Book of Rhymes Read Free Page A

Melle Mel delivers the first line with a combination of dramatic pause and exaggerated emphasis. He begins rhyming a little behind the beat, includes a caesura (a strong phrasal pause within the line) between “glass” and “everywhere,” and then dramatically extenuates the pronunciation of “everywhere.” Were it not for an accurate transcription, these poetic effects would be lost.
    Sometimes rap poets devise intricate structures that give logical shape to their creations. Using patterns of rhyme, rhythm, and line, these structures reinforce an individual verse’s fusion of form and meaning. While literary poetry often follows highly regularized forms—a sonnet, a villanelle, a ballad stanza—rap is rarely so formally explicit, favoring instead those structures drawn naturally from oral expression. Upon occasion, however, rap takes on more formal structures, either by happenstance or by conscious design. For instance, Long Beach’s Crooked I begins the second verse of “What That Mean” by inserting an alternating quatrain, switching up the song’s established pattern of rhyming consecutive lines.
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    Shorty saw him comin’ in a glare
I pass by like a giant blur
What she really saw was Tim Duncan in the air
Wasn’t nothin’ but a Flyin’ Spur
    By rhyming two pairs of perfect rhymes abab (“glare” with “air” and “blur” with “spur”), Crooked I fashions a duality of sound that underscores the two perspectives he describes: that of the woman onlooker and that of the MC in his speeding car. By temporarily denying the listener’s expectation of rhyme, he creates a sense of heightened anticipation and increased attention. Using this new rhyme pattern shines a spotlight on the playful metaphor at the center of the verse: what the woman saw was the San Antonio Spurs’ MVP Tim Duncan in the air, otherwise known as a flying Spur, otherwise known as his luxury automobile, a Bentley Continental Flying Spur. The mental process of deciphering the metaphor, nearly instantaneous for those familiar with the reference and likely indecipherable for anyone else, is facilitated by the rhyming structure of the verse. Rhyme and wordplay work together to create a sense of poetic satisfaction.
    Rap’s poetry is best exemplified in these small moments that reveal conscious artistry at work in places we might least expect. It is this sense of craft that connects the best poetry of the past with the best rap of today. Consider the following two verses side by side: on the left is Langston Hughes’s “Sylvester’s Dying Bed,” written in 1931; on the right is a transcription of Ice-T’s “6 ’N the Mornin’,” released in 1987. Though distanced by time, these lyrics are joined by form.
    Hughes’s form relies upon splitting the conventional four-beat line in half, a pattern I have followed with Ice-T’s verse for the purposes of comparison; I might just as easily have rewritten Hughes’s lines as two sets of rhyming couplets. This adjustment aside, the two lyrics are nearly identical in form. Each employs a two-beat line (or a four-beat line cut in two) with an abcb rhyme pattern. They even share the same syntactical units, with end stops (a grammatical pause
for punctuation at the end of a line of verse) on lines two, four, six, and eight. Both draw upon the rhythms of the vernacular, the language as actually spoken. This formal echo, reaching across more than a half century of black poetic expression, suggests a natural affinity of forms.
    I woke up this mornin’
Six in the mornin’
‘Bout half past three.
Police at my door.
All the womens in town
Fresh Adidas squeak
Was gathered round me.
Across my bathroom floor.
Sweet gals was a-moanin’,
Out my back window,
“Sylvester’s gonna die!”
I made my escape.
And a hundred pretty mamas
Don’t even get a