The Musical Artistry of Rap

266 Pages·2017·2.44 MB·English

by  Martin E. Connor

The Musical Artistry of Rap
Martin E. Connor
Foreword by Kyle Adams
Afterword by Ilan Zechory
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
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e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3043-4
© 2018 Martin Connor. All rights reserved No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover images © 2018 apartment/jepard/iStock McFarland & Company,
Inc., Publishers
  Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
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To everyone, everywhere,
for everything they ever did for me
Acknowledgments
To Kanye, Sheila, Bill, Will, Joe, Molly, Harry, Kate, Satori, Jean, Karen,
Kate, Sally, John, Jack, Stacy, Bette, Justin, Kyle, CJ, Sohaib, Will, Dan,
Kevin, Jim, Matt, Guthrie, Harry, Yu-Hui, Danya, Tom, Matt, Allan,
Kevin, Bo, Meg, Erin, Terry, PJ, Dan, Tom, Pat, Ann, Anthony, Shah, Liz,
Anthony, Mikhail, Chris, Adam, Diran, Jean, Sabrina, Akash, Talib, Jon,
Chris, Tupac, Marshall, Harry (again!), Karen, Tim, Rivers, Franklin, Liam,
Lauryn, Wyclef, Prakazrel, Cedric, Omar, Tariq, Calvin, Reuben, Katrina,
Justin, Omar, Corey, Dennis, Robert, Tony, Harry, Austin, Niko, Marvel,
LE, Elsa, Claude, Samuel, Johann Sebastian, George, John, Paul, Rose
Marie, Dewey, Richard, Eric, Karen, Bertrand, Arvo, Nasir, Kendrick,
André, Trevor, Wayne, Jayceon, Curtis, Andre, Yasiin, God, and Adam:
thank you!
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Kyle Adams
Introduction
1. Rhythm
2. Melody
3. Motivic Development
4. Structure and Performance Practice
5. Texture and Orchestration
6. Instrumentalism
7. Masters of the Form
Epilogue
Afterword by Ilan Zechory
Appendix: Songs Analyzed
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
List of Names and Terms
Foreword
by Kyle Adams
In the past fifteen years, scholarship on rap music has grown exponentially.
Musicologists, music theorists, ethnomusicologists, and scholars from a variety
of non-musical disciplines have all found rap to be fertile ground for research.
This is hardly surprising; rap is one of the few truly new art forms to have
emerged in the past half-century, and attempting to understand its musical
structure is exciting, challenging, and rewarding for the generation of scholars
who grew up listening to it.
Martin Connor is one such scholar, and his work promises to address the
challenges of hip-hop analysis head on. His enthusiasm for the music is limitless,
and he clearly knows a wide variety of songs from different artists and different
time periods. Moreover, his work celebrates the differences inherent in rappers’
approaches: Connor’s goal in analyzing rap music is not to smooth out stylistic
differences but to explore them; to dig deep and understand how and why
rappers craft their unique sounds.
Along the way, Connor has hit upon a unique approach to the vexing problem of
rap transcription. In his view, transcription serves to archive rap performances,
not necessarily to make them reproducible. While his system of noctuplet
notation might at first seem a bit cumbersome to read, it nevertheless proves to
be an effective way to transmit and compare the nuances of hip-hop rhythm and
articulation. His idiosyncratic system allows him to highlight rhythmic
correspondences and differences between individual verses and individual artists
in novel and thought-provoking ways.
The Musical Artistry of Rap offers a multi-faceted look at hip-hop music.
Connor explores rap many angles, discussing rhythm (naturally), melody,
motive, articulation, and more. He also does not shy away from experimenting
with all sorts of different methodologies. He has assimilated and drawn from
much of the existing scholarship on rap, and thus approaches rap music from a
number of analytical perspectives, each time explaining why he feels a given
approach is relevant for a given topic and demonstrating what sorts of analytical
conclusions he feels are possible.
This book was written with a deep love and respect for rap music. I imagine that
those who share this love and respect—music theorists, scholars, even rappers
and producers—will approach it just as eagerly as I did.
Kyle Adams (Ph.D. CUNY) is a professor at the Jacobs School of Music,
Indiana University Bloomington, and chair of the Department of Music
Theory. His research is on 16th century and hip-hop music. His “On the
Metrical Techniques of Flow in Rap Music” (Music Theory Online, 2009)
is frequently cited.
Introduction
This musicological study is a wide-ranging, corpus-based empirical survey of
135 individual songs by 56 different rap artists, using compiled music
transcriptions, that analyzes these performers’ oeuvres with a diverse array of
pre-existing analytical techniques, applied by musicologists for the
understanding of other musics for centuries.1 In this way, it builds the empirical
argument that the modern rapping idiom, when considered as a vocal genre,
constitutes a highly-developed synthesis of radically complicated rhythms,
intonational systems, motivic developments, song structures, performance
practices, textures, orchestrations, and instrumentalism.2 These adjectives are not
meant as affirmative or positive value judgments of the worth of rap, but only as
comparisons by which rap can be better understood within a wider context of all
vocalizing styles, such as the singing style of common practice period classical
music, or the sprechstimme of Arnold Schoenberg. The final chapter is a
capstone on those first six chapters that summarizes the earlier discussion by
assembling the previous quantitative pieces of evidence into broad, qualitative
takeaways about the individual oeuvres of critically-acclaimed and popularly-
acclaimed rappers, such as Kanye West.
As a result, it is a direct response to the wonderful body of work supplied by Dr.
Kyle Adams, currently of Indiana University. While Dr. Adams posits Adam
Krims as the rap analyzer pioneer in his own 2016 article “The musical analysis
of hip-hop,”3 this author would, in turn, assign that position to the adjudicator
himself. Since it is of a kind with much of the work to come in the ensuing
chapters, Dr. Adams’ nuanced, bottom-up empirical approach has been more
fruitful for the generation of my own work, rather than Krims’ top-down,
taxonomic approach. I am also greatly indebted into the motivation and
inspiration I have received from my readings of and interactions with Dr.
Guthrie Ramsey, one of the few other scholars who has approached the music of
rap with the same level of appreciation, understanding, and enthusiasm as Dr.
Adams.
Besides Adams’ own parsing of rap studies into categories “Krims” and “other,”
I would posit my own dichotomy, dividing rap studies into the “novel” and the
“traditional.” The novel category of rap studies generates new methods of
analysis for understanding rap musicologically, creating new techniques and
approaches with each subsequent article or book. Studies within this category
include much of Krims’ 2000 title “Rap music and the poetics of identity,”
where the author relies on a subgeneric, qualitative taxonomy for rap melodies,
in the manner of creatio ex nihilo. Another example is the utilization of
statistical and linguistic methodologies for the analysis of flow in Kendrick
Lamar’s 2015 track “Momma” by Dr. Mitchell Ohriner, conducted in a 2016
presentation to the Society of Music Theory Pop Music Interest Group.
Traditional rap studies, however, attempt to apply the same methodologies that
musicologists have used for centuries to understand music, such as rhythmic
transcription, instrumental classification, and even voice-leading graphs. Studies
in the latter category includes Adams’ own 2008 article, “On the Metrical
Techniques of Flow in Rap Music,” as well as the excellent work of Paul
Edwards’ and his transcribed diagrams from studies like 2009’s “How to Rap.”
Within this category, this present work at hand can also be found. As a result,
traditional technical terms and phraseology as diverse as passagio, tessitura,
triplet, augmentation, diminution, polyrhythm, additive rhythm, metric
modulation, homophony, cover, remix, standard, rondo, freestyle, and more can
all be found in the pages to come. Thus, the general hypothesis I herein attempt
to falsify or verify through specific proof is that the nature of rap contains a
minimum of dissimilarity to previous musics, and a maximum of similarity.
This posited dichotomy reveals that the epistemological point from which all
musicological studies on rap depart is an assumption that rap is either
fundamentally similar to previous musics, or that rap is fundamentally unlike
previous musics. Because he summarizes the competing modes of historical
thinking that led to this clash, and because his eloquently-stated aims dovetail so
well with my own, the 2016 article by Dr. Mitchell Ohriner, “Metric Ambiguity
and Flow in Rap Music,” may now be quoted at length:
… [W]hen music theorists first began publishing studies of popular music,
scholars from other disciplines … took issue with music theory’s primary
focus on structures of melody and harmony (McClary & Walser, 1990;
Shepherd, 1991; Covach, 1999)…. [I]mporting methods of analysis
designed for older genres, music theorists allegedly both missed the point of
the music and furthered colonialist agendas (Middleton, 1990, p. 105; Frith,
1987, p. 145)…. Even at that time music theory was not as myopic as its
detractors maintained…. Because scholars … have addressed the digital