Rap and the Elements of Music
In my previous post I said that I would go back and link different pop genres back to the elements of music. I’ve decided to actually do that, and I’m starting with rap. I should preface by saying that I am a fan of rap and hip-hop but I am classically educated and also very extraordinarily white. I will be trying to take an educated view only of the elements of music used in rap, rather than social or political implications. There are a lot of great resources around that already. I highly recommend looking around for a more educated view on politics and society in rap. I will link any good articles in comments (or here with editing).
Rap uses a variety of tone colours in both its instrumentation and in the voices of rappers. A list of these colours with (hopefully clean-ish) examples include:
Raspy/Flowing – Juice WRLD’s vocals in Lucid Dreams (listening especially to his open vowels for raspiness)
Sharp/Pointed/Clean – Kendrick Lamar’s vocals in DNA (listen to how he articulates his words so quickly and cleanly)
Piercing/Heavy/Messy – Kanye West’s production in Runaway (listen to the piano piercing above the heavy bass line and Kanye’s layered vocals in the chorus, layered imperfectly so as to create a messy tone)
Big/Bulbous/Strained – Childish Gambino’s production in Redbone (the production on makes it sound really pear-shaped (bulbous) and hugely funky in general, Gambino’s vocals (in a super high falsetto) create a strained tone (also listen out for glockenspiel in the backing instruments!))
I often find that once students get a few examples of identifying and naming timbres they can really run away with it. Be careful that, in senior years, students do not incorrectly identify character as timbre. They are similar and intrinsically linked but not the same.
Rap draws a lot of influence from black music of the recent past and draws on instrumentation similar to that in jazz and blues, but with a greater level of production. These instruments often include, but are not limited to:
Lead Vocals and Backing or Featuring Vocalists
A rhythm section with: Bass Guitar (sometimes Slap Bass) or Synth Bass, Drum Kit or Drum Machine (popularly using 808 sounds), Clean Piano
Countermelodies provided by: Synthesizers or less frequently Electric Guitars
Sound FX are often included and can include engine sounds, gun shots, vocal samples, all adding to the character of the piece
Production in general plays a huge role in rap. If your students are advanced enough, talk about choice of synth waves/drum samples/EQ choices (low-pass/high-cut is used a lot)
There are clear analogues between rap and other popular genres such as rock or pop and pop music is especially starting to blur into hip-hop so you could encourage exploration from that point. Keep in mind to try and choose artists who aren’t appropriating culture for the sake of tapping into the rap and hip-hop market.
Rap uses a modified verse-chorus form – again, leading the way for exploration into other popular genres. Some features of the form are:
Verse (A sequence of lyrics/bars rapped by the title artist/s)
Hook/Chorus (A repeated line sung often by a featuring or uncredited vocalist or appearing as a sample)
Feature Verse (A verse rapped by an artist not credited with the creation of the song)
You can find nearly any other feature of regular verse-chorus form in rap, but those are some of the standout features.
Rhythms in rap are one of the most important features and help to both define the genre, and differentiate the sub-genres. The clearest example is triplet rhythms in mumble-rap but there are a lot of facets that go into a rap piece’s rhythm.
Flow: Flow is the idea of where accents land within a rhyme scheme. Too simple a flow and it sounds childish (my name is Alex and I’m here to say, I really like school in a major way!) Too complex (or too poorly thought through) and listeners will lose the pulse of the music or won’t be able to tell how the rhyme scheme is meant to fit into the rhythm. 2Chainz is often cited as having “bad flow.” Word setting (where words land in the sentence and on the beat) is seen as less important than flow, sentences can run over bar lines and phrases. See this Vox video for more information. Flow is an ever-changing topic, but getting your head around an understanding is necessary for teaching rap elements to rap fans.
Ostinato: Despite rhythms being in flux in rap, the underlying “beat” (which can refer to all instruments in the rhythm section, not just drums) tends to stay very similar. If it does change, it is given time to establish itself. Listen to Armadillo by Balming Tiger and notice that in each verse (including the “chorus” verses) the beat stays the same with different sound effects and then the bridges [Lyrics: “wit’ me, VIP” etc. and then “call me mystery kanji” etc.] also have the same beat, different to the verses (hence – a bridge) but the same across the two of them.
Syncopation: Another link back to black music in the recent past, rappers use syncopation heavily in both their beats and their flow. This is less obvious than just starting a phrase off beat (although that does happen) especially because flow demands that words are almost constantly coming out of a rappers mouth. Listen for syncopation in the accents of words, where new rhyme schemes start, where words are given more time (duration) for emphasis. Use this to teach rhythms that are more technically challenging in notation (dotted quaver, semiquaver or the reverse (scotch snap) are used fairly often in rap).
Rap melody isn’t often talked about in the classroom as rap is often seen as monotonous flow of consciousness kind of music but it’s obviously not. No two rappers are the same and even the more “monotonous” rappers have to differentiate their melody (whether it be through pitch or rhythm) to keep the listener interested. Here are two examples focusing on one rapper:
Q-Tip’s feature on Mark Ronson’s “Bang Bang Bang” is largely fairly monotonous, still, he legitimises by finishing his phrases cadentially moving downwards (sometimes up then down) and altering his rhythms slightly.
Q-Tip on his own group’s (A Tribe Called Quest) song “Can I Kick It” has a huge range, a theme which is continued by Phife Dawg in the second verse.
Melody is clearly a necessity, it’s just a lot more subtle in rap.
There’s no conclusion to this post. Do I need to add anything/other elements? (He asks to the no people who are going to read this). Is there a style of music that you’d like me to cover? (Western music only sorry!) Let me know
