3.1.5 Rhythm and Rap music and verse form

Rap and Rhythm

The introduction in the 70's of Rap popular music and its adoption of a strong-stress metre from Old English is a form of music based on rhythm and not melody. The phrase of this line: "As if blind" separated by a comma from ["he" understood] "cleaves the stream's push" creates a pause and an accompaniment is designed to stress the metrical structure of the verse. It has lines with four stressed beats with two stresses in the first half and two stresses in the second half of each line. The stressed beats may be separated by other syllables varying in number and could include other stressed syllables which would be secondary. This kind of rhythm has been imposed on the language and is not the result of normal stresses of spoken language (Attridge, 1995). Look at the following example from EMPD's "It's My Thing".

   /                /               /         /
They mean business, no time for play
   /                    /              /             /
If you bite a line, they blow you away
          /             /              /           /
The more you bite, your body gets hot
   /        /         /                        /              /
Don't get too cold because you might get shot
     /                   /                /            /
Knowin' that my rhyme's like a poisonous rat
  /              /                       /               /
Don't play dumb boy, you're smarter than that
             /
It's my thing

(In Poetic Rhythm and introduction (1995). D. Attridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)

Note how the lines are actually written in couplets which seal off a meaning and the last line acts as a refrain.