THE ART OF WRITING RAP LYRICS

 

INTRODUCTION

One can write an essay about rap lyrics by ennumerating the different subjects that they touch upon, write about their influence on people, their political and sociological engagement, educational values, bla, bla, bla. One can write an essay in an attempt to defend rap lyrics, since they are constantly being attacked for their content (and form) by non-Hiphop listeners, and try to prove that they are worth something and that Hiphop is not dead in Croatia. But I leave those approaches for some other enthusiasts. I am an MC . After writing rap lyrics for some time and freestyling in cyphers for hours and hours, you are bound to become an addict, an individual slightly removed from ''reality'', thinking in rhymes. It becomes a full time occupation. And once you start breaking the world down into rhymes you do not function the same as before, thus my perception of it is completely different. I'm highly biased. I don't want to defend anything. Things are as they are, unchangeable. There are good lyrics, there are bad lyrics, and that is something completely normal and expectable ( „ The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright, but the mouth of fools poureth out foolishness.” - Proverbs 15:2. ). What writing rap lyrics really means to me is something I can hardly verbalise, although I am deeply immersed in it and not a day passes without me writing rhymes or listening to other MCs. I know the feeling I have when I write and when I hear a Hiphop beat. I know it even now while I am writing this, I can feel it, but how can I put that on paper? It is as if someone asked you to describe how a rose smells. Of course you know how it smells, but when it comes to explaining it, problems occur. Human language is definitely not sufficient sometimes. Let me try anyway…Bear with me…

LIBERATING EFFECT

One cannot talk about rap lyrics and not mention the beat (the musical part, the drums and the samples), which is the father and the guide of this kind of oral poetry. We, MCs, just do what the beats tell us. It is similar to chess - the beat is the chessboard, the words are the pieces and the thoughts are the moves. In order to play the rap game right, one must master the flow - the ability to adapt to different beats, to rap fluently on any instrumental, to flip different styles, placing the right words in the right places, his/her mind completely free, brain channels completely free for vocabulary transmition. The lyrics must come out of an MC like branches come out of trees. If the flow is on point, the very meaning of lyrics in most of the cases remains in the background. The thing is, words have a life of their own, they have a musicality, and their inherent effects makes us choose them; they inspire just by the way they sound and the images behind them are less important. You can test that by attempting to translate rap lyrics. Translation is impossible, I mean, it is possible, but the magic disappears, because the words that rhyme in one language don't rhyme in the other. My poetic principle of rap is very nicely explained by Jorge Luis Borges' thoughts about writing poetry, said in one interview. He says : “I think that the meanings are more or less irrelevant. What is important, or the two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don't think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial...I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow” . The emotion Borges mentions is the key element. Various feelings - whether they be of unrest, happiness, unhappiness or anything else, and which have to be expressed - stir in our brains and have to come out. And that's why every MC raps. To release the tension, the content under pressure which is „ready to explode, like beer cans in the freezer when they get too cold“ , and Hiphop enables one to do that, to express dangerous thoughts which are a result of everyday life. The majority of rap lyrics is the agressive outlet of emotions with the MC claiming supremacy over others, self-presenting himself as the authority, destroying all that is negative and that bothers him. It often sounds concieted, but actually the roots of it are deep in the human psyche. Rap originated from African tradition. ''In Africa, songs, proverbs and verbal games served a dual purpose of not only preserving communal values and solidarity but also providing occasions for the individual to transcend, at least symbolically, the inevitable restrictions of his environment and his society by permitting him to express deeply held feelings which ordinarily could not be verbalised.“ To summarise, people got the opportunity to say the unsaid through music. There were even special festival days, which are very similar to today's MC battles, when people were allowed to walk around and say everything they resented with other people in verses, insult them even, without the other person being offended . The reason was that the people believed that each of us has SUNSUM - a soul - that can get hurt or become sick and make the body ill, if the negative and hidden emotions were not channelised from the within and spat out. I most definitely believe they were right. In an MC's subconcioussness, energy materialises out of emotions and through brain receptors and nerves pops out of our mouths in the form of never-ending rhymed verses. It is the sublimation of the negative into the positive, the positive being the music. It is a cry against oppression. It is alchemy. ''I got stress on my brain that causes chest pains'' ..''so I grab my pen and note to spill my soul'', causing serotonin levels to rise instantly. This liberating effect of cleansing oneself of the negative is the strongest during the very act of creation, when the lyrics first emerge (maybe that's the reason why a large percentage of rap lyrics is metafictional, addressing the creation of itself, rapping about rapping, because the process is such a strong one) and with every additional repeating of the lyrics slightly fades, so an MC is forced to create again and again and again… 

BEAUTY OF THE ART

During this process one must be aware of the fact that he/she is engaged in the creation of art, oral poetry , which should move the listeners, causing the elevation of one's soul. As E. A. Poe (whose ''Raven'' is pure rap) said in ''Philosophy of Composition'', this can be achieved only by the effect of beauty . Poe says: “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem...That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful…Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose…It by no means follows from any thing here said, that passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem — for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music, by contrast — but the true artist will always contrive, first, to tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and, secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem.” As an experienced Hiphop listener I would dare say that this is exactly why one listens to this kind of lyrics. They are beautiful. As RZA said: “Hazardous vocabulary attacks be beautiful, acoustical notes we provoke, it comes out musically dope.” They are so visual, 3D acoustical movies. Sad, comical, disturbing, hilarious, educational, real, teaching the individual to push his/her limits and always strive for better, strive for perfection. Their scope is the whole world, the world so “incorrigibly plural” , as Louis MacNeice said. For MCs, the chaos of this incorrigible plurality of the world and infinitesimal images of life is given sense only when the order of the highly mathematical Hiphop beat is imposed on it.

POWER OF THE WORD

So while rap remains an invaluable psychological regulator and a creative outlet for MCs, taking them to ''the gates of pleasure“ , and a beautiful listening experience with similar effects for the listeners, one must also be aware of the power of the medium that rap uses, the sacred power of the word. Africans call it Nommo – ''generative power of the Word both in the creative and in the aesthetic sense, because that which inspires or calls life into being does good and is therefore beautiful. And there is no separate African linguistic term to distinguish goodness from beauty because one without the other would negate the whole aesthetic concept as it is traditionally understood“ . Ancient Africans believed that mastery of life comes through the power of the word and that what a person spoke would come to be. Words have the Force and Power to move people to think new thoughts and to do new things. Words are the creators of our ''reality'', the power to build or destroy lies in the tongue, the power to give life or to pronounce death, to reveal the truth or to deceive with lies, each word that is uttered has an enormous impact. That's why we, MCs, turn to the words, and are encrazed by them; we are in a quest to master them, and by mastering the words, we master the everyday life that they map, we solve its mysteries and intricacies. MCs are modern day prophets, who spread the Word which is Knowledge among the people, and they can point individuals towards the right way in life. They are also the modern-day chroniclers of a culture's history and social situation, whose lyrics clearly show what's wrong and what's good in a society . Considering the power of its form, rap can definitely be used for good, to teach people the basic elements of life, such as Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding, Freedom, Justice, Equality, Unity, Love, Respect, Work, Fun, the Duality of man, Economics, Mathematics, Science, Life, Thruth, Facts, Faith and the Oneness of God. Unfortunately, the full usage of rap's power and its overall acceptance in our country still remains quite unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, things are bound to change. I end this essay with an excerpt from a lecture delivered by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan to a gathering of leaders of the Hiphop community on June 13, 2001 in New York City. He adressed MCs with the following: ''Your potential to change reality is so great that, if you learned the skill of words and how to use words; if you learned how to say what it is you want to say, but say it in a way that gains universal respect, then the rap would evolve to an art form that will never be replaced. It will evolve to be that form that will set the stage for the next phase of human evolution.“ Word-up. Peace.

Ivan Vuković