Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Yes, indeed, I am a rap artist,
but I release records with subject matters that are a little bit different.
One of my albums is a hip-hop adaptation of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."
(Laughter)
Another one is a hip-hop interpretation
of Charles Darwin's "Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection."
And natural selection is a pretty potent idea;
it's used to understand design and complexity in the natural world
or the appearance of design.
But I think we can also use it to understand how culture evolves,
including hip-hop culture and the word play through history -
going back a lot further than hip-hop.
Let's take it to the Stone Age of rap;
where did it start out?
I mean, hip-hop is a culture that is based on word play;
rappers are known for their word play.
They use metaphor; they use simile;
they use alliteration; they use irony;
they use humor, double entendre.
But I want to focus really on the rhymes,
and see where the rhymes in rap come from and how they've changed over the years.
Here's the first rap record that came out in 1979,
"Rapper's Delight."
So this was pretty much the first rap lyrics
that anyone outside of the New York area would have heard
because it was the first one on any mass media.
And here's what it sounded like:
(Music) "Now what you hear is not a test, I'm rappin' to the beat.
And me, the groove, and my friends, are gonna try to move your feet."
(Music ends)
Now, familiar stuff, right?
But let's just look at the rhyme schemes and the word play.
The basic rhyme is "beat" and "feet,"
the same kind of rhyme as you might find in Shakespeare, Chaucer, William Blake.
It's not really an innovation.
Then there's an off-rhyme, maybe, on the other line:
"test" and "friends,"
and there are internal rhymes on "groove" and "move,"
but they're all monosyllabic single rhymes.
If you go forward a few years, 1982,
rap starts to become more complex in its message.
This song is called "The Message":
(Music) "Rats in the front room, roaches in the back.
Junkies in the alley with the baseball bat.
I tried to get away, but I couldn't get far
'cause a man with a tow truck repossessed my car.'" (Music ends)
Getting rhythmically a bit more interesting,
the subject matter is more conscious, but the rhymes are still quite simple:
"back," "bat," "far," "car."
A few years later, an innovation happened;
it was like a mutation.
It was a mutation that happened in the mind of this guy on the right,
William Griffin, aka Rakim,
and he did something innovative with rap that no one had done before.
So, see if you can see what it is in these lyrics
that constitutes an innovation in rap.
(Music) "Write a rhyme in graffiti in every show you see me in,
deep concentration, 'cause I'm no comedian.
Jokers are wild, if you wanna be tame,
I'll treat you like a child, and you're gonna be named." (Music ends)
These are called "mosaic rhymes."
A mosaic rhyme takes the constituent parts of a multisyllable word
and assembles those parts from smaller words
to recreate the pattern.
"Comedian," "see me in," "graffiti in."
A polysyllabic rhyme, or multisyllable rhyme -
rappers call them "multis" -
takes words and combines them together into a pattern.
So "wild," "wanna be tame," "child," "gonna be named."
This caught like wildfire through hip-hop culture.
After that, it was the game that rappers had to play
because rap is so competitive;
there's too many emcees and not enough mics,
which means rappers have to innovate
in order to get their prestige and their recognition.
So a few years later,
hip-hop culture had decided that an idea worth spreading
was this concept of multisyllable rhymes.
They proliferated, not instantly but fairly quickly,
so that if you go forward about seven years,
to where Nas was in the early '90s,
you get all rappers doing this,
but I think Nas was one of the best.
Here's how he played with multisyllable rhyme schemes:
(Music) "It's like that. You know it's like that.
I got at him, now you'll never get the mic back.
When I attack, there ain't a army that could strike back,
so I react, never calmly, on a hype track." (Music ends)
You can see how more and more of the line is being used as part of the rhyme scheme.
It's not just "like that," and "mic back";
it's "attack, there ain't an army that could strike back,"
"react never calmly on a hype track."
The word play is sort of proliferating through the lyrics.
And then a few years later, Eminem did something kind of novel as well,
where he took a small pattern of rhymes
and just tried to see how many variations of it
he could flip in the same lyric.
So here's four bars that uses
the "work a sweat," or "circus net," rhyme pattern:
(Music) "I feel like I'm walking a tight rope without a circus net
poppin' Percocet;
I'm a nervous wreck.
I deserve respect, but I work a sweat for this worthless check.
I'm about to burst this tech in somebody to reverse this debt." (Music ends)
"Circus net," "Percocet," "nervous wreck,"
"deserve respect," "work a sweat"
"worthless check," "burst this tech,"
"reverse this debt."
That's only four lines.
So when I first discovered these rhyming patterns, I was 19.
I was first starting out as a rap artist myself,
but I was also studying English literature at the time.
So I thought if I go back to the oldest poetry in our language,
if I go back 1,000 years,
will I find these rhyme patterns?
So I started with Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 1300s
because he was sort of the founder of what we call English literature today.
And here's the opening lines from Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale":
"In Flanders whilom was a company Of youngè folk that haunteden folly,
As riot, hazard, stewès, and taverns Where, as with harpès, lutès and gitterns.
They dance, and play at dice both day and night,
And eat also and drink over their might Through which they do the devil sacrifice
Within that devil's temple in cursèd wise."
(Applause)
Clearly, there's word play going on here,
but are there multisyllable rhyme schemes?
Not really - it's rhymes like "company," "folly," "taverns" "gitterns,"
one syllable and two syllable rhymes.
There is a strange little possible multi here
on "stewès, and taverns" and "lutès and gitterns."
And if you look through Chaucer, you find these occasionally sprinkled in,
but he seems to just do it to spice up the playfulness of the lyricism;
he never uses a sustained pattern of polysyllabic rhymes.
To find this pattern of polysyllabic rhymes in English literary history,
you have to go forward to 1663,
where Samuel Butler's poem "Hudibras" was published.
And it had these lines:
"Beside, he was a shrewd philosopher, And had read ev'ry text and gloss over;
Profound in all the Nominal And Real ways, beyond them all."
Now, these are rap-style rhymes:
"philosopher," "gloss over," right?
This was an innovation for Samuel Butler, as far as we know.
But this poem, Hudibras, it was a mock epic.
It was meant to be silly, absurd, a comedy piece.
So henceforth, this kind of rhyming became known as "Hudibrastic rhyme."
And Hudibrastic signified both the multisyllabled patterns
and the absurdist, comedy context.
And all poets, from then on,
seemed to never divest these two different aspects of Hudibrastic rhyme.
So if you go 150 years forward,
you get Lord Byron using the technique in his poem "Don Juan,"
where he writes the classic line
"But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?"
Now, that is a classic hip-hop-style rhyme:
"intellectual" and "hen-peck'd you all."
But once again, it's used in an absurdist comedy context.
I made a bit of a study when I was in grad school
of the English literary canon
to see if I could find any poets in the history of the English language
using multisyllable rhymes outside of a comedy context,
and I couldn't really find any.
If anybody knows of a counterexample of this,
of serious polysyllabic rhyme in English literary history,
I'd love to know of it; I couldn't find any.
Actually, the only one I could find
was, strangely enough, in "Lord of the Rings," by JRR Tolkein.
Now, in "Lord of the Rings," Bilbo, he's kind of done with the quest;
he's hanging at Riverrun, chilling with the elves, smoking a pipe,
sitting by the fire, writing poetry.
And when Frodo comes through on his quest with the Fellowship,
Bilbo takes him aside and goes,
"I've worked on this poem; I want to read it to you.
It's kind of a funny little experiment.
See what you think."
And he reads him the "Song of Eärendil," and here's how that one sounds:
"Through Evernight he back was borne on black and roaring waves that ran
o'er leagues unlit and foundered shores that drowned before the Days began,
until he heard on strands of pearl where ends the world the music long,
where ever-foaming billows roll the yellow gold and jewels wan."
These are rap-style polysyllabic rhymes:
"waves that ran," "days began,"
"foundered shores," "drowned before."
So Tolkein discovered this mutation that Rakim discovered,
the possibility of using mutisyllable rhymes
to express a noncomedic emotional tone,
but Tolkein puts it in a meta-context of humor
because he doesn't give the poem to someone serious,
he gives it to old, senile Bilbo sitting by the fire,
just goofing off in his retirement, right?
So we still can't escape from this comedy context.
Rappers manage to do this;
they managed to escape from this comedy context,
and it may help that Rakim's early lyric in this,
the first thing people heard in multisyllable rhyme,
was "I ain't no comedian," right?
And the song title was
"I ain't no joke."
So in case you were tempted to take it as a joke,
Rakim did not give you that option.
And henceforth, rappers could use the multisyllabic rhyme
to express all possible emotional tones:
aggression, anger, frustration,
grief, melancholy,
and yes, also humor,
but there was not that same limitation.
It became open, and this redeemed the possibility of rhyme,
because if you look through the last 100 years of poetry,
you'll notice that poets pretty much gave up on rhyme.
Rhyme used to be definitive, and then it became free verse;
it just became too obvious:
moon, June, soon.
It's, like, not creative anymore.
But my analogy is that - imagine poets throughout history
were like painters who only knew how to paint in primary colors.
All they had was red, yellow and blue.
And then rappers came along, and they were like,
"Yo, you can mix them together."
And suddenly, there's aquamarine and mauve and turquoise and fuchsia,
and they're all appearing, and the color potential emerges.
So, next time you listen to rap,
I want you to just listen to the word play that the rappers are using
because you'll hear this legacy of polysyllabic rhyme.
You'll hear that what they say is part of the word play,
but the structure, the intricacy of the rhymes, is another.
And this is a historically significant literary innovation
that rappers deserve credit for,
for creating that potential space.
Now, I started out saying that I was a rap artist,
so I'm going to have to show you how I play with these rhymes.
I'll take the one pattern "broken glass" and see how many times I can flip it.
It's a 16-bar rap I'm going to do,
and I use the pattern four times in each of the sixteen bars.
Don't be tempted to read ahead; we'll do it line by line.
(Music)
Like this.
I been cracking jokes and having loads of plans, but no cash.
I'm known for passing notes in class and going back to old Casanova tactics,
holding hands and poems, and that's my only passion,
so my rap is open to action.
No relaxin'.
No, I'm smashing holes; fasten open caskets,
slow dancing over scattered broken glass and cold molasses;
no fashion moguls have my clothes -
I'm happy sewing patches.
I don't have a home; I'd rather roam the map of no attachment,
so I'm a laughin' nomad
though I travel roads and pass it, no average Joe can;
I won't collapse and go flaccid.
No chance, it won't happen,
only after no challenge known to man goes unmastered,
only after more than half my bones are fractured,
only passive, goes to pasture,
no one asks for pros, they ask for smokin' raps
like solar flashes flowing past the globe's axis,
so I task my overactive dome with matching no unstandards
and only hatchin' poems that have the motions of explosive gases.
(Music ends)
And that's what rhymes with broken glasses.
Thank you.
(Cheers) (Applause)