Book of Rhymes by Adam Bradley

itself most powerfully in the dual rhythmic relationship between the beat of the drums and the flow of the voice.
    MCs face a particular challenge, distinct from those faced by literary poets and song lyricists. Literary poets concern themselves with the rhythms in the language of their lines. They balance stressed syllables and select specific rhythm patterns to govern their compositions. They work with implied beats. The song lyricist, on the other hand, must contend with audible rhythms in addition to harmony and melody. Writing for a singing voice, they construct a melodic line that fits within the musical accompaniment. The MC’s task embodies elements of both, combined with a particular set of concerns unique to rap. Unlike a literary poet, an MC’s flow is not governed solely by the rhythmic structure of the poet’s words, but by the audible rhythms of the track. Unlike song lyricists, MCs are concerned almost exclusively with rhythm. This specialization opens rap up to its most obvious criticism from musicians in other genres: Rap is not music, they say, because it doesn’t care about harmony and melody. Rap, in other words, is nothing more than
an extended drum solo, the rapper nothing more than another kick drum or snare.
    This rhythmic preoccupation should not obscure the wide range of aesthetic decisions an MC has to make in every rhyme. When presented with a beat, the first question for the lyricist is this: How will you rhyme to it? Fast or slow? Monotone or animated? A little bit ahead, a little bit behind, or right in the pocket? The answer is as varied as the number of individuals willing to pick up the mic and spit. You’ll notice that nowhere in these questions is, “What will you talk about?” Perhaps there are some MCs who begin this way; undoubtedly almost every MC has begun with that question at one time or another. But I would contend that the question of lyrical content almost always comes second to the more immediate concern of sound.
    Like a jazz singer scatting to some big-band swing, the MC’s most pressing lyrical challenge is in patterning sound rather than making meaning. If this were reversed, if a rapper’s primary concern had to be sense before anything else, then it might likely lead to those good-intentioned efforts at conscious rap that cram political slogans into the rhymes with little concern for how it sounds. Very few listeners will have the patience for that. In rap you must convince people that they should hear you even before they know what you’re saying. That doesn’t mean that content can’t be the most powerful part of a rhyme; often it is. But it is not the first thing to consider, and it’s rarely the indispensable part.
    The first thing a listener usually hears in rap is the MC’s flow. Flow, as you’ll recall, is the distinctive rhythm cadence a rapper’s voice follows to a beat. It is rhythm over time. As historian William Jelani Cobb describes it, flow is “an individual
time signature, the rapper’s own idiosyncratic approach to the use of time.” Controlling tempo, juxtaposing silence with sound, patterning words in clusters of syllables, all are ways of playing with rhythm over time. In addition to its use of time, flow also works by arranging stressed and unstressed syllables in interesting ways. In this regard, flow relates to meter in literary poetry in that both rely on the poet’s artful manipulation of vocal emphasis. Just as classical composers score music, poets “score” words, using the embedded rhythms of vocal stress.
    Every poem provides the reader with implicit instructions on how to read it. Give ten able readers a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee and, except for variations of vocal tone and small matters of personal choice, the poem should sound just about the same in each instance. “It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a