four. Second, his flow actually gives the doubled-up stresses in the third line room to breath by including a slight pause between “groove” and “and” that the written words on the page do not suggest. Similarly, he lessens the effect of the three unstressed syllables by further truncating his pronunciation of “gonna.” The
they are far from the only rhyme scheme in rap. Over the years rap has undergone an internal rhyme revolution. Internal rhymes broaden rap’s expressive range, enabling MCs to satisfy their listeners’ lust for rhyme even as they claim greater freedom of motion to express complex ideas beyond the bounds of end rhyme. Unlike literary poets, who also wished to liberate themselves from the restrictions of end rhyme, MCs have done so while still satisfying their audience’s desire for lines rich in
him,” Ralph Ellison explained to an interviewer in 1958, speaking about the distinctive language of black American poets. “Thus if these [vernacular] poets find the language of Shakespeare or Racine inadequate to reach their own peoples, then the other choice is to re-create their original language to the point where they may express their complex emotions.” Hip hop’s first generation did exactly this, forging a language responsive to the needs of its creators, reflecting their own complex
“rock” (petra), homonyms for stone. To the initiate, puns have a sophisticated range of uses, well beyond the limits of humor. Puns have an important place in the Western poetic heritage as well. Shakespeare used puns throughout his plays and sonnets, often for the purpose of blunt sexual humor. The very title of his great comedy Much Ado About Nothing turns a pun on its last word, which was slang in Elizabethan times for vagina. One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the poet John Donne, also
things, and I knew I’d have something different and interesting to say. To tell a familiar narrative in a new way is the motivating impulse behind a lot of rap storytelling. With a storyteller’s mind, rappers create poetic narratives with character and setting; conflict, climax, and resolution. They do all of this while rhyming many of their words, and usually in less than four minutes. Rap’s early years were filled with rhymed stories. Few hip-hop heads could forget Wonder Mike’s question
