FOUR Style
LEGEND HOLDS THAT during a freestyle battle in the late 1980s an unsuspecting rap neophyte broke his own jaw trying to mimic the signature style of “the god MC,” Rakim. While it may be apocryphal, the legend testifies to an essential truth about rap: Style reigns supreme.
MCs often talk about style like it is a possession, a lyrical fingerprint distinguishing one MC from all others, even a gift bestowed upon them by a higher power. “God gave me style, God gave me grace / God put a smile on my face,” 50 Cent once rhymed. At the same time, rappers also talk about style as something to be switched up, changed up, flipped, and otherwise transformed in the name of lyrical ingenuity. That style can be both identity and diversity at the same time attests to the breadth of meaning the term carries in hip-hop circles. For MCs, style is what you do, but it is also what the people around you do, where and when you happen to live.
To put it another way, while style is a matter of the qualities of an individual artist, it is also the term we use to describe larger definitions: the sound shared by an entire crew, for instance, or the familiar forms of a region, a time period, or a genre. Style has to do both with the artist’s conscious crafting of particular attributes into a sonic whole as well as with the audience’s reception—often their varying receptions—of those attributes in the music. Q-Tip once rhymed, explaining his popularity, that “ladies love the voice, brothers dig the lyrics.” He knew that his style was not just what he made of it, but what others made of it as well.
Style describes both what an artist puts into a work of art and what an audience gets out of it. It takes on different meanings when seen from within and from without the process of artistic creation. From within, style involves the way an artist produces a work of art, the sum of the choices that result in the formation of an artistic whole. From without, style involves the way an audience interprets the arrangement of language in a work of art. It defines the terms of individual artists’ styles, as well as the habits of larger stylistic groups of which that individual may belong.
The fact that styles are identifiable means that they are at least in part predictable. It is this predictability that allows us to talk meaningfully about “Jay-Z’s style” or the “hyphy sound” or the stylistic differences between Miami rap and Atlanta rap, Brooklyn style and Queens style. “We develop schemas for particular musical genres and styles;” writes the recording engineer turned neuroscientist, Daniel J. Levitin, “style is just another word for ‘repetition.’” What he means by this for our purposes is that styles—whether they belong to individuals or to groups, regions, or genres—take shape only when at least some element of them becomes predictable, when we can conceive schemas or patterns of expectation. Even if it is the predictability of the unpredictable, like in the rhymes of the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard, style defines itself through continuity. When we say that some new artist is trying to sound like Lil Wayne, or when we say that Lil Wayne doesn’t sound the same way he used to sound, we are working from a stylistic knowledge base that develops even without our conscious awareness of it.
This same principle of style as repetition holds true for rap as a whole. What must it have been like, then, to have been the first person to hear rap music? What must it have been like to have turned on the radio in 1979 and heard a fifteen-minute song with a familiar disco hook, a driving beat, and a group of male voices that weren’t quite speaking, weren’t quite singing? The majority of rap’s audience today never experienced such an epiphany. Most of us have known rap all our lives—maybe even longer.
Researchers have found that we begin to develop our musical knowledge even before we leave the womb, and by age five or six we already have a sophisticated sense of the various musical schemas that correspond to our culture. For those of us exposed to hip hop at an early age—for some of us this means even before birth—rap carries with it an unmistakable familiarity. Its stylistic conventions are apparent; quite literally, our brain is encoded on the neural level with a set of expectations for rap as a genre. We might know, for instance, that rap almost always follows a 4/4 measure with a strong kick-drum downbeat on the one and three and a snare backbeat on the two and four. We might know that this beat is the centerpiece of a rhythmic performance that also includes the MC’s voice flowing on top of the track, usually in the pocket of the beat. We might know that these dual rhythms usually predominate over any harmonies and melodies in the song. This is our equipment for listening, things we need never consciously consult that nonetheless define the contours of our relationship to the music.
For those with little or no exposure to rap, this equipment is underdeveloped or missing entirely. Of course, it is possible to learn to love rap, or any other music for which one lacks exposure, but it requires many hours of listening and conscious mental effort. By isolating the elements of style, we reinforce the very neural pathways that allow us to experience rap as pleasurable. Think of this chapter, then, as a road-construction project for your musical mind, helping you build from dirt paths to paved roads and from paved roads to expressways of musical perception.
For the MC, just as for any artist, style is the sum of rules and creativity. Inherent in this definition is the concept of genius, the capacity of particular artists to create new possibilities within the context of inherited forms. Style can describe the characteristic qualities of an individual MC, the dominant mode of a particular time period, as well as the shared aesthetic of a group or even an entire region. It is an umbrella term for a host of different things that MCs have made out of rap’s poetic form. As Adam Krims observes, style encompasses “history, geography, and genre all at once, not to mention the constant personal and commercial quest for uniqueness.”
When it comes to their styles, rappers are obsessed with novelty, ownership, and freedom. The Beastie Boys crowing “It’s the new style!” in 1986 was a declaration of their lyrical independence—ironically, at a time when Run-DMC was writing some of their lyrics. It is one of rap’s most common tropes: My style is different from yours. My style is better than yours. Another common boast is claiming innumerable styles. “I got 6 million ways to rhyme: choose one,” Common boasts on his second album, Resurrection. He also flips this clever bit of wordplay, illustrating the very stylistic freedom he claims: “My style is too developed to be arrested / It’s the free style, so now it’s out on parole.”
Conceiving of style as the product of inherited rules and individual invention connects rap with jazz and the blues, those other dominant forms of African-American musical expression that rely upon both formula and improvisation. All are products of the vernacular process, the artistic impulse to combine the invented and the borrowed, the created and the close at hand. The word vernacular comes from the Greek verna, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a slave born of his master’s house.” This is no mere etymological footnote; it has profound implications for African-American expressive culture, the only artistic tradition born in slavery. Rap, as the most recent manifestation of the vernacular process in action, extends a tradition of outlaw expression that reaches back to the dawn of the black experience in North America and beyond.
The vernacular, as Ralph Ellison defines it, is “a dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the past are continually merged with the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations which we invent in our efforts to control our environment and entertain ourselves.” In Ellison’s description “the most refined styles” and the “play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations” are of equal importance. For an art form like rap that emerged from the socio-political underground as the voice of young black and brown Americans, the cultural energy of the vernacular has proved nothing short of revolutionary.
Rap’s most profound achievement is this: it has made something—and something beautiful—out of almost nothing at all. Two turntables, a microphone, and a lyrical style define rap as the epitome of African-American vernacular culture. “Hip-hop is a beautiful culture,” Mos Def told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. “It’s inspirational, because it’s a culture of survivors. You can create beauty out of nothingness.” Rap may be the music of the street corner rather than the conservatory, but mastering its verbal art requires as much attention to craft as the most rarefied forms of artistic expression. So while rap’s spirit is unquestionably revolutionary, its form is traditional. Rap style is always balanced somewhere along this axis.
To say that rap often emerges out of nothingness, however, is not to say that it comes from nowhere. MCs tend to make a big deal about their place of birth. Anyone who’s ever been to a Mos Def concert has undoubtedly heard him shout “Where Brooklyn at?” And if you’re at a Roots show, Black Thought will tell you, more than once, that he’s representin’ Philly. While rock musicians often open concerts by telling you where you’re from (“Hello, Chattanooga!”), rappers usually start by telling you where they’re from. This is more than a matter of geography, it’s an article of faith and an element of style.
It makes sense that hip hop would be obsessed with place. Representing for your borough, or even your block, has long been a motivating interest in rap. “I wanted to put Queens on the map,” a young LL Cool J announced. Such insistence on geography no doubt in part originated out of deep-seated rivalries across and among New York’s boroughs. It also drew from a deeper, more sustaining source: the desire to have pride in one’s community, even if—especially if—that community was denigrated by outsiders. Rappers created a self-fulfilling prophecy: by taking pride in where they were from, they gave where they’re from a reason to be proud.
At the same time, hip hop fostered from its beginning a universalist aesthetic as well. As the product of a mixed-cultural heritage, drawing from African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Latin, and even white punk-rock roots, hip hop was both a democratic and democratizing force; in other words, it made a place for the very equality it manifested in its amalgamated art. On the 1987 hip-hop classic “I Ain’t No Joke” Rakim gave voice to this inclusive sensibility:
Now if you’re from uptown, Brooklyn-bound,
The Bronx, Queens, or Long Island Sound,
Even other states come right and exact,
It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.
The inclusion that hip hop offered, as Rakim suggests, did not come free; it demanded fealty to form, a knowledge and appreciation of the culture, and a certain level of mastery. Rakim, from Long Island himself, was voicing an appeal to collective consciousness or, as George Clinton once proclaimed, to one nation under a groove. With hip hop we could all get down, and be down if we would only “come right and exact.”
Eight years later, Mobb Deep would turn Rakim’s credo on its head, reasserting the primacy of territory. Spitting his verse on “Right Back at You,” Havoc rhymes, “Fuck where you’re at, kid, it’s where you’re from / ’Cause where I’m from, niggas pack nuthin’ but the big guns.” For Havoc, hip hop had everything to do with place. “Queensbridge, that’s where I’m from,” he rhymes, “The place where stars are born and phony rappers get done / Six blocks and you might not make it through / What you gonna do when my whole crew is blazing at you?” Behind the venomous threats is an assertion of pride, in place, but also in style. “Queens rappers have a special style,” the West Coast veteran Ice-T admits. It’s hard to dispute his analysis. The six blocks of Queensbridge housing projects alone have produced dozens of rap standouts including Marley Marl, MC Shan, Roxanne Shanté, MC Butchy B, Craig G, Nas, Big Noyd, and Cormega. While they differ in talent and temperament, they undoubtedly share a certain spirit. If Queensbridge has a sound, it embodies certain qualities: dark, grimy production with rhymes to match, vividly rendered pictures of urban realities.
If a style can be as specific as a six-block radius, then it only stands to reason that it can encompass an entire region. In hip hop’s first decade, when New York dominated, it made sense that the stylistic differences would be on the micro level—borough to borough, even block to block. But as rap started to gain ground in the West Coast, the East Coast sound started to coalesce.
At the height of tensions in the mid-1990s, the difference between East and West Coast rap culture was so great that Dr. Dre could reasonably be shocked to discover that his album The Chronic, now recognized as one of the two or three most influential hip-hop recordings of all time, was being played just as much in New York as in L.A. Do these traditional stylistic divisions of region still matter now that hip hop has grown into a global phenomenon? Has the context for them shifted now that we can conceivably compare the rap styles of Brazil or South Africa with the United States as a whole, rather than East or West, Midwest or South? Broadly considered, rap’s center of gravity has moved from East (specifically New York) to West (specifically L.A.) to South (specifically Atlanta) over the years. This is not to say great music hasn’t come from other places, from Cleveland, for example, or from Karachi, but that rap often takes on the character of a particular locality. Perhaps it’s a matter of where you’re from and where you’re at. Regardless, it is ultimately the responsibility of individual artists to define personal styles out of a combination of their individual genius and the influences that surround them.
As important as geography is to rap, we come to know the music through the range and versatility of individual artists. When it comes to experiencing any art form, it’s almost always like this: We long for the specific rather than the general. If we wish to read a poem, we want one by Robert Frost or Elizabeth Bishop or Pablo Neruda, not the idea of a poem in the abstract. When we go to an art museum, we’re drawn to particular periods—the impressionists, the abstract expressionists—or even particular painters, Monet, Kandinsky. The same holds true for rap. We want to hear Tupac’s prophetic baritone, or Biggie’s graveyard humor; we want Jay-Z’s understated complexity, Common’s smoothed-out delivery, or Talib Kweli’s dense lyricism. Certain MCs have a distinctive personal style, some quality of voice, of theme, of rhythm, or any combination of these that forges a distinguishable character to their lyricism. What is it that separates one from another, that makes one better than another? What is it that keeps us coming back to hear them time and time again?
On the inner sleeve of his second solo album, 1987’s How Ya Like Me Now, Kool Moe Dee attempted to answer these questions for rap with the first-ever Rap Report Card. He evaluates twenty-four of his rap contemporaries on a ten-point scale in ten different categories, such as “vocabulary,” “articulation,” “creativity,” “voice,” “sticking to themes,” and “innovating rhythms.” Never one for humility, he awards himself an A+, a grade he shares with two other star students, hip-hop pioneers Melle Mel and Grandmaster Caz. But while his report card is marred by poetic injustices (Public Enemy rates only a B; the Beastie Boys, a C) and inaccuracies (he misspells the names of Rakim and Biz Markie, among others), it nonetheless represents something remarkable in rap’s history. Kool Moe Dee makes explicit something that rap fans often think about but rarely articulate: that an MC’s style consists of identifiable elements of form, and that we can judge an MC’s greatness using these elements.
The report card, while enlightening and entertaining, tells only part of the story. An MC’s greatness is never simply the sum of particular formal accomplishments; listeners experience rap in the totality of its performance, as the sum of its styles. Studying style requires that we key into the most essential elements that define that particular MC’s expression. Consider, for instance, the long-standing argument among hip-hop heads over whether Tupac or the Notorious B.I.G. was the better MC. Among the many debates rap fans have over style—underground or mainstream, Dirty South or East Coast, Kanye or 50 Cent—the Pac and Big debate is among the most passionate, particularly in the years since their violent, unresolved, and untimely deaths. When MTV gathered a panel of hip-hop experts to compile, with the help of an online fan poll, a list of the greatest MCs of all time, both artists made the list: Biggie coming in third and Tupac coming in second (with Jay-Z in first). But the proximity of their ranking belies the more divided opinion held by many listeners. Few people who love Biggie’s style have the same love for Pac’s, and vice versa. They may respect the other MC, but when it comes to deciding what they want to hear, the difference is usually clear.
I once helped a good friend, a former editor at The Source, drive a U-Haul truck from Miami to Boston. Along the way we had a lot of debates on rap, as was our custom, but none proved more heated than our Biggie/Tupac debate. He was in the Tupac camp; Biggie, he said, wouldn’t even make his top fifty MCs. Pac had that voice, that passionate delivery; he also had a more impressive diversity of themes. I was a Biggie guy, if somewhat more moderate; while I put Biggie in my top five, Pac at least made the top fifteen. Biggie had the superior flow, sharper storytelling abilities, more clever wordplay, and the greater sense of humor. I could admire Tupac’s rhymes, but I could love Biggie’s. And so as we made our way up Interstate 95, we commenced a series of fruitless attempts to convince each other by cranking out track-for-track comparisons from the tinny speakers of the moving truck. As the songs played, we’d punctuate them with our own recitation of the lyrics or glosses on the meaning and eloquence of particular lines.
I think it was somewhere in the middle of “Hail Mary” from Tupac’s Makaveli album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, when it dawned on me that, as fun as this game was, we might just be missing the point. Our preference for one MC’s style over the other’s says at least as much about what we value as listeners as it does about the inherent accomplishment of the particular artist. My friend and I were both listening in our own terms, with our own largely unacknowledged and unexamined aesthetic values at work. This is, after all, what listeners do; this is what we call personal taste.
But understanding style requires something different. Style asks us also to listen in the terms the artists themselves establish, to judge them in the ways their art asks to be judged. To point out the absence of Tupac’s passionate introspection in Biggie’s lyrics or the dearth of Biggie’s punning wordplay in Pac’s is to demand of those artists something neither ever intended to provide. If we listen to them on their own stylistic terms, however, we can judge them against the forms of excellence to which they aspire.
“Technically, Tupac wasn’t a great rapper,” writes Rolling Stone music critic Anthony DeCurtis, “but he invented a compelling, brooding self in song and image that made his failings completely irrelevant. . . . The man became the music—and the words.” DeCurtis is heading in the right direction, but I would take his claim even further. Tupac was a great rapper, provided we judge his technique against the ideal it posits for itself rather than our own abstractions of taste. While there is an important place for discerning, as Kool Moe Dee once did, the constitutive elements of style that we can use to judge the value of individual MCs, there is also a vital need to work from the opposite direction: to begin with individual styles—Biggie’s, Pac’s, whomever’s—and move inductively toward an understanding of an individual style and the combination of traits upon which that style is based. And so we give extra weight to wordplay when considering Biggie’s style because his lyrics call so much attention to his arrangement of language, his imagery, and puns. When evaluating Tupac, however, wordplay plays a lesser role because it is something he seems consciously to downplay in his lyrics, perhaps not wanting to detract from the power of his direct expression—that connection between man and music that DeCurtis celebrates.
Addressing the Biggie versus Tupac comparison, Shock-G of Digital Underground suggests that their value lies as much in the way we, the listeners, hear them as it does in their own stylistic achievements.
Biggie’s gonna win hands down when you’re talking about flow. Strictly from a rhythm standpoint, Biggie is the swinger. He swings like a horn-player over jazz. . . . When people say ’Pac is the best rapper of all time, they don’t just mean he’s the best rapper, they just mean what he had to say was most potent, most relevant.
While Biggie could deliver a dope line just by spelling his name (“B-I-G-P-O-P-P-A / No info for the DEA”), Tupac’s lyrical strength came from the passion of his performance, like a streetwise preacher working the pulpit. It is our great fortune as listeners, of course, that we don’t have to choose between the two MCs, the two styles. Understanding style requires us to hold two things in our minds at once: a sense of the full range of potential parts in lyrical expression, and the particular combination of those parts that goes into making the style of any one MC.
Rap style consists of many elements, perhaps the most significant of which are voice, the unique timbre of an MC’s expression and the tonal range of that expression; technique, the formal elements (the most significant of which is flow) that distinguish one MC’s performance from another’s; and content, the subject matter of an MC’s lyrics. These three elements alone can go a long way toward explaining things we know intuitively: like why Biggie is so different from Tupac, why certain artists go pop and others remain in the underground, why old-school differs from new-school or East differs from West, which differs from Midwest, which differs from South.
Some stylistic elements, of course, are easier to adopt than others. Voice may be the most difficult to replicate if only because not everyone who wants to sound like Biggie can sound like Biggie. Yet enough have tried—Shyne and Guerilla Black come to mind—that it seems that even this element of style is not beyond imitation. (For living proof, check out the YouTube clip where comedian Aries Spears freestyles live on radio while impersonating the voices of LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, DMX, and Jay-Z. It’s nothing short of amazing.) Certain MCs have staked their careers on the unique appeal of their voices, the physical instruments of their art. 50 Cent was an underground MC until a bullet lodged in his jaw transformed his vocal timbre, endowing him with his unmistakable, slightly sinister slur. DMX has patterned his style on the same guttural barks and growls of his numerous canine pets. And for all Tupac’s stylistic greatness, the thing we remember most is the voice—the rich, resonant baritone that dipped and dived with the phrasings of a country preacher or a city pimp. “A distinct voice tone is the identity and signature of the Rapper, and it adds flavor to anything being said,” KRS-One explains. “Rappers with no distinct voice tone are soon forgotten, whereas Rappers with distinct and unique voice tones are always remembered and identified by their audience.” Rap is also the music of the human voice; it is tone and timbre, combing with rhythm and, increasingly, harmony and melody, to make song.
Technique is the element of style most open to imitation. Truly groundbreaking MCs are those who develop individual styles that can be adopted and adapted by other artists—or even an entire generation of artists. Melle Mel’s emphasizing words on the two and four, Rakim’s multisyllabic rhymes, Big Daddy Kane’s fast and slow flow, all of these innovations of technique made impacts that extended well beyond the originator’s own personal style. It is difficult to claim ownership over a technique. Unlike the sound of one’s voice, a way of saying something is easily disassociated from its originator; indeed, it almost demands to be disassociated. Rap was born out of the vernacular process of creative individuals borrowing from existing sources and adding something distinctly their own. So the question for those MCs who borrow Rakim’s rhymes or Kane’s flow is, what did you add of your own?
Rap’s critics often claim that rap lacks thematic range, that few rappers are adding anything of their own. All MCs ever talk about is how many women they have, how much money they stack, what cars they drive, and how much better they are at everything they do than anyone else around. Those of us who listen to rap know that this just isn’t true. Rap has a broad expressive range, but who can blame those who are exposed only to hip hop’s commercial hits from drawing such limited conclusions?
Sense follows sound in rap. Rap lyrics only rarely introduce new ideas. But rap is not alone in this. “I suspect that the freshest and most engaging poems most often don’t come from ideas at all,” observes the poet Ted Kooser of literary verse. “Ideas are orderly, rational, and to some degree logical. They come clothed in complete sentences, like ‘Overpopulation is the cause of all the problems in the world.’ Instead, poems are trigged by catchy twists of language or little glimpses of life.” When Kooser mentions “catchy twists of language” and “little glimpses of life” he might as well be speaking directly about rap. Rap achieves both of these, whether it comes clothed in Immortal Technique’s scathing political critique of George W. Bush on “Bin Laden” or Yung Joc’s playful, amoral celebration of the crack trade on “Coffee Shop.” Poetry, in other words, is value neutral, though listeners certainly are not. Rap asks that each rhyme be judged on its own terms, the terms by which it presents itself. Rap asks to be judged not simply as pure content, but as content expressed in specific, poetic language. They are inseparable. As Terry Eagleton notes, “the language of a poem is constitutive of its ideas.”
What happens, though, when a rap artist sets out to transform the ideas that go into the music? What does this require of the poetic craft? The career of Kanye West offers a compelling case study in what happens when an artist sets out to change the game.
Kanye burst on the scene as a rapper in 2004. By that time, he had already produced chart-topping hits, like the distinctive soul-sampled Jay-Z smashes “This Can’t Be Life” and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.).” Critics were quick to praise Kanye’s debut album,
The College Dropout, for what many saw as his fresh sound and original subject matter. Here was a rapper not just rhyming about girls, cars, and clothes (although he certainly did that as well), but about organized religion, the excesses of consumerism, even folding shirts at the Gap. In an interview with the website
universalurban.com just before the release of
The College Dropout, Kanye reflected upon the formation of his distinctive style. His explanation speaks not only to his own process of creation but to the common challenge of all artists trying to break new stylistic ground in a medium dominated by a handful of trendsetters.
It’s like if you wanna rap like Jay[-Z], it’s hard to rap like Jay and not rap about what Jay is rapping about. So what I did is incorporate all these different forms of rap together—like I’ll use old school [rhythm] patterns, I come up with new patterns in my head every day. Once I found out exactly how to rap about drugs and exactly how to rap about “say no to drugs,” I knew that I could fill the exact medium between that. My persona is that I’m the regular person. Just think about whatever you’ve been through in the past week, and I have a song about that on my album.
Kanye’s comments underscore several essential truths about style in rap. Contrary to many people’s assumptions, in rap content often follows style. In other words, the stylistic models an aspiring MC imitates often dictate the content of the rhymes as well. It would be hard to imagine an MC, for instance, with 50 Cent’s style and Lauryn Hill’s content. There is something essential in 50 Cent’s style—the constitutive elements of his poetics—that lends itself to a particular set of themes: in his case, women, cars, his thug past, and exaltation of his own lyrical greatness.
Another significant lesson to draw from Kanye’s remarks is that style is often the product of the self-conscious construction of a lyrical identity, or persona. For Kanye, that persona would be the common man—a garden-variety identity in most literary traditions, but a surprisingly underdeveloped one in a hip-hop tradition that trades upon the projection of self-aggrandizing and larger-than-life images. Of course the irony of these comments is apparent in light of Kanye’s notoriously outsized ego, and yet he does project a common persona at times in his rhymes, even if he as a person is far from it. Throughout The College Dropout and intermittently on his subsequent releases, Kanye extends a rap tradition of self-deprecation that, while far overshadowed by its opposite, still holds an essential place in rap’s history. As he rhymes on “All Falls Down,” perhaps his finest lyrical performance on the album, “We all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it.” This theme of vulnerability reflects itself in a style that is sometimes halting and awkward, vocal tones that he comically exaggerates, and unorthodox rhythms and rhymes that call our attention to what’s new in his lyrics. Whatever else Kanye West’s career reveals, it shows that a revolution in rap’s themes must begin with a revolution in rap’s poetics. All artists must face up to Kanye’s dilemma at some point in their development: how to craft an individual voice out of the myriad influences available. This is the definition of personal style.
I once taught a student who said he liked to rhyme. He knew that I was writing this book, so he offered me a CD with several of his songs. I played it on my drive home. What I heard, though it surprised me at the time, shouldn’t have been at all unexpected: I heard 50 Cent—well, not exactly 50 Cent, but my student’s very best impersonation of 50’s signature flow and familiar gun talk. His alias probably should have tipped me off; I won’t reveal it here, but it was something very nearly like “Half a Dollar” or “48 Cent.” In ways both conscious and not, my student had patterned his style so closely upon 50’s that even his ad libs seemed straight off of “Candy Shop” or “I Get Money.” He actually wasn’t doing a bad job of it, either; the production value of his homemade tracks was respectable; and his flow, though not exactly his own, embodied that same sense of offhanded swagger that is 50’s greatest strength as a rapper.
Part of me, however, couldn’t help but think it was a little absurd for this college sophomore, a good student attending a predominantly white suburban liberal-arts college in sunny Southern California, to be spitting bars more at home in a hardscrabble neighborhood of South Queens. Then again, I suppose it’s no more absurd than 50 spitting these same lines today from the tony Connecticut compound where he currently resides. Driving back to campus the next morning, I played the tracks again. This time, instead of just hearing the imitation, I heard something else: the birth of a young artist’s style.
Style often starts as a form of jealousy. Someone does something that you want to do, but don’t know how to do and it motivates you to figure it out. You begin to build this body of influences until you have a particular blend that is distinctly your own. Style is amalgamation.
No style is completely original. Certainly there’s a sliding scale of originality that stretches from the completely copied to the wholly original. Most artists reside in between, shifting along the axis at different points in their careers—even at different points in particular rhymes. This is most evident with young artists still searching for their voices. A necessary part of the process of development includes imitation. Out of that imitation, innovation is often born. It only makes sense that aspiring MCs will want to model their style upon the most successful artists of the moment. My student’s choosing 50 Cent made intuitive sense, given that 50 is one of the best-selling rap artists of all time. Certainly this choice came at a cost to the variety of my student’s themes and the authenticity of his voice, but it made sense from a poetic standpoint. Keats began by modeling himself after Shakespeare. Hughes modeled himself after Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. This is what we mean by tradition.
50 Cent himself had to learn how to rhyme from someone, too. Despite his claims, it seems it wasn’t God that gave him style, but a humbler source, the late Jam Master Jay of the legendary Run-DMC. In his memoir,
From Pieces to Weight, 50 relates the story of his MC education, a revealing record of style in the making.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never written a rhyme. But I looked at it like it was my chance to get out of the drug game, so I hopped on it. I wrote to the CD [Jam Master Jay had given him], rapping from the time the beat started to the time the beat ended. I went back to Jay’s studio a few days later and played him what I had done. When he heard it, he started laughing. He liked the rhyme, but he said that he had to teach me song format—how to count bars, build verses, everything. On the CD I had given him, I was just rambling, talking about all kinds of shit. There was no structure, no concept, nothing. But the talent was there.
Talent is critical, but alone it falls short of producing art. Style begins with the basics, with the formal rules of the genre as much as with inspiration or excellence. 50’s story is a rather common coming-of-age tale for rap. Snoop Dogg recalls a similar moment of stylistic realization. “I wasn’t a good writer, but in a battle I could beat anybody,” he recalls. “But as far as songwriting, I didn’t know how to write. Then once I got with Dr. Dre he showed me how to turn my 52 bar raps into 16 bar raps.” In both these cases it is curious to note that these lyricists didn’t learn rap form from other lyricists but from producers, suggesting an essential link between lyrical and musical forms in rap.
When Eminem released his independent debut album, Infinite, in 1996, the few critics who heard it (the original release was a little over a thousand copies—all on vinyl and cassette) accused him of biting the styles of other artists, most notably Nas. Eminem admits as much, and looks back upon the album as a crucial step in his stylistic development. “Obviously, I was young and influenced by other artists,” he recalls, “and I got a lot of feedback saying that I sounded like Nas and AZ. Infinite was me trying to figure out how I wanted my rap style to be, how I wanted to sound on the mic and present myself. It was a growing stage.” Eminem’s remarks key into the essential elements of style: the qualities of voice or, as he puts it, “how I wanted to sound on the mic”; and the formation of persona, or how he wanted to “present himself.”
Eminem, like 50, Snoop, and my former student, made a conscious effort to define the elements of his personal style. For those critics who consider rap unsophisticated and formless, even for those rap fans who give little thought to how the music is made, it will undoubtedly come as a surprise to learn that MCs most often pursue their craft with such a conscious awareness of form. While many MCs have no formal musical training, they nonetheless have learned the necessary terminology or created a vocabulary of their own to describe the elements of their craft.
Rakim brought formal musical training as a jazz saxophonist to his rhyme style. It certainly informed his phrasing and his rhythmic sensibilities. He also brought a keen awareness of language and its relation to these musical elements. “My style of writing, I love putting a lot of words in the bars, and it’s just something I started doing,” he explained to the Village Voice in 2006. “Now it’s stuck with me. I like being read. The way you do that is by having a lot of words, a lot of syllables, different types of words.” This is a remarkable statement coming from one of rap’s standard bearers: I like being read. Rakim is claiming for himself, and by extension for rap as a genre, a fundamental poetic identity, a necessary linguistic style to accompany the musical one.
Another MC who uses his voice as an instrument, developing a style conscious of both the linguistic and the musical identities, is Ludacris. In a revealing interview he makes a case for what makes his rap style distinctive.
But as far as what makes me unique when it comes to verses and things of that nature, I would definitely say that when it comes to doing sixteen bars, whether I am featured on somebody else’s song or whether I am doing it myself, I am just not afraid to take it to the next level—doing something that I know no other artists would do—even with styling, metaphors or whatever. Because if there is anything . . . I want to be known as the most versatile MC out there. Whether it is who raps the best with other artists; or who kicks the best metaphors; or who raps slow, or over any kind of beat—whatever. That’s me! I think that is what separates me from the rest.
Rap styles are far from static. Though an MC may become known, like Ludacris, for a signature style, it is still possible to innovate within those terms. Some artists evolve quite dramatically, expanding their stylistic identities in ways broad and deep. Lil Wayne’s remarkable emergence as a respected lyricist over the past several years came as a result of dramatic stylistic growth. Similarly, Busta Rhymes has transformed over the years from what was essentially a novelty rapper, good as a guest artist or on a hook, to a multifaceted rhymer capable of carrying an entire album.
A very few artists, however, seem to have emerged on the scene full-grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Jay-Z was as good on the first track from his debut, Reasonable Doubt, as he has ever been since, which is to say that he was something like a legend from the start. Only Jay-Z himself, perhaps, could look back on his early days in rap and see a stylistic transformation. In a revealing interview with Kelefa Sanneh published in the New York Times he offered this self-assessment: “I was speeding,” he said. “I was saying a hundred words a minute. There were no catchphrases, there were no hooks within the verses. I was very wordy. . . . I don’t know that I’ve gotten better. I think that I’ve definitely gotten more rounded.”
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:
Now hey, kid—plural, I graduated
“’Cause you could get through anything if Magic made it.”
And that was called recycling, r.e., reciting
Something ’cause you just like it so you say it just like it.
Some say it’s biting but I say it’s enlightening.
Besides, Dr. Kanye West is one of the brightest.
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:
Writing for Biz was in a whole different style [from mine], so that could be a challenge. But Fly Ty wanted Shanté to have my style, so I wrote for her in that way, and it wasn’t a problem, of course. Biz had invented this whole different style and wanted to flow like that—he just couldn’t always work the words out. So I wrote in that style for him. Because it was different, the way I wrote for him, it didn’t sound like nothin’ that would come from me, so it was harder to tell. Shanté would always tell people that I wrote rhymes for her. It wasn’t a big deal. The Biz thing was something that we kept on the hush. Anybody that was really into the artwork and reading all the credits on albums could put one and one together and figure it out, but it wasn’t something we mentioned back then.
Kane makes an important distinction between style and songwriting. Biz, he says, had “invented this whole different style,” he just “couldn’t always work the words out.” Style, in this case, is a quality that at once transcends words and is nonetheless bound up in them. Biz Markie created a persona as the clown prince of hip hop with songs like “Picking Boogers” and “Just a Friend.” He used his beatboxing alongside his slow, thick-tongued flow to craft a distinctive vocal style, certainly distinct from the smooth, articulate delivery of Kane. It is a testament to the various strengths of both artists that they both are remembered as distinctive lyrical stylists from their era.
Ghostwriting’s long tradition in hip hop is not necessarily at odds with hip hop’s claims to authenticity. There is the famous case of the Sugar Hill Gang “borrowing” rhymes directly from the rhyme book of Grandmaster Caz. Some performers are notorious for not writing their rhymes—and unapologetic about it as well. Diddy once wrote the check to the person who penned this line for him: “Don’t worry if I write rhymes / I write checks.”
But what does rap have to fear by openly acknowledging the difference between songwriter and performer? Does it still matter to rap’s audience that the illusion of the inviolable MC persists, or have we come to a place where we are comfortable with the concept that some people are good poets, some good performers, and only a few are both?
In 2006 rap legend Chuck D asked the West Coast rapper Paris to pen almost all the lyrics for Public Enemy’s Rebirth of a Nation. What was so surprising about this was how openly the two of them discussed their collaboration. Perhaps most shocking of all to the rap fan, it wasn’t some rap dilettante like Shaquille O’Neal buying himself some hot lines he couldn’t possibly have written himself, it was one of rap’s most respected lyricists, one of its most memorable voices. Why would the man who had written the lyrics for “Yo! Bum Rush the Show” and “Fight the Power” need a ghostwriter? The answer, to hear Chuck himself explain it, was that he didn’t need one, he wanted one. “I really pride myself on being a vocalist, so why can’t I vocalize somebody else’s writings?” he asks. He argues for rap to recognize openly what it already concedes in private. “I think often that the mistake made in rap music is that people feel that a vocalist should write their own lyrics,” he says. “That’s been a major, major mistake in hip-hop, because not everyone is equipped to be a lyricist and not everyone is equipped to be a vocalist.”
Keep in mind that Chuck D is making this point in the midst of a long and illustrious rap career during which he has written many, many lyrics and turned in some of rap’s most indelible performances. He certainly has the authority to say it, but he does so at a time when, as a senior statesman, his influence on rap itself is limited. But what if rap did follow Chuck’s lead? What would it look like? Perhaps someday not far from now rap will produce its Irving Berlin, an artist famous for writing classic lyrics while never performing them himself. But for now rap still relies on the close association, at least on the surface, of creator and performer.
Rap lyrics are so closely bound to the image and identity of the performer that the very idea of a distinction seems counterintuitive. We assume that the writer is also the performer, that the lyricist and the rapper are one and the same. It has always been this way. Perhaps it is rap’s proximity to literary poetry, perhaps it is the assumption of reality behind the lyrics, perhaps it’s the illusion of spontaneity, but rap is inherently associated with personal expression rather than song craft. Part of the unspoken pact between MC and audience is that the MC is authentic, that what he or she is saying is sincere or real.
This is quite different from the understanding other pop artists have with their audiences. When Mariah Carey performs a song, we understand that the words she sings may or may not be her own; it makes little difference to us either way. The songs themselves, which are often undistinguished pop confections, matter less to us than the memorable performance she gives them. American Idol has made a franchise out of discovering popular performers who explicitly do not compose the songs they sing and often succeed in spite of, not because of, the material they’re asked to perform.
Rap’s emphasis on originality, ownership, and spontaneity so thoroughly governs the art form that even in those instances when the MC is expected to repeat previously written rhymes—at a concert, for instance—he must still find ways of maintaining the illusion of immediacy. This might mean flipping a few freestyle references into the established rhyme, or involving the audience by leaving blank spaces in the delivery for the crowd to fill in the words, or giving microphones to a crew so that they can ad-lib or emphasize particular words or phrases. All of these techniques achieve the same effect, which is to defamiliarize the live performance from the prerecorded one, in effect making it new, and thus real, again. It reestablishes the MC’s relation to words. The MC is not simply a performer, but something more: an artist conceiving the lyrics before our very eyes. Of course, sometimes this comes as a detriment to the performance. Too many people on stage with mics leads to mud-died sound and garbled lyrics; too much crowd participation ends up seeming like laziness on the MC’s part; too much freestyle from an MC unskilled in the art can lead to disaster and embarrassment. But even when these things go wrong, they still achieve the goal of connecting MCs with their creations anew.
Style is finally the means by which MCs call attention to themselves—to their relation to other artists, to their connection to particular places or times, and perhaps most of all, to their individual excellence. But style is also a vessel, a container waiting to be filled with emotions, ideas, and stories. It is here, where rap’s form meets its function, that hip-hop poetics achieves its highest calling. Ralph Ellison once said, “We tell ourselves our individual stories so that we may understand the collective.” If this is true, then we have much to learn from listening to hip hop, a form uniquely suited to the art of storytelling.