Reviews
Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop
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All too often the author’s expertise is clouded by personal opinion and bias or the writer gets distracted from the task at hand by spending too much energy on establishing his own legitimacy within the field of Hip Hop. It is by no means an easy task to professionally distance yourself and write about a music or craft or culture, or in this case all of the above, that one grew up so personally and emotionally attached to. There is also the risk of taking it too far in the opposite direction, coming across as cold and detached. Hip Hop is a culture so rich in energy, passion, love, hate, frustration, joy, and soul that the last thing I want to read is something that appears to be written by a robot equipped with a PhD and fancy vocabulary. In 2009’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, Adam Bradley deftly finds that delicate balance and creates a brilliant, intriguing and informative work that fills a much needed vacancy in the ever increasing canon of literature on Hip Hop music and culture.
Over the course of the past decade and a half, the world of academia has slowly caught up with the need for more works chronicling, analyzing, and interpreting the rise of Hip Hop culture from a unique, localized South Bronx scene into a global phenomenon. The timeline is generally said to have started with Tricia Rose’s groundbreaking 1994 classic Black Noise. Don’t blame academia, however, as they weren’t alone in their failure to recognize the significance and staying power of this powerful culture. Radio, record labels, photographers, periodicals, and Hollywood were also slow, all assuming Hip Hop was nothing more than a musicality-lacking passing fad set to burn itself out. Much respect to pioneer journalists, photographers, and documentarians such as Nelson George, Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, Tony Silver, Charlie Ahearn, Sally Banes, and Craig Castleman who took this culture seriously from the jump and helped pave the way for this multibillion dollar industry affecting everyone from the youth in Senegal to grandparents in Iowa.
Bradley, with his groundbreaking book exploring the rarely discussed aesthetics and poetics of Hip Hop’s lyrics, builds upon a tradition started by such works as H Samy Alim’s Roc the Mic Right, Jeff Chang’s Total Chaos and William Jelani Cobb’s To the Break of Dawn: a Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. You could even say the true pioneer of lyrical analysis was an emcee himself as Kool Moe Dee from the Treacherous 3 used to include rap report cards in the liner notes of his albums. Up until the previously mentioned works, almost all books on Hip Hop focused primarily upon socio-economic stances on Hip Hop. The typical argument for Hip Hop’s inception was poor youth in post-industrial New York City were abandoned by the lawmakers and politicians, in turn lashed back by creating something beautiful out of nothing. Subway cars became canvases for graffiti writers, discarded linoleum and cardboard became spinning material for the B-boys and B-Girls, parents’ old record players became instruments, and gang warfare disappeared and turned into dance competitions. All very true to one degree or another, yet still a bit romanticized and oversimplified. These arguments fail to acknowledge the battle for aesthetics and flare embodied in the words coining Tracy 168’s crew Wild Style, the pure pleasure in crafting letters (graffiti writers) or physical distortions (b-boys/b-girls) or words (emcees) together in a way never imagined before— the celebration of one’s youth, and influence of longstanding traditions such as the Blues, toasting, playing the dozens, Capoeira, and showing and proving within 5 Percenter ciphers. Bradley takes us on an epic journey of these in the linguistic realm as they relate to the core element of emceeing.
Fans of Hip Hop, particularly the ever rising and influential online Blogger community, all like to argue about who is the greatest emcee of all time, the so called “dead or alive” debate. A quick Google search will provide you with countless top 10 greatest emcee lists. Sometimes it’s a little more specific: Top 10 female emcees, white emcees, contemporary emcees, emcees. As long as there is an audience, people will state their claims. As a matter of fact, Internet fans are presently engaged in heated exchanges in regards to Slaughterhouse emcee Joe Budden’s recent comments about a Vibe magazine top 50 emcee list. The reality is nobody will ever agree because it’s arbitrary to a certain degree. To begin with, as individuals we all have particular tastes. Same reason you don’t see everyone driving around in the same car listening to the same Sirius satellite station. Another problem is the whole concept of “dopest emcee” is shrouded in vagueness. What makes a particular rapper “the dopest”? Is it their charisma, their stage presence, their style, use of metaphors, lasting power, influence, album sales, or something else less tangible? What Bradley does for us in Book of Rhymes is to provide us with a brilliant working definition of what it takes for an emcee to be “dope”, accomplishing this by qualifying the particular attributes that makes a particular emcee great at their craft. He serves to equip the reader and Hip Hop fan with the tools and vocabulary to analyze the linguistic skills of our favorite rappers. In essence, he prepares all of us fans of both Hip Hop and never-ending debates for our next barbershop quarrel over who’s the iller emcee: Jay-Z, Biggie, or Nas? Bradley supplies us with the tools which enable us to critically dissect an emcee’s rhythm, poetry, aesthetics, style, and significance so that we can ourselves wax poetic, in turn prevailing victorious, in our next great Hip Hop debate.
The first three chapters discuss the concrete aesthetic components of the emcees spoken word: rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay. In so doing, Bradley eloquently describes the dual nature of Hip Hop’s rhythm as the core of the genre: The emcee gets to playfully enjoy the liberty of rhythmic freedom and diversity over the confinement of the deliberately structured rhythm of the beat. This freedom allows the emcee to explore various rhyme patterns and forms of wordplay, which Bradley analyzes in passionate detail.
The second half of the book focuses on the more abstract elements or event traditions. He convincingly argues the importance of style within Hip Hop, while at the same time painting a vivid portrait of what comprises it and what it takes to possess it. Bradley creatively segues from style into the rich cultural traditions of storytelling and signifying. Obviously not afraid of paying his dues in terms of research, the author provides countless precursors, from around the globe, to these customs as they relate to Hip Hop, in turn confirming the idea that Hip Hop really is just a brilliant modern day continuation and extension of past forms and traditions. Hip Hop really is the by-product of the creative youth of the past thirty-five years who continually borrow various elements of the past, deftly recontextualizing and weaving them together, and spitting them back out with contemporary flavor. You could call it a “Greatest Hits” of past literary and sonic ventures, resulting in the vibrant collage we know as Hip Hop.
To give you a glimpse of the scope of Book of Rhymes, we can view his treatment of a Big Punisher phrase as a microcosm for the analysis Bradley continually provides throughout the course of the book. Big Punisher released his debut album Capital Punishment in 1999. On the track “Twinz (Deep Cover ’98)”, Pun proceeds to rhyme, “Dead in the middle of Little Italy/Little did we know we riddled a middleman who didn’t know diddily.” Over the course of the past decade, that line has come up time and time again over many late night arguments between Hip Hop heads as “the illest rhyme of all time”. I’ve been present at several of these debates, yet whenever anyone questions what makes that line more impressive than, say for example, Lil Wayne’s lyrics (also explored in depth by Bradley) off 2008’s “Lollipop Remix”, “Safe sex is great sex, better wear a latex/Cause you don’t want that late text/That ‘I think I’m late, Tex”, everyone becomes silent. The problem is in the past nobody has been equipped with the vocabulary and the tools to explain why he or she loves a certain verse so much. Bradley proficiently illustrates that the pleasure we indulge ourselves in by listening to Big Pun’s poetics is created by his concise juxtaposition of rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and consonance all in the span of 19 words. And the next time I get into one of these heated discussions, you can be sure I’ll be well prepared to argue Lil Wayne’s clever use of homophones as the reason why I find myself wearing out my rewind button on his playful wordplay in “Lollipop Remix”.
The previous example is an illustration of the beauty of Book of Rhymes. He has created a space where both Bradley the fan and Bradley the intellect can simultaneously shine. He dissects lyrical selections which effortlessly validate his own credibility within the Hip Hop community while at the same time providing brilliant analysis that doesn’t get weighed down in vague academic jargon. As a result, Bradley has produced the rare Hip Hop work that will appeal to everyone from the PhD candidate at Yale University who cherishes what Lupe Fiasco’s “Dumb It Down” to the Harlem bred 16 year old who still adores Big L’s “Ebonics”.
Nicholas Conway is an adjunct professor, teaching Hip Hop Music and Culture at Trinity College, Yale University And SUNY-Albany. He is currently authoring a textbook on Hip Hop and freelances for Deft magazine as well as Albany’s The Time Union, UndergroundHipHop.com and also serves as a guest lecturer on hip hop.
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