Aspects of the Music/Text Relationship in Rap

Volume 14, Number 2, May 2008Copyright © 2008 Society for Music TheoryKyle Adams*Aspects of the Music/Text Relationship in RapGet the free QuickTime plug-in to hear the audio examples.KEYWORDS: rap, hip-hop, OutKast, A Tribe Called QuestABSTRACT: Few scholars of rap music have analyzed rap as they would other forms of Western texted music, by examining the relationship of the music to the text. This article will suggest that this type of analysis of rap is possible, but will argue that since the music in rap is composed before the text is written, we must change our analytical focus to examine not how the music supports the text, but how the text supports the music. I will propose a new analytical method for rap, and use excerpts from A Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, and artists affiliated with them, to show how rappers incorporate rhythms, groupings, and motives from the underlying music into the rhythm of the lyrics.Received November 2007Introduction(1)[1] One of the most common approaches to the analysis of music with text is to examine the relationship of the music to the text. Music theorists routinely engage in this sort of analysis, often examining the text for its poetic meaning and its rhythmic scansion, examining the music for specific elements that support key words or phrases, and presenting a comprehensive analysis that shows how the composer integrates text and music. It is surprising, then, that almost no one has attempted this sort of analysis of a rap song.(2) While there have been several excellent musicological and sociological studies of rap, virtually no one has analyzed rap music in the same way that one would analyze, for example, Schubert Lieder. This is especially striking since so many studies of rap focus on its lyrics, usually citing their often violent and misogynistic content. This article will address this problem by suggesting an approach to analyzing rap that begins by inverting the traditional text/music relationship into a music/text relationship. In other words, I will argue that the best way to analyze many rap songs is to examine not how the music supports the text, but how the text supports the music.[2] There are several possible reasons why scholars have not pursued the relationship between text and music in rap. First, many still hesitate to accept rap music as a valid art form, and even those who readily accept it are not necessarily interested in analyzing it. Second, Western music theory has traditionally been pitch-centered; and, since the pitch content of rap is usually secondary to the rhythmic content, a pitch-centered approach might not yield very useful results. Even more significantly, the accompaniment in rap music typically consists of a single 2- to 4-bar segment that repeats continuously throughout the song. This repetitive accompaniment makes all but the most rudimentary text-painting quite difficult; text-painting in rap has traditionally been limited to the choice of music with the same affect as the text (such as the minor-mode accompaniment to Slick Rick's dark "Children's Story"), or the use of sampled sounds (such as gunshots) alongside descriptions of those sounds in the lyrics.[3] But perhaps the most important reason for the lack of text/music analyses has to do with the meaning, or rather lack of meaning, of many of the texts. The mid-1980's saw a move away from the original topics of rap lyrics-bragging about one's skills, money, or sexual prowess, or disparaging other rappers-and a move towards lyrics of increasing complexity, abstraction, and metaphor. These types of lyrics are found most prominently in the work of the Native Tongues Posse, a loose collective of rappers and groups(3) united by shared ideas, including Afrocentrism, positivity, and rejection of the materialism, shallowness, and violence that had come to dominate much rap music of the day. …