Book of Rhymes Read Free Page B

chance
Bowed their heads to cry.
To grab my old school tape.
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    Rap lyrics properly transcribed reveal themselves in ways not possible when listening to rap alone. Seeing rap on the page, we understand it for what it is: a small machine of words. We distinguish end rhymes from internal rhymes, end-stopped lines from enjambed ones, patterns from disruptions. Of course, nothing can replace the listening experience, whether in your headphones or at a show. Rather than replacing the music, reading rap as poetry heightens both enjoyment and understanding. Looking at rhymes on the page slows things down, allowing listeners—now readers—to discover familiar rhymes as if for the first time.
    Walt Whitman once proclaimed that “great poets need great audiences.” For over thirty years, rap has produced more than its share of great poets. Now it is our turn to become a great audience, repaying their efforts with the kind of close attention to language that rap’s poetry deserves.

Part One

ONE Rhythm
    RHYTHM IS RAP’S reason for being. I realized this several years ago in an unlikely place, a beach in a small seaside town outside of Rio de Janeiro. Unable to speak Portuguese, I had been making do by resorting to the traveler’s Esperanto of smiles and hand gestures, but I hungered for familiar words. One afternoon as I walked along the beach, I contented myself by idly reciting rap verses that came to mind. I was in the midst of Inspectah Deck’s opening lines from the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Triumph” (“I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies / and hypotheses can’t define how I be dropping these / mockeries”) when I heard the first words uttered by another person that I had clearly understood in days.
    â€œWu-Tang Clan!”

    I glanced behind me, half expecting to see some spectral projection of my linguistically isolated mind. Instead I saw a brown-skinned kid of about fourteen who seemed to have emerged from out of nowhere on the otherwise-abandoned beach. Not wanting to miss the chance to converse with someone in English, I asked him which MCs he liked best. He smiled broadly but said nothing. He’d exhausted his English, as I had my Portuguese. We parted ways, but I wondered, What was it about those rhymes that spoke to him when the words could not? It must have been the rhythm.
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    Rhythm is rap’s basic element. Whatever else it is, rap is patterned verbal expression. It is the offspring of a voice and a beat. The beat, of course, is the most obvious rhythm we hear. It is the kick drum, the high hat, the snare. It is sampled or digitized, beatboxed, or even tapped out on a tabletop. The MC’s voice has rhythm as well, playing off and on the beat in antagonistic cooperation. For most rap listeners, even for those with a full grasp of the language of the lyrics, rhythm has a way of overshadowing meaning. Feminist women sometimes hit the dance floor when the rhythm is right, misogynist lyrics be damned. And even true hip-hop heads have been known to “walk it out” or crank that Soulja Boy on occasion. The rhythm can make you do strange things. Rap, after all, is more than the sum of its sense; rhythm has a meaning all its own.
    So what does rap mean when we aren’t paying close attention or can’t comprehend the words? “I can go to Japan, not speak the language or communicate whatsoever, but a beat will come on, and we’ll all move our heads the same way,” remarks Evidence of Dilated Peoples. “It lets me know
that there’s something bigger than just making rap songs.” Less obvious but equally significant is that rap’s poetic language also finds meaning in pure rhythmic expression. “Poetic forms are like that,” literary critic Paul Fussell explains. “They tend to say things even if words are not at the moment fitted to their patterns.”
    Poetry was born in rhythm rather than in