Learning to Rap

This month’s dare is to enter a freestyle rap competition. If you ever watched Eminem’s 8 Mile, that’s what I’m talking about. Personally, my exposure to rap has thus far consisted of dancing to Rob Base in Junior High, and having Biz Markie’s Just a Friend as my ring tone (the part that goes “Hey baby you, you got what I need, and you say he’s just a friend …”) When Dan proposed this dare last December, I figured, why not. Well, famous last words.

As I finally sat down this month to think about what I have committed myself to doing, I realized that I’m way over my head. First of all, I haven’t even the slightest clue on how to rap, let alone making up songs on the fly. The month is half over, and I’d better come up with a plan. As a first step, I ordered How to Rap and The Complete Rhyming Dictionary on Amazon. Yeah, I can’t rhyme either. Well, I can do things like “cat” and “bat” and “hit” and “pit” in a pinch, simple baby stuff. But definitely not like Paul Barman’s “will amazon com be here grandma’s gone mom?”

While waiting for the books, I figured I’d try to develop some intuition by listening to some rap and sing along.  Dan recommended listening to some Big Daddy Kane, since it’s 80s rap and probably a little less sophisticated. I found a song called Ain’t No Half Steppin. As I hit play, I was stunned by how fast the rapper talked and as a non-native speaker, I can’t even read fast enough, let alone sing it. As I tried to furiously spit out the lyrics, Dan was doubled over on the couch. When he could catch his breath, he said,

“When I was listening to this song as a 12 year old boy, I never would have guessed that some day my 38 year old Chinese wife would be singing it back to me.”

You can imagined my relief when the books finally arrived. I cracked open How to Rap. The first three chapters were mostly background and quotes from famous rappers. I needed the how-to, the nitty gritties, not inspiration at this point. Finally in chapter four titled Flow, we started getting down to business. Apparently, most rap consists of a repeating loop of 4 beats. 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. In each beat, you might be able to get one or a few words out, depending on how many syllables the words have. The reason I was having so much trouble sounding like I was rapping, rather than just reading something very fast, was that I wasn’t emphasizing the right beat. You are supposed to emphasize the syllable that falls onto each beat. This is probably old news for most of you but I never figured this out on my own. After I finished that chapter, I figured I’d go back and try to do the sing along again, but to make it easier on myself, I will first mark the syllables that are been stressed.

I picked a much slower song, Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio. I paused the music after each line and marked the stress syllables. I also arranged the line breaks so that it goes four beats per line. For example, here is the first verse of the song:

As I
walk through the valley of the shadow of death I take a
look at my life and realize there’s nothin’ left Cause
I‘ve been blasting and laughing so long, That
even my mama thinks that my mind is gone But I ain’t
never crossed a man that didn’t deserve it. Me be
treated like a punk you know that’s unheard of. You
better watch how you’re talking and where you’re walking. Or
you and your homies might be lined in chalk. I
really hate to trip but I gotta loc. As they croak, I
see myself in the pistol smoke, fool I’m the
kinda G the little homies wanna be like. On my
knees in the night saying prayers in the streetlight

After about 2 hours of reading and 2 hours of dissecting this song and a couple of run throughs, here is where I’m at.

As bad as this is, it’s miles better than the first time I tried to sing Big Daddy Kane’s song. I aim to do 3 more 2-hour study sessions and get ready for prime time. It’s going to be ugly…

BTW, here is a quick update on the September dare, which was to write a book.  Well, I had dared myself to do that one because there was a month with no dares, I figured I as well put in something I was going to do anyways.  My original plan was to bang out the first draft of a book named How Do You Know It’s Time to Quit Your Job.  Long story short, I’m now working on a free online course on career design instead, ETA is next May.  I will put up a link when that’s done.