Book of Rhymes (22 page)

“I Got a Story to Tell” differs in its tone from the other notable story rap on
Life After Death,
“Niggas Bleed.” Gone are the playfulness and mischief, replaced by a dead-serious story about crime and consequence. Biggie's voice is not exactly his own, and yet it is informed by his rap persona. He tells the story of a drug deal gone bad. But even on this dark song, Biggie can't resist himself. With the last line, he undercuts the mood of menace by having his story end on a blunder—the getaway car hits a hydrant. This small detail transforms the entire song, with all its menace and drama, into a setup for a Biggie punch line. Unlike so many of those rappers who followed his lead, Biggie never took himself too seriously.

Perhaps the most natural story of all is the story of oneself. For rap music, this often means combining the dual modes of braggadocio and narrative into a kind of autobiography of greatness. Stories of one's rise to the top—in the rap game, in the crack game, whatever—are quite common. Stories of the MC's life form one of the core narratives in rap. Of course writing of one's own birth is a hoary conceit in Western literature, so much so that even its parodies (Laurence
Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
being foremost) are now canonical. In the African-American tradition, autobiography's roots are in the slave narratives, which almost invariably began with some version of “I was born. . . .”

MCs have employed this convention in surprising ways. A partial catalogue of birth narratives includes Ras Kass's “Ordo Abchao (Order Out of Chaos)”; the Notorious B.I.G.'s “Intro” from his debut album,
Ready to Die;
Andre 3000's “She's Alive” from
The Love Below;
and Jay-Z's “December 4th” from
The Black Album.
By far the most arresting example, though, is Nas's “Fetus,” the hidden track on 2002's
The Lost Tapes.
The song begins with pensive guitar chords followed by the sound of bubbling liquid, soon overlaid with a beat and a piano riff that picks up on the guitar's melody. Then Nas begins, almost as a preface, in a tone more spoken than rapped, “Yeah. I want all my niggas to come journey with me / My name is Nas, and the year is 1973 / The beginning of me / Therefore I can see / Through my belly button window / Who I am.” By endowing the insensible with voice, he aspires to an expressive level that transcends speaking for oneself, or of oneself, to one that self-consciously constructs itself as an artist giving shape to that which lacks coherence.

Another unforgettable, unconventional example of rap autobiography is Andre 3000's “A Life in the Day of Benjamin André (Incomplete),” the last track on
The Love Below.
At just over five minutes, it's a long song by today's rap standards. But what makes it stand out is the fact that he rhymes for the entire time—no hooks, no breaks, just words. Unlike the previous examples, Andre chooses to begin not with his actual birth, but his birth as a lover and as an artist: “I met you in a club in Atlanta, Georgia / Said me and homeboy
were comin' out with an album.” The narrative that follows intertwines Andre's rise to prominence as an artist with his love relationships, most notably the tumultuous one he had with the R&B singer Erykah Badu. The lines that follow epitomize the way Andre balances the improvisational qualities of storytelling with a clear and directed narrative trajectory, stream-of-consciousness forays with factual assertion:

 

 

These lines show Andre using stark enjambment, other voices, layered rhyme, and playful wordplay to render an unforgettable story, which also happens to be the story of his life.

Like so many other narrative forms today, rap too has seen a revolution in its storytelling structure. In particular, MCs have begun to devise nonlinear narratives, perhaps in emulation of filmmakers. “Narrative is a verbal presentation of a sequence of events or facts . . . whose disposition in time implies causal connection and point,” notes the
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Obvious examples include Nas's “Rewind,” which begins with an invocation:

 

 

The first image Nas describes is of a man with a bullet coming out of his body. As we rewind, Nas inverts narrative tension without compromising its effect upon the listener; just the opposite, emotions are amplified. Nas uses a similar narrative conceit on “Blaze a 50,” except instead of telling the entire story in reverse, he narrates his story in conventional fashion all the way through, but, not being satisfied with the ending, “rewinds” to an earlier point and ends it another way.

Nas is perhaps contemporary rap's greatest innovator in storytelling. His catalog includes songs narrated before birth (“Fetus”) and after death (“Amongst Kings”), biographies (“U.B.R. [Unauthorized Biography of Rakim]”) and autobiographies (“Doo Rags”), allegorical tales (“Money Is My Bitch”) and epistolary ones (“One Love”), he's rapped in the voice of a woman (“Sekou Story”) and even of a gun (“I Gave You Power”).

His most arresting story, however, may be “Undying Love,” a dramatic monologue about infidelity, jealousy, murder, and suicide that would have made Robert Browning proud. It pairs well with Biggie's “I Got a Story to Tell,” except where Biggie rhymes in the voice of the man cheating, Nas rhymes in the voice of the man being cheated upon. What's remarkable about the story this song tells is that it pierces the armor of invincibility surrounding the MC's ego, if only in fiction rather than fact. In the process, Nas explores
a texture of emotion rarely acknowledged in rap: human frailty. In doing so, he suggests that rap may yet be capable of encompassing the full range of human emotion.

Rap has always expressed a broad expanse of moods. Its rawest emotions are often on display when MCs aren't telling stories at all. After all, rap is the product of two seemingly disparate places—the block party and the lyrical battlefield. The good-times spirit that rap often displays is tempered by the more aggressive, even menacing, tone it takes on other occasions. As a consequence, rap is often misunderstood, taken either as a joke or as a threat. In reality it is both and so much more. It is to rap's complicated, sometimes contradictory, spirit that we now turn.

TWO COMPETITORS FACE
one another, encircled by a crowd. One of them begins delivering improvised poetic lines filled with insults and puns. The second responds, trying to outdo his adversary by conjuring up even sharper verbal jabs. This goes on for several rounds until one of them gets tripped up in his words, or until the audience asserts its judgment with cheers or jeers. Such a battle could be happening right now in a Brooklyn basement or at a Bronx block party, at an open-mic night or in a street-corner cipher. It also could have happened three millennia ago, at a poetry contest in ancient Greece.

The Greeks may not have been rappers, but they certainly knew how to put on a freestyle battle. The Greek tradition of “capping” involved contests between two or more
poets matching verses on set themes, responding to one another “by varying, punning, riddling, or cleverly modifying” that particular theme. Like today's freestyle rap battles between rappers, these ancient poetic competitions were largely improvised. As classical scholar Derek Collins explains, “The ability of the live performer to cap his adversary with a verse . . . while keeping in step with theme and meter at hand and at the same time producing puns, riddles, ridicule, depends among other things upon improvisation.” As with rap battles, the competitive spirit of these Greek rhyme contests sometimes spilled over into physical violence. “Improvisation and humor at the wrong time,” Collins writes, “occasionally resulted in death, while such repartee at the right moment could absolve one from punishable offense.” It doesn't get any realer than that.

Battles are an essential part of almost every poetic tradition in the world. In the tenth-century Japanese royal court, for instance, a poet named Fujiwara no Kintô gained fame for his ability to vanquish his adversaries with just a few lines. Across the African continent, poetic contests have long been common, serving both functional and ceremonial purposes. Among the women of Namibia, for instance, a tradition of heated poetic exchange in response to perceived slights developed, a practice that continues to this day. Unifying all of these disparate traditions are the basic elements of improvisation, insult, braggadocio, and eloquence.

While battling might not be the first thing one thinks of when it comes to poetry, traditions of poetic expression around the world are rooted in it. Rap takes its rightful place within this longstanding practice of verbal warfare. When Jay-Z announced his short-lived retirement, he underscored
the centrality of the battle to rap in the following public statement: “People compare rap to other genres of music, like jazz or rock 'n' roll. But it's really most like a sport. Boxing to be exact. The stamina, the one-man army, the combat aspect of it, the ring, the stage, and the fact that boxers never quit when they should.” Far from disqualifying rap as a poetic form, rap's combative nature actually binds it more securely to the spirit of competition at the heart of some of the earliest poetic expressions. Whether in a freestyle session or in a recording booth, rap seems almost to require this spirit of competition.

The battle in rap is not simply between competitors, it is also between the MC and the words themselves. Mastering language before it masters you is the first contest an MC must win, even before the real competition begins. Lil Wayne, who, like Jay-Z, the MC to whom he's most often compared, claims never to write down his rhymes, picks up on this same pugilistic sensibility, but in relation to language itself. “I don't write, homie,” he explains. “I just go straight in [the recording booth] and cut the music on. . . . It's sort of like a fight, I just start fightin' with the words. I don't need a tablet [of paper]. If I had a tablet, I'd get beat up.”

Rap's proving ground is the cipher, a competitive and collaborative space created when MCs gather to exchange verses, either in freestyle battles or in collaborative lyrical brainstorming sessions. The cipher is a verbal cutting contest that prizes wit and wordplay above all else. It is, of course, connected to the poetic compositions born in the MC's book of rhymes, and yet it exercises its own distinct set of skills. Often a rapper is good at writing, but not at freestyling, or vice versa. It is almost an unwritten rap rule that the dopest
freestylers tend to make the wackest studio albums. Within the hip-hop community, some insist that freestyling is a necessary element of MCing, while others recognize it as a completely separate skill.

Lil Wayne, as mentioned above, sees writing as an impediment to rap. “I could be at my happiest moment,” he says, “my saddest moment, I could be speechless, I could be voiceless, but I could still rap. That's what I do. So that's why I really don't use the pen and pad, 'cause I kind of feel like when you use the pen and pad, you're readin', And when you're readin' somethin', man, you're payin' attention to what you're readin' instead of what you're doin'.” So what is freestyle's relation to rap's poetry? After all, the complex poetics we've been discussing thus far are most often the product of composition and revision, not just unfiltered impromptu expression. Is freestyling, therefore, somehow less “poetic” than those lines born in an MC's book of rhymes? Are the lyrical products of each necessarily distinct?

Most MCs tend to underscore the connection rather than the division between freestyling and writing rhymes. “When you write a rhyme it arrives in the form of a freestyle anyway,” observes Guru. “It's just a matter of how you catch it and capture it and put it down on paper.” Black Thought of the Roots similarly suggests an inherent connection between the two methods of lyrical creation. Speaking about “Proceed,” a classic track from an early album, he remarks: “All the lyrics on there were written down, not freestyled. But when I wrote the stuff down, it was also always the first thing that came into my head. So I guess it was half and half.” Kurupt echoes both MCs when he describes his own
compositional process as a hybrid of the written and the freestyled, working in symbiotic unity:

 

No matter how we define the precise connection, the freestyle battle provides a way of understanding something of the spirit of rap poetry as a whole. Most rap, whether freestyled or written, celebrates individual excellence. Through ritualized insults made up of puns and other plays on words, rap embodies a spirit of competition, even when no competitors are in sight. Understanding the rap battle helps explain why MCs often rail against unnamed “sucker MCs,” even if they're rapping alone in the recording booth. It doesn't really matter if LL had someone specific in mind when he wrote, “LL Cool J is hard as hell / Battle anybody I don't care who you tell / I excel, they all fail / I'm gonna crack shells, Double-L must rock the bells.” The lines are just as fierce, the swagger just as hard. Competition is abstract, but no less real. Whether freestyled or written, something in rap requires this spirit of verbal combat. It is rap's motivating energy and its sustaining drive.