{"id":156682,"date":"2022-01-13T15:21:58","date_gmt":"2022-01-13T20:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156682"},"modified":"2022-01-15T15:12:27","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T20:12:27","slug":"rhetoric-and-rhyme-on-rap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/01\/13\/rhetoric-and-rhyme-on-rap\/","title":{"rendered":"Rhetoric and Rhyme: On Rap"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m into having sex, I ain\u2019t into making love<\/p>\n

So come give me a hug if you\u2019re into getting rubbed.<\/p>\n

50 Cent, \u201cIn Da Club\u201d (2003)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is there any couplet in the English language that so concisely spans the dizzying sweep of poetic possibility, the subtle gradations of sense illuminated in a few short words and the abyss of nonsense toward which we are ever drawn by carelessness and entropy? You don\u2019t have to answer that. The answer is \u201cyes, many.\u201d I was making a point.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve probably heard the stately bounce of \u201cIn Da Club,\u201d at least ambiently. It was 50 Cent\u2019s mainstream breakout single, and he mostly spends it surveying the fixtures of his nightlife: drinks and drugs, cars and jewelry, prospective lovers and pissy haters. If we\u2019re meant to take anything away from the song, though, it\u2019s that 50 is twenty-five percent hedonist and seventy-five percent hustler. So he puts the song to work for him, makes it tell us what he\u2019s about, what he\u2019s been through, who his friends are, how he moves through the world. After fifteen years of career ups and downs, flops and feuds, fluctuating wealth and implausibly diverse investments, it remains an indelible sketch of 50 at his fiftiest.<\/p>\n

Now, generally speaking, 50 relies as much as any rapper does on similes, homophones, trick rhymes, and assorted other kinds of semantic misdirection. He once even described the name 50 Cent as \u201ca metaphor for change.\u201d Yet when you look closely, \u201cIn Da Club\u201d contains almost no wordplay, no figuration, no trickery. When he says you can find him in the club, he\u2019s not being evasive; if you\u2019re looking for him, that\u2019s probably where he\u2019ll be. When he offers you ecstasy\u2014\u201cI got the X if you\u2019re into taking drugs\u201d\u2014he\u2019s barely even using slang. It is, and fittingly for the calling card of a no-nonsense street magnate, a bracingly direct song. Except there\u2019s this one line, tucked memorably but unassumingly into the hook, a line you could in fact read as the very essence of 50\u2019s no-nonsenseness:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m into having sex, I ain\u2019t into making love.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s perfectly clear what he means by this: he doesn\u2019t have time for romance. He\u2019s not a player, he\u2019s a hustler<\/em>. No nonsense, all grind. It\u2019s slippery, though, this little pinprick of character definition, how what it says sits at odds with the way it\u2019s expressed. The distinction between having sex <\/em>and making love <\/em>is negligible biologically but critical sentimentally, after all\u2014and here\u2019s 50 using it to tell us how uninterested he is in sentimentality. Quietly but repeatedly, twice in each chorus of the song that introduced him to the global pop market as a hard-nosed hood kingpin, he\u2019s framing his identity through language and idiom and metaphor. And finally, beneath the mythologies of money and sex, the beef and bullet wounds, what defines a rapper more intimately than his or her relationship to those things? And then there\u2019s this: \u201cSo come give me a hug if you\u2019re into getting rubbed.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do you follow such a pearl of rhetorical legerdemain as the sex\/love line with that<\/em>? This question haunts me.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not wholly displeasing to the ear: the internal vowel rhyme is a nice touch, as is that third into <\/em>binding the lines together. But what does getting rubbed <\/em>mean? Does it mean being sexually serviced in crude, utilitarian fashion? Does it mean being murdered? Will 50 Cent kill anyone who touches him, or accept a tender embrace on the condition that it lead straight to intercourse? In either case, is the best word really rubbed<\/em>, which is too mealy to sound threatening and too workmanlike to be sexy? What\u2019s that conjunctive so <\/em>doing there? What does this thought say about the previous one? How come I\u2019ve never heard rubbed<\/em>\u2014rubbed out <\/em>and rubbed off <\/em>and rubbed on<\/em>, yes, but never just rubbed<\/em>\u2014anywhere else? What am I missing? How, a thousand times how, does the sly precision of the immediately preceding line wind us up at a ham-handed muddle like this?<\/p>\n

No, you\u2019re <\/em>reading too far into it.<\/p>\n

The point I\u2019m making is that rap lyrics, even ones from such a poetically trivial source as \u201cIn Da Club,\u201d contain multitudes of meaning, and also of nonsense, of possibility, of exquisite care and carelessness and carefreeness, sometimes all at once. If 50 Cent can be ingenious and metaphysical and<\/em> clumsy and puerile in the space of twenty words, six seconds, just imagine what depths of inventiveness and complexity and contradiction abound within a lyrical tradition that will soon turn \u2026 fifty.<\/p>\n

Yes, many.<\/p>\n

Rap music serves, consistently, contagiously, sometimes in spite of its own claims to the contrary, as a delivery mechanism for the most exhilarating and crafty and inspiring use of language in contemporary American culture. This is true on a number of levels, from the political and the conceptual down to the phonological and the syntactic, but I\u2019m particularly concerned with the semantic: with the creation and control of sense. It\u2019s worth thinking about how <\/em>rap means\u2014how it can say both less and more than it appears to, depending on the way we listen; how it compels and challenges us to follow along; how it forges these vital, beguiling grooves of imagination and reality that lodge and blossom in our personal and historical memory.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Let a nigga try me, try me<\/p>\n

I\u2019ma get his whole motherfuckin\u2019 family<\/p>\n

And I ain\u2019t playin\u2019 with nobody<\/p>\n

Fuck around and I\u2019ma catch a body<\/p>\n

Dej Loaf, \u201cTry Me\u201d (2014)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Try me<\/em>, as Dej Loaf says it on the hook to the song of the same name, sounds to my ear like it rhymes with Charlie<\/em>. So do family<\/em>, which is accordingly something more like fahmly<\/em>, and nobody<\/em>, which I hear as pretty much standard. Once the verse starts, the first four rhymes are forty<\/em>, macaroni<\/em>, on it<\/em>, and recording<\/em>. There\u2019s only one conventionally perfect rhyme in the song\u2019s whole three and a half minutes\u2014scoring <\/em>with boring<\/em>\u2014unless you count nobody <\/em>with catch a body<\/em>, which is a remarkably flippant way to refer to murdering someone. There are slant rhymes and then there are sheer drops. It\u2019s not that Dej Loaf can\u2019t rhyme\u2014anyone can rhyme<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s that she gets more mileage here out of deciding not to.<\/p>\n

With apologies to Tolstoy, all perfect rhymes are alike, each imperfect rhyme imperfect in its own way. Perfect rhyme tells us about a relationship between words that never changes; that scoring <\/em>with boring <\/em>is a rhyme you can <\/em>find in a dictionary is useful but also, not to put too fine a point on it, boring. But rhyming family <\/em>with body<\/em>\u2014that\u2019s interesting<\/em>. How does she do it? Why <\/em>does she do it? Imperfect rhyme\u2014slant rhyme, off-rhyme, near-rhyme, half-rhyme, lazy rhyme, deferred rhyme, overzealous compound rhyme, corrugated rhyme, what have you\u2014illuminates something about the person creating it, about their ear and their mind and what they\u2019re willing to bend for the sake of sound. It tells us what they believe they can get away with through sheer force of will, like how Fabolous rhymes Beamer Benz or Bentley<\/em> with team be spending centuries<\/em> and penis evidently<\/em> just because he knows he can. Or:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m ridin\u2019 through the metropolitan, everybody hollerin\u2019<\/p>\n

Me I\u2019m just acknowledgin\u2019 with this million-dollar grin<\/p>\n

Shine like a halogen, cool as the island wind<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t judge myself but if I do I\u2019d give my style a ten<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom Nothin\u2019 to Somethin\u2019 Intro\u201d (2007)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That last line isn\u2019t particularly memorable by itself, but as the culmination of a chain of rhymes that drift in and out of alignment with metropolitan<\/em>, it\u2019s riveting\u2014all the more so because he ends it by awarding himself a perfect score for style rather than precision. Style is how he gets away with spending two bars repeating the same vowel sound\u2014at least as I say those words\u2014and then abandoning it altogether. Confidence is how he gets halogen <\/em>to rhyme with island wind<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In a similar way, imperfect rhyme tells us how much effort a rapper is willing to appear to put in, whether it\u2019s a little\u2014<\/p>\n

I\u2019m in the bucket, paid two hundred for it<\/p>\n

My lil\u2019 niggas thuggin\u2019, even got me paranoid<\/p>\n

I\u2019m gettin\u2019 money, that\u2019s in any nigga category<\/p>\n

Double M, I got Gs out in California<\/p>\n

Rick Ross, \u201cStay Schemin\u2019 \u201d (2012)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014or so much<\/em>\u2014<\/p>\n

What you doin\u2019 in the club on a Thursday?<\/p>\n

She said she only here for her girl birthday<\/p>\n

They ordered champagne but still look thirstay<\/p>\n

Rock Forever 21 but just turned thirtay<\/p>\n

\u00a0Kanye West, \u201cBound 2\u201d (2013) <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The former is from the Miami rapper Rick Ross, whose manicured Southern drawl\u2014he says his last name as Rauwss <\/em>and rhymes it almost exclusively with boss<\/em>\u2014goes only part of the way toward explaining how any of those end words could be aurally comparable. The latter is Kanye West, for whom obstinacy is as much an aesthetic principle as it is a personal liability. Both rappers are unusually fond of rhyming words with themselves, but for what scan to me as opposite reasons: Ross out of a sort of plutocratic lethargy, West out of pure insistence. Literary critic Adam Bradley, who calls forced cases like birthday <\/em>and thirstay <\/em>\u201ctransformative rhymes,\u201d describes Kanye\u2019s willingness to distort pronunciation on stylistic grounds as \u201cthe poetic equivalent of Jimi Hendrix using his amp\u2019s feedback in his solo.\u201d One pictures him standing before a perfect rhyme, stroking his chin, considering how best to perfect <\/em>it by fucking it up.<\/p>\n

Rhyme is the most powerful, least cerebral way I know to tap into that strange attraction words in close proximity exert on one another, what David Caplan, in Rhyme\u2019s Challenge<\/em>, calls \u201clanguage\u2019s need to couple.\u201d By its form it sets up an expectation which, depending on how and when it\u2019s met, can relieve you or surprise you, pull you forward in time or hold you in place: imagine if the last line of \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d had to rhyme with the birthday person\u2019s name. Its internalized call-and-response dynamic gives it a sense of gravity, of purpose. It\u2019s rhetorically means-justifying, so much so that researchers have documented a cognitive bias known as the rhyme-as-reason effect, according to which statements that rhyme are easier to pass off as true than ones that don\u2019t. (See a 2000 Psychological Science <\/em>report called \u201cBirds of a Feather Flock Conjointly (?).\u201d)<\/p>\n

Which accounts, perhaps, for what I\u2019ve come to think of as slant idioms: single-use figurations based on imperfect rhymes that are as oddly compelling semantically as slant rhymes are aurally. Take the Notorious B.I.G., for instance\u2014who rhymed birthday <\/em>with thirstay <\/em>two decades before Kanye did\u2014and who, while cautioning inexperienced drug dealers to avoid consignment arrangements, finds time to compact that old Postal Service credo (\u201cneither snow nor rain or heat nor gloom of night\u201d) into a crystalline synonym for no matter what<\/em>:<\/p>\n

If you ain\u2019t got the clientele, say hell no<\/p>\n

\u2019Cause they gon\u2019 want their money rain sleet hail snow<\/p>\n

Biggie Smalls, \u201cTen Crack Commandments\u201d (1997)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or take Jay Electronica capping off a happily-ever-after snapshot with a two-word distillation of a wedding send-off:<\/p>\n

Life is like a dice game<\/p>\n

One roll could land you in jail or cutting cake, blowing kisses in the rice rain<\/p>\n

\u201cExhibit A (Transformations)\u201d (2009)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and the Chicago rapper Vakill tap dancing around dead<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Some niggas claimin\u2019 that they can drop me, serve me<\/p>\n

Got it topsy-turvy, so fuck around and wind up autopsy-worthy<\/p>\n

\u201cKeep the Fame (Remix \u201901)\u201d (2001)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These coinages don\u2019t just sound good, don\u2019t just make plausible sense: I find them seductively self-evident, dazzling in their novelty and sublime in their perishability. In the seconds between call-and-response, they create and immediately fill a space in the language. You can\u2019t explain the difference between thirsty <\/em>and thirstay<\/em>, I don\u2019t think, but you can hear it.<\/p>\n

And who\u2019s to say this isn\u2019t proof of a deeper semantic magnetism that rhyme allows us to tap into? Not the rhyme-as-reason of \u201cIf it doesn\u2019t fit, you must acquit\u201d or \u201cHe who smelt it dealt it,\u201d but the rhyme-as-redemption of 2Pac reassuring his mother:<\/p>\n

And even as a crack fiend, mama<\/p>\n

You always was a black queen, mama<\/p>\n

\u201cDear Mama\u201d (1995) <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014which I hear as its own kind of transformative rhyme: one that acts, that performs, the way I confess <\/em>and I now pronounce you man and wife <\/em>are more than just statements. It\u2019s not that perfect rhymes can\u2019t accomplish the same thing, just that the imperfection is what makes it feel purposeful, personal, human when it happens. It\u2019s in surmounting perfection, or ignoring it, that you show what you\u2019re capable of and what you refuse to be told you can\u2019t do, even if it\u2019s just rhyming family <\/em>with nobody <\/em>and nobody <\/em>with body<\/em>. It shows what you <\/em>hold to be equivalent and thus, in a sense, true.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say that the word orange <\/em>doesn\u2019t rhyme with anything, and that kind of pisses me off, because I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with orange<\/em>,\u201d Eminem tells Anderson Cooper in a 2010 interview. \u201cIf you\u2019re taking the word at face value, and you just say orange<\/em>, nothing is going to rhyme with it exactly,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you enunciate it and you make it, like, more than one syllable\u2014aw-rindge<\/em>\u2014you could say, like, uh: I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with Georidge.<\/em>\u201d (A bemused chuckle from Cooper.) This is just it: taking words at face value is what good rappers almost militantly don\u2019t do. They find the blind angles, the shortcuts, the secret overlaps, and use them, sometimes, to build stunning models of invention and entente, spaces where small discords combine into larger resolutions and we see, hear, how boring it would be to live in a perfect world where like belongs only with like.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Daniel Levin Becker is a critic, editor, and translator from Chicago. He was an early contributing editor to Rap Genius. His first book, <\/em>Many Subtle Channels, recounts his induction into the French literary collective Oulipo.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cRhetorical Questions\u201d and \u201cOn Rhyme\u201d from <\/em>What\u2019s Good: Notes on Rap and Language.<\/a> Copyright \u00a9 2022 by Daniel Levin Becker. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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