Flow, Metric Complexity, and Text in Eminem

Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers) has attracted much scholarly and media attention for his abilities as a rhymer as well as the controversial content of his lyrics and his possible cultural appropriation. This chapter fills a gap in Eminem scholarship by examining his use of the vocal groove classes described in Chapter 4. Specifically, it shows how Eminem sequences vocal grooves in a way that creates rhythmic narratives of accruing metric complexity (i.e., the proportion of accented syllables not aligned with the beat or a beat’s midpoint). These rhythmic narratives often support and even foreshadow narrative events in lyrics. By documenting correlations between Eminem’s lyrics and his rhythmic choices, the chapter shows a new way in which flow connects music to text. The chapter closes by reflexively considering the historically problematic relationship between the analysis of music complexity and Afro-diasporic music.

From Accent to Vocal Groove

This chapter presents a model of vocal groove in rap delivery, defined as reiterating patterns of durations between accents. It shares with recent theories of groove emphases on repetition, virtuality, and syncopation; in contrast, it departs from these by de-emphasizing human motion, microtiming, group interaction, and large time frames. The inter-accent durations of flow are understood to be 2 or 3 units long (i.e., “eighth notes” or “dotted eight notes”) and sum to one measure (i.e., 16 units), resulting in seven distinct “groove classes.” Because some listeners are permissive of slight alterations in accent placement, the model differentiates between adaptive listeners (who switch grooves whenever necessary) and persistent listeners (who try to maintain grooves). The chapter concludes with a segmentation method modeling these two kinds of listeners.

A Corpus for Rap Music Analysis

Over the course of his writing, Leonard B. Meyer distinguished between two kinds of music analysis: style analysis, which identifies the “rules of the game” operating in a collection of music, and critical analysis, which seeks to explain the choices of artists by identifying the range of possibilities they confront at each moment and interpreting the path they take. This chapter prepares for the critical analysis of flow in rap music by constructing a corpus of rap verses, taking care to document and maintain rap’s chronological, geographical, and stylistic diversity. The chapter also describes how primary constituents of flow (text, rhythm, and phrase) are digitally represented in the corpus.

Flow in Rap Music: Sources of Confusion and a Strategy for Clarity

Artists, fans, critics, and scholars define “flow” in rap music in a variety of ways. Among the disputes are the proper scope of flow and the musical features that comprise it. This chapter begins by examining several sources of confusion: the many meanings of flow in rap lyrics, the proffered equivalence of flow with the purely musical musical, and the debate as to whether a theory of flow ought to describe or prescribe expressive practice. The chapter then identifies which features constitute flow by examining instances where artists call out flow within their lyrics, specifically when they announce in the midst of a verse that the flow has “flipped” or changed. This result is a definition of flow that arises not from what scholars say flow is, but what artists do when they (flip the) flow.

Flow and Free Rhythm in Talib Kweli

Throughout his career, Talib Kweli has been called an “off-beat rapper.” Despite that highly derogatory comment, this chapter connects Kweli’s non-alignment with the underlying beat to earlier Afro-diasporic rhythmic practices. Kweli’s voice moves away from the beat through four distinct processes: phase shifting, swinging, tempo shifting, and deceleration. The last of these, while a hallmark of the rhythm of speech, has little relationship to the rhythm of music with a mechanically regulated beat. By documenting the non-alignment between flow and beat in a particular track (“Get By”), the chapter shows the novel way in which Kweli inserts rupture into the flows of his verses, extending the aesthetic values of hip hop into the rhythms of his flow itself.

Flow, Groove, and Beat in Black Thought

Previous analyses of and discourse on the relationship between flow and beat (i.e., the instrumental streams of a rap track) have mapped musical meaning flowing directionally from the beat to the flow. This chapter documents a wider range of relationships between flow and beat in the rapping of Black Thought, including flows that diverge from rather than converge with beats, and flows that converge with beats but with a conceptual or temporal distance. Since Black Thought performs with a live band (The Roots), the chapter also considers how changes to the beat in live performance affect the groove of his flow. As rap music presents an ontology far different from European classical music, one in which creative agencies multiply and authority frequently shifts, this chapter sketches an analytical method for a host of musics that do not exhibit the work concept of the classical score.

From Rhythm to Accent, from Sound to Rhyme

The model of flow presented in Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music attends carefully to accent and rhyme, yet neither term is easily defined. In the case of accent, the term refers to very different concepts in scholarship on the rhythm of speech and the rhythm of music. This chapter exposits theories from those domains before reconciling them in an accent discovery method calibrated for the rhythm of rap flows. Similarly, the chapter addresses cognitive challenges in representing rhyme, such as temporal boundaries and phonetic similarity.

Features of Flow in the Genre and the Artist

Following Leonard B. Meyer’s distinction between stylistic and critical analysis, the first part of this chapter undertakes a stylistic analysis of flow in rap music, drawing on the models of accent, rhyme, groove, and groovy listening presented in Chapters 3 and 4 to characterize flow in the genre as a whole, as evidenced by the corpus constructed in Chapter 2. Features of flow discussed include speed, tempo, phrasing, rhyme patterning, groove class usage, adherence to groove classes, and groove typicality. The second part of the chapter pivots to critical analysis, examining the meanings of virtuosic flow in the rapping of the emcee Black Thought of The Roots (aka Tariq Trotter). By contextualizing Black Thought within the genre, the chapter shows his flow to be a combination of complexity and comprehensibility.