One Problem with Reading Rap Lyrics without Listening to the Music
This is something I’ve been meaning to write for like six years now, but I never got around to it till now. Ages ago, some dude over at New York Magazine wrote an article reviewing Yale’s Anthology of Rap. Notably, he read it all without ever having heard any of the songs, and didn’t listen to any until after he’d read the whole book.
Probably everyone who’s listened to music, rap or otherwise, would realize beforehand that this guy reading rap lyrics without listening to the music would produce incongruous results (as it did): him liking certain songs after simply reading the lyrics and disregarding others, and then changing his mind entirely after actually hearing them. There are a couple obvious reasons why this is: The music adds something that can’t be described by words, the performance of the rapper is different from the reading voice in one’s head, etc. But even apart from that I knew this was going to be problematic for a reason that I haven’t seen mentioned: Our writing system is inadequate.
Even though a lot of poetry is meant to be read aloud, much of it that’s studied in the Western canon was written at a time when writing existed, so the writers were quite conscious of the fact that their poetry would be read on the page (even if their work was private, it’s not like Emily Dickinson was about to go out and do live poetry readings), which can be a bit constraining. Lots of poets have done some pretty awesome things with the space on the page (see this one by Roger McGough), but the writer knows that most people are going to see it, rather than hear it.
Music is the opposite. Certainly not all, but a good number of music artists are imagining people listening to their music exclusively, not reading books of their lyrics—and certainly not in the order lyrics then music. The sound is primary, meaning that how these things look on a page is immaterial.
This causes two problems for someone reading lyrics without music: (1) there’s no official way to transcribe lyrics (the more complex the song, the more problematic writing the lyrics down becomes); and (2) in the other direction, writing is one dimensional (ignoring time), whereas music is two dimensional.
When you’re reading a book or a poem (doesn’t matter what), they’re going to references or allusions to other stuff, whether it’s “high art” literary references, or pop culture references. Those references will be in the text though (the words on the page), otherwise they’re not there (how could they be?). Lyrics can do the same thing in a song, but so can the music. Simple example is the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”, which starts out with the trumpets playing the opening bars of “La Marseillaise” (also finishes up with a short reference to “She Loves You”, but that you could, theoretically, pick up from the lyrics). The trumpet part is purely instrumental, so how are lyrics going to catch that? They’re not.
Now let’s move to rap, where things just explode. I’m going to focus on one of my favorite Tupac songs “Keep Ya Head Up”. (Brief note that Tupac, who died 20 years ago this September, was a controversial figure; Wikipedia article on him is here.) The very moment this song starts there’s a musical reference that’s lost since it has nothing to do with the lyrics. The song samples Zapp’s “Be Alright”, which is thematically appropriate. The lyrics aren’t as complex as “Keep Ya Head Up”, but the idea is that at least some people hearing Tupac’s song will know “Be Alright” and will remember the lyrics, which will kind of set the tone. This is reinforced by using the verse of the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child” as the chorus. If you know the original song, the song that samples it becomes fuller, as you get the full context. You might recognize it if the lyrics were written down, but you have to hear it to realize it’s a direct reference to the song.
And that’s just the musical samples. Going back to the first problem, here’s a section of “Keep Ya Head Up” with all the words simply written down:
I remember Marvin Gaye used to sing to me. He had me feeling like black was the thing to be.
That’s one way of writing it down. Here’s probably how it’d be written down as a traditional poetic stanza:
I remember Marvin Gaye
Used to sing to me,
He had me feeling like black
Was the thing to be.
Neither of those written transcriptions tells you how the lyrics are rapped, though. Because something that Tupac does in this song (and others) is he develops mini rhyme/metrical schemes. He does it by doing one line in a particular way, and then following it up with another line where some of the lyrics are done in exactly the same way. We have no way to convey that in writing; no convention. Here’s one way you might do it:
I remember Marvin Gaye
Used to sing to me
He had me feeling like black was the thing to be.
That gives you a much better idea of what the lyrics actually sound like when you hear them. In fact, you could even go further and do this:
I remember MAR-vin GAYE
Used to SING to ME
He had me feeling like black was the THING to BE.
Only thing that’d be missing is a light emphasis on “black”, but not as heavy as the end of the lines. You can hear these lines specifically here and see if this conveys the sound of it a little better.
But like I said, it’s not like you can isolate one pattern and figure it’ll be the same for the rest of the song. Here’s another sample from the beginning:
And if he tells you you ain’t nothing, don’t be-LIEVE ‘im.
And if he can’t learn to love you, you should LEAVE ‘im.
You can hear it here. Probably one of the more recognizable bits is this one a few lines later:
And since we all CAME from a woman,
Got our NAME from a woman,
And our GAME from a…woman,
I wonder why we TAKE from our women,
Why we RAPE our women,
Do we HATE our…women?
I think it’s time to KILL for our women,
Time to HEAL our women,
Be REAL to our women.
You can hear this section here. Something also lost in the orthography is that Tupac’s pronunciation of “kill” makes it a perfect rhyme with “heal” and “real”. (Also, for that second stanza, I hope the linguists reading this post appreciate the near rhymes with each of English’s voiceless stops!)
The idea is to show with the bolding and all-caps that something is happening with the lyrics that is different from the usual way the words are read/rapped/sung. It’s also important to know that if these bolded phrases are units, they all have the same weight, regardless of syllable count. Notice the first three above are all five syllables, but three of the next six are four syllables. It might not work in a poem that’s read silently, but it works perfectly in the song (the listener never questions it—or even necessarily notices it), so a reader needs to know that.
The point is that the written word can give you the lyrics verbatim—and extra reference material can tell you who Marvin Gaye is, if you don’t know, and why he might be mentioned in the song; it can give you the full history of Tupac Shakur; it can even list the songs that are sampled and give you their full lyrics. But our writing system really doesn’t handle prosody well. It doesn’t capture intonational well. Punctuation approximates it kind of okay, if you assume standard conversational speech is being transcribed, but singing? Performance? It’s simply not equal to the task. True, I gave it a go here, but remember: Someone can invent a system using roman characters or whatever else, but it doesn’t mean anything if no reader knows what it’s supposed to be encoding. There’s no surefire method of conveying the intonation and pacing of a phrase.
Of course, the cool thing about living in the 21st century is there’s no reason on Earth any student should be studying rap lyrics without actually listening to the song. And unless society collapses, I imagine it will only get easier to integrate media as technology improves. So I really don’t think there’s any danger of someone teaching rap lyrics from a book to students in a bubble. But if you’ve ever wondered why if you look at the lyrics to a song they seem simplistic, or weird, or sometimes even silly, this is why. A full transcription of the lyrics is not the same as the performance because we developed our writing systems to encode the meaning of our speech, rather than the full character of the speech itself.
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