Book of Rhymes by Adam Bradley Page A

maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee.” As long as the readers haven’t willfully disregarded the rhythmic clues Poe has set down in his arrangement of words and vocal stress, his distinctive voice should emerge from the mouth of whoever is reading the poem.
    Now try the same experiment with a rap verse, a verse that is comparably as sophisticated in its genre as Poe’s is in his, and something altogether different occurs. Give those same ten people Nas’s “One Mic.” Let’s assume that none of them have ever heard the song. Let’s also assume that they’ve been given nothing but the lyrics. “All I need is one life, one try, one breath, I’m one man / What I stand for speaks for itself, they don’t understand.” Without hearing Nas’s distinctive performance—the way his voice rises from a whisper to a shout—and without even the benefit of listening to the
instrumental track, chances are they will recite it in ten different ways. Some will read it flat, with almost no added inflection at all. Others might catch a hint of Nas’s syncopation, or see a cluster of syllables, or emphasize a particular stress pattern. Certainly none of them would rap it like Nas does. This begs the obvious question: What does Poe’s poem have that Nas’s does not, or to frame it more broadly, what does a literary verse reveal about its rhythm that a rap verse does not and why?
    To answer this, it’s necessary to return to rap’s dual rhythmic relationship. The rhythm of rap’s poetry, you’ll recall, is defined by that fundamental relationship between the regularity of the beat and the liberated irregularity of the rapper’s flow. Literary verse, by contrast, concerns itself with rhythm and meter. It goes without saying that when composing Annabel Lee the only beat Poe worked with was the particular metric ideal he had in mind. It was contingent, then, upon Poe to represent on the page both his idiosyncratic rhythm and the vestiges of the ideal meter from which it came. To put it another way, Poe has to be both the rapper and his own beatbox all at once.
    Nas, on the other hand, knows that we will likely only hear his rhymes in the particular context of the “One Mic” beat. That means that while, like Poe, he composes his lines with a regular meter in mind, his lyrics need not carry the burden of representing that meter—the beat of the instrumental track does that for him. On a practical level, this means that the range of Nas’s rhythmic freedom is potentially broader than Poe’s, which must stay closer to his chosen meter so that his reader never loses the beat. This doesn’t
mean that Nas and rappers like him have complete rhythmic autonomy. Quite the contrary, because rappers are conscious of how their lyrics function as both poetry and song, they will stay close to the rhythm laid down by the beat—the rapper’s version of poetic meter.
    So now give our ten readers Nas’s lyrics again, but this time play them the beat, and you’ll likely see a marked improvement in their reading’s resemblance to Nas’s performance and an increase in their similarity to one another. Given a sense of the rhythmic order against which Nas composed and performed his lines, it is easier to fit the lyrics to the beat. Indeed, it may be hard to fit them anywhere besides where Nas put them. Of course, for the nonrapper it still presents quite a challenge to rap someone else’s lyrics to a beat. As an oral idiom, rap’s rhythm only partly exists on the page; it requires the beat and the distinctive rhythmic sensibility of the lyricist to make it whole.
    A lyrical transcription rarely provides all the information needed to reconstruct a rapper’s flow. Without the benefit of the beat, we are left to guess at how the words fit together and upon what syllables the stresses fall. If we