hey, welcome to 12tone! hip hop is arguably
the most important musical invention of the
last 50 years: it pushes musical boundaries,
challenging the idea of what popular music
is allowed to sound like, and its influence
has been felt in pretty much every genre.
but despite its success, or perhaps in part
because of it, hip hop has also faced a lot
of criticism, much of which targets its signature
vocal technique, rapping. one of the most
common complaints about rap is that it's too
simple.
I mean, they're just talking, right?
how can that be art? and if it is art, surely
it's poetry, not music, right?
right?
well, I've argued in the past that this isn't
true: rap is a complex, nuanced technique
on par with any other approach to vocal performance,
but I think it's time I put my money where
my mouth is.
if hip hop is a serious art form, which it
definitely is, then it deserves serious analysis,
so… let's do that.
let's talk about what it really means to rap.
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
first, I want to take a look at where this
misconception comes from, and a good way to
do that is through one of its most annoying
manifestations.
you've probably seen one of these mean-spirited
videos with a musician, usually a classically
trained one, performing an "instrumental cover"
of a hip hop song, where they just play a
single note over and over, which is… funny?
I guess?
somehow? and if you're familiar with classical
music, you can sort of see how this might
happen, because in a lot of classical pieces,
the lyrics don't really matter.
take Ave Maria.
the version you're probably familiar with
is by Franz Schubert, originally published
as Ellens dritter Gesang, but Schubert didn't
write the words.
Ave Maria is a traditional Christian prayer
to the Virgin Mary: Schubert just set it to
a melody. or, actually, he didn't: Ellens
dritter Gesang was a setting of a Walter Scott
poem that begins with a part of the prayer,
but modern performances tend to replace the
rest of the lyrics with the full Ave Maria
anyway because, again, who cares.
besides, even if Schubert didn't intend to
set the full Ave Maria, dozens of other composers
did, including Mozart, Bruckner, Stravinsky,
and Brahms. each of these has a different
melody, different harmonies, rhythms, arrangements,
and more.
they're completely different pieces of music
that just happen to have the same set of lyrics
grafted on.
and a similar thing happens in jazz, where
songs are often written as instrumentals,
and then when a singer wants to do a version
of it they have to write their own lyrics.
my favorite example of this is So What, the
first track off Miles Davis's groundbreaking
album Kind Of Blue. this was released in 1959,
and almost a decade later, jazz singer Eddie
Jefferson recorded a version where he'd added
lyrics about the impressive work ethic of
Miles Davis.
clearly, though, Davis's version proves that
the song doesn't need words: Jefferson's just
adding them in for decoration.
and that's the thing: in most styles, the
lyrics are effectively separate from the music.
they exist on top of it, and while removing
the words may change the song's meaning, it
probably won't change its structure.
but hip hop doesn't work like that: more than
pretty much any other genre of Western music,
in hip hop the words become an intrinsic part
of the not just the message, but the music
itself, an idea that's encapsulated in the
hip hop concept of flow.
now, flow covers a lot of different aspects
of a rapper's performance.
Dr. Kyle Adams breaks these up into two main
categories: articulation, which is how you
say the words, and meter, which is when you
say them.
the articulation aspects are really important
in describing an individual rapper's delivery,
but they're not that different from the tools
you'd use to analyze, say, a rock singer:
rappers may play around more with things like
legato and staccato, leaning on either long,
flowing phrases or sharp, short attacks, but
ultimately, what sets flow apart as its own
unique form of vocal delivery is how it uses
lyrics not just for their meanings, but also
for their sounds.
of course, almost all vocal music does this
to an extent: pick any popular song with lyrics
and odds are you'll find that they rhyme,
but for the most part, the rhymes in pop,
rock, and jazz lyrics don't get much more
advanced than couplets, where you have a pair
of lines and the last syllable of each rhymes
with the other one.
really adventurous songwriters may go as far
a quatrains, where four lines fit together
in an alternating rhyme scheme, but even then,
these lyrics rely almost exclusively on end
rhymes. that is, rhymes between the ends of
phrases.
early hip hop mostly followed the same pattern,
but that all changed in the late 80s and early
90s, when rappers began to experiment more
with internal rhyme, where rhymed syllables
appear within lines rather than just at the
ends. for a great example of what you can
do with internal rhyme, Dr. Adams cites the
first verse of Blazing Arrow by Blackalicious,
and this is where doing this as a YouTube
video instead of an academic paper gets complicated.
I'd love to just play you the verse, but in
order to see what he's doing you should really
hear the whole thing.
the problem is it's 40 seconds long, and if
I play you 40 uninterrupted seconds of a song
there's no chance I'll beat the inevitable
copyright claim.
so...
I'm gonna describe what happens as best I
can, but if you want to pause this video,
go to another tab, look up the song, and then
come back, I won't mind.
just don't close this window, YouTube gets
weird about that.
got it? everyone good?
alright, let's go.
so the verse is 12 bars long, and it starts
and ends with traditional couplets: at the
beginning, the rapper, Gift of Gab, rhymes
"blazing arrow" with "rio de janeiro", and
then at the end he rhymes it with "camaro".
these two couplets serve to bookend a much
more complex section in the middle, where
Gift of Gab says something on almost every
16th note for 8 full bars, and on the rare
occasions where he does stop to catch his
breath, the DJ, Chief Xcel, fills in for him.
rhythmically, it's perfectly even, and that's
accentuated by the beat as well: the snare's
on 2 and 4, the bass is on 1 and 3, and the
guitar is strumming 8th notes.
there's a little syncopation in the kick drum
pattern, and they swing the 16th notes, but
all of that is entirely consistent throughout
the section.
on paper, from an instrumental perspective,
this verse has almost no rhythmic interest
at all, and yet all you have to do to prove
that analysis wrong is listen to it.
so where's that rhythm coming from?
well, it's coming from the lyrics. this whole
section is built around a single lyrical idea:
a three-syllable phrase where the first and
third syllables both contain the vowel sound
"ay", like "saved the day", "razor blades",
"change the game", or "came to play".
this is the rhythmic unit of the verse, and
all the rhythmic interest comes from the different
ways Gift of Gab places it around the bar.
for the most part, each bar contains three
instances of this phonetic unit: to start
with, these begin on the downbeat, the second
upbeat, and beat 4. if we drop the rest of
the lyrics and just look at these phrases,
we get something like this (bang) and if we
focus in on the beginnings of the phrases,
we see they form a well-known pattern called
a tresillo, which is where you group sets
of 8 beats into a pattern of 3, 3, 2, 3, 3,
2. this tresillo sits on top of the rest of
the band, creating a compelling contrast to
the underlying 4/4 pulse.
to reiterate, though, no one is actually playing
a tresillo: Gift of Gab or, occasionally,
Chief Xcel is rapping on every single 16th
note.
the pattern doesn't appear in a standard transcription,
but listening to the song, it's pretty clearly
there.
you can feel it, because the lyrics themselves
have taken on structural significance.
that's not a thing that most traditional forms
of analysis are set up to catch, but it doesn't
mean it doesn't exist, it just means we're
not very good at finding it. and if that's
not enough, partway through the verse, he
adds an extra 8th note to one of the gaps,
pushing everything back a bit and switching
over to this even cooler rhythm: (bang) where
that same tresillo now starts on the first
upbeat, creating even more syncopation between
the lyrics and the underlying beat.
again, you can hear this happening in the
song on the words "okay, okay", even though
the rhythm of his vocal attacks doesn't change
a bit.
the simple fact that Gift of Gab can change
your perception of the rhythm without actually
changing anything that we would traditionally
consider part of the rhythm shows that our
conception of what counts a rhythmic is, at
best, incomplete.
but that's just one kind of flow.
in Blazing Arrow, the rhyme scheme is incredibly
tight and ordered, featuring one rhyme repeated
over and over in a shifting rhythmic context,
but another common approach is to weave multiple
different internal rhymes together.
let's take a look at The People, by Common:
again, I'm not gonna play it, but if you want
to pause and look it up, feel free.
this time, though, I just want to focus on
the beginning of the first verse. after the
refrain, Common starts with "and the struggle
of the brothers and the folks, with lovers
under dope, experiment to discover hope."
here, we see the introduction of two main
rhymes: first,
there's a straightforward single-syllable
one, with folks, dope, and hope.
these are end rhymes: their positions mark
the the ends of lines.
they also draw attention to Common's uneven
phrasing: the first and third lines are three
beats each, whereas the middle one is only
2, an imbalance that wouldn't be nearly as
noticeable if "dope" didn't rhyme.
but there's also the two-syllable rhyme here
that we see in struggle, brothers, lovers,
and discover.
this one only shows up internally: the first
two statements are on beats 1 and 2 of the
first bar, strongly emphasized, which makes
your ear latch onto them, but then he moves
the other two onto offbeats, creating syncopation
with the rhyme now that you know you're supposed
to be looking for it.
it adds another, more complex rhythmic layer
on top of the already interesting pattern
laid out by the first rhyme.
together, these two rhymes take you on a rhythmic
tour all around the bar, emphasizing different
parts of the beat and making the whole thing
feel almost alive.
then, in the next two bars, Common builds
on those ideas with the lines "scuffle for
notes, the rougher I wrote, times was harder,
Went from rocky starter to the voice of a
martyr." here, we see those same two rhymes
concentrated into the beginning: the phrases
"scuffle for notes" and "rougher I wrote"
both show them pretty much back to back, with
just one throwaway syllable in between.
interestingly, though, "note" and "wrote"
have been shifted onto offbeats too, de-emphasizing
them, and at the end of the line we're introduced
to our third rhyme, consisting of harder,
starter, and martyr.
what's fascinating to me here is that, taken
together, these four bars are effectively
a pair of couplets: the first two lines rhyme
folks with hope, and the next two rhyme harder
with martyr. on a surface level, that's all
that's happening, but because he holds over
the rhymes from the first half to form the
internal structure of the next line, the boundary
between the couplets become blurred, making
it feel like one long sentence.
the sounds of the words he's saying serve
as a sort of connective tissue, defining the
structure of the verse much more than any
other instrument.
and this can be taken even further: as an
extreme example, Adams cites All Caps by Madvillain,
where rapper MF DOOM's incredibly relaxed
flow drifts between numerous often multi-syllabic
rhymes in ways that seem almost entirely unconnected
to the underlying musical beat, creating a
rich web of lyrical rhythms that practically
dare you to try and pick them apart.
like, in the line "and he won't stop 'til
he got the masses and show 'em what they know
not through flows of hot molasses", there's
the obvious rhyme between masses and molasses,
but there's also two different internal rhymes,
one between won't, show, know, and flow, and
the other between stop, got, not, and hot.
the closest analogy I can think of is like
different drums in a drum solo: sure, you
might focus on one or another at any given
moment, but the artistry comes in blending
them together, building a series of related
sounds into one coherent structure.
on the surface, this sort of flow almost does
sound like just talking, but if you actually
tried to do it, you'd see it really wasn't
that simple: a lot of craft and skill goes
into hiding the seams of such a complex pattern.
the fact that MF DOOM and others like him
are able to make this stuff sound easy is
a testament to their skill, not evidence of
a lack of it.
All Caps also demonstrate another important
part of many rappers' flow: enjambment. this
is a poetry term for when the boundaries of
your sentences don't line up with the boundaries
of your meter.
like, Will Smith's Parents Just Don't Understand
begins with the lines "You know parents are
the same no matter time nor place.
they don't understand that us kids are going
to make some mistakes."
each of those lines takes four beats to deliver,
and each one is a complete sentence.
this means their syntactic structure, or the
structure of their meaning, lines up with
their metric structure, or the structure of
the beat.
this makes them feel like two complete, independent
units.
on the other hand, when MF DOOM delivers the
line "sometimes he rhyme quick, sometimes
he rhyme slow, or vice versa," that is, again,
one complete sentence, but it takes him 5
beats to deliver it, pushing the line into
the next bar and breaking up that sense of
coherence: the line before it ends with "don't
talk about my moms, yo", which means "rhyme
slow" is technically an end rhyme within the
4-beat pattern of the song, but because the
sentence carries on past it, it doesn't really
register as an ending.
the enjambment overrides our sense of meter,
making even the end rhymes feel internal.
and this is all just scratching the surface.
I could spend all day grabbing random hip
hop songs and breaking down the rapper's flow,
but the point here isn't about how any particular
artist used the concept.
there's as many kinds of flow as there are
rappers; in fact, there's probably more. and
I'm not trying to say that rappers with simple
flows are bad, either: just like with any
other device, simplicity is always a valid
artistic decision.
my point is that, more than any other style
of popular music, in rap, the words matter.
they're not just decoration, to be slapped
on at the end: they serve a key structural
role.
it's no wonder, then, that removing them makes
the music sound empty, in much the same way
a jazz song might sound empty if you just
didn't play any of the chords.
some people argue that caring so much about
the words means it's more like poetry than
music, but that feels facetious to me: every
genre has its own focus.
in jazz, it's harmony.
in common practice, it's voiceleading. in
rock, it's tone. of course, all these things
matter to some extent in every style, but
so do lyrics.
the way rappers use those lyrics is still
intensely musical, and what's amazing is that
this increased structural role doesn't come
at the cost of meaning: many rappers manage
to deliver deep, powerful messages and compelling
stories with the same words whose base phonetics
they're converting into music.
it's a phenomenal artistic achievement.
I wanted to make this video for a couple reasons.
first, I think it's a fascinating and often
misunderstood topic, and I've wanted to cover
it ever since I found Adams's paper.
but also, right now, with everything going
on in the United States and the rest of the
world, I think it's an important time to acknowledge
the contributions of black artists to the
world of music.
that's not the only reason I support the Black
Lives Matter movement, but it's worth recognizing
that we owe black musicians a huge cultural
debt.
and not just for hip hop: rock, jazz, country,
and funk were all the product of black musical
innovation, and even in genres where the early
pioneers weren't black, more often than not,
their influences were.
the blues runs deep in metal.
this can be uncomfortable for white audiences
to face, and the mere mention of the fact
that these genres come from black communities
is often seen as "getting political", but
it's not.
it's a historical fact. and the pushback against
hip hop isn't new either: it's hard to imagine
now, but despite being a darling of the modern
academy, jazz faced a strikingly similar backlash
in the beginning, with critics accusing the
music of luring good white teenagers into
a life of drug use and sexual proclivity.
that's a real thing that actually happened.
you can look it up.
noted racist Henry Ford even invested loads
of money into promoting white country artists
in order to push the new genre of black music
out of the mainstream.
so here's the thing: when we talk about the
reasons people don't like hip hop, it's easy
to chalk it up to just not understanding,
to missing the nuances because they don't
know what to listen for, and for a lot of
people I think that's true.
but it's also worth acknowledging that there
are powerful societal forces at play here
designed to make sure you continue to not
understand, and those forces are the same
ones that've been around since Ford's time.
the details have changed, but the system remains
largely the same.
that's not to say that if you don't like hip
hop you're a racist, but maybe try asking
yourself if you've ever really given it a
shot.
have you tried to find hip hop songs you like,
or have you just heard a couple things on
the radio and used that to judge the entire
genre? if so, that's not your fault, but it
is something you can fix.
hip hop is almost 50 years old now, with dozens
of subgenres based on every musical aesthetic
imaginable, so even if it'll never be your
favorite thing, odds are someone's made something
that you'll enjoy.
honestly, though, I'm tired of defending hip
hop. it doesn't need my defense.
I want to celebrate hip hop.
I want to look at the things that make it
great instead of deflecting bad-faith critiques
that assume it's inherently bad, so...
I'm gonna do that.
I'm not shifting my entire channel focus,
but I am gonna make a lot more videos on the
music theory of hip hop in the future.
it's a field of study with a lot of unanswered
questions, but the answers we do have are
fascinating, and I want to help share them
with the world.
and while we're on the topic, last week I
asked you to donate to the national bail fund
network if you had the means, and this week,
while national attention toward the protests
is fading, it's important to remember that
the work goes on.
people are still in jail for the crime of
exercising their right to free speech in defense
of black lives, and they still need our support,
so instead of putting a sponsor on this video,
I'm just gonna link to the bail fund network
again.
it's a great cause, and it's one of the most
direct ways you can help support the fight
to protect black lives.
please consider donating if you have the means,
and if you already did… please consider
donating again.
I've also linked to some more resources from
Black Lives Matter if you'd like to educate
yourself on other ways to support those efforts.
and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our
Patreon patrons for making these videos possible,
and extra special thanks to this video's Featured
Patrons, Susan Jones and Jill Sundgaard.
if you want to help out, and help us pick
the next song we analyze too, there's a link
to our Patreon on screen now.
you can also join our mailing list to find
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subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.
