RAPPERS ENCYCLOPEDIA: It’s my belief that, when discussing rap (which here refers to something completely different from hip-hop), we can move the discussion beyond the “Drake sucks, Eminem rules” kind, based on nothing besides who you like more and fanboy- dom. We can look at rappers and, by describing their musical and rhythmic tendencies, group them into different categories, and then say who manipulates rhythms most masterfully. That is exactly what will happen in this article. The rappers will be Kanye West, Mos Def, Andre 3K, and Eminem. Ultimately, who is good and who is bad will be left up to the listener, but I know what I prefer, and will offer my value judgments based on what I believe to be the core, fundamental principles underlying all good rap. I’ve chosen these four rappers chiefly because, in integral parts of their styles, they are vastly different from how they approach the music. The three categories we can use to describe a rapper’s flow that concern us here are as follows (quoted from my How To Listen To Kendrick Lamar Analysis ): 1. The nature of their rhymes – how many they drop per bar, how many syllables they are, where they fall in the line, whether they’re repeated in the same order or different, and so on. 2. The nature of their sentences — how long/short they are, where they fall in the music, how many of them there are, and so on. 3. Whether they repeat certain rhythms, or keep making new rhythms as they go long. When I say the word “flow”, it means the rhythmic structure that arises in a rap from the interaction between the rapper’s words and the strictly musical rhythms of those words. That is, the rapper’s words will always inform how we understand the rhythms of any rapper’s raps.A very good place to start this discussion is with Kanye West’s rap on “Jesus Walks.” , which you can hear here: youtube/watch?v=X-3gXet-ljs (Although Rhymefest is co-credited as a writer, this song falls so squarely into Kanye’s style that I’ll act as if he wrote it all.) This is because Kanye West is, comparatively, a technically simple rapper when compared to the likes of Eminem, Mos Def, Nas, and Andre 3k. TO BE CONTD.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 09:26:40 +0000
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