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So if you’ve been alive recently, you know that Kendrick Lamar just released his much-anticipated good kid, m.A.A.d. city album. Overall I really, really liked the album, the album of the year I think. However, this is not yet another GKMC review. Instead, I want to take a look only at Kendrick’s rap, not the beats of his songs. When I say rap, I mean the words and rhythms that Kendrick speaks, and how they interact together. In this article, I want to answer an important question: what makes Kendrick so unique musically, and why is he at the forefront of where rap will go next?

In order to answer that question, we need to understand the 5 major ways there are to describe a rapper’s flow musically. When I say the word “flow”, it means the rhythmic structure that arises in a rap from the interaction between the rapper’s words and the strictly musical rhythms of those words. That is, the rapper’s words will always inform how we understand the rhythms of Kendrick’s raps.
In short, there are 5 major ways to musically describe a rapper’s flow:

1. The rate at which they drop rhymes
2. How they say their words and syllables, whether all rolled together or separated
3. The nature of their sentences — how long/short they are, where they fall in the music, how many of them there are, and so on
4. Whether they repeat certain rhythms, or keep making new rhythms as they go long
5. The nature of their rhymes – whether they are just one syllable long or multisyllabic, at the end of lines or the beginning of them, whether they always come in the same order, and so on

I will make summarizing remarks about Kendrick’s flow in general on the album, but examining more in-depth a song that seem designed to showcase Kendrick’s sick rap skills. The song is “Backseat Freestyle.” Also, as a disclaimer, this article will make use of notated sheet music, but I PROMISE even if you can’t read music, you will be able to understand it. Also wait for the video at the end of this article, which will walk you through a computer performance of Kendrick’s rhythms following along to the sheet music.

Let’s begin.

Kendrick starts the song with a 4-bar hook instead of a verse. It’s important to know what a bar is: a bar is simply a musical duration of time, just like an hour is a measure of chronological time. A bunch of bars together make a verse or hook, and the verses and hooks together make a song. The bars are represented in the music below by those vertical lines that separate the musical notes, such as between the word “a” and “dream”:

A bar is made up of 4 beats, which is what that fraction-looking like number at the left (4/4) means.
Now, Kendrick here fits his sentences organized completely by the bar, starting at the bar’s start and ending at the bars end, and fits short yet multisyllabic rhymes at the end of them. This is pretty standard for a hook; it makes it easy to remember and rap along to. In practice, it means that he organizes his sentences in the most natural way possible. As we shall see, this is actually out of the ordinary for him. Where his sentences end and start are represented by those curved lines underneath the musical notes, such as from “all” to “pow’r” in the music below. Take a look at the sheet music to see this:

In the first verse, though, Kendrick gets to why the hype was so crazy for him and this album. He starts off by pacing his rhymes: he doesn’t drop them all at once, because to come on so strong means any effect of a climax that should come at the end of the song (as all good musical pieces do) would be very weakened. So he starts off slow, rhyming “amazing” with “matrix.” However, he immediately jumps in: “My MIND is living on cloud NINE and this NINE is never on VACATION”, where vacation rhymes with “matrix” in the preceding line. (The capitalized words used in this article and on the sheet music itself represents rhymed words.) So, using the organizing principles described above, we can say the following: Kendrick here uses mostly few-syllables internal and external rhymes in different rhythmic positions in relation to the bar in relatively long sentences that are largely organized by the bar line. This is a very good general remark to make about Kendrick’s flow in general, but of course it is much more detailed than that.

Next, Kendrick gets to another hallmark of his style. Often, he fits a number of syllables other than 4 to a beat. Just as the bar is divided into 4 beats, each beat can be divided into 4 16th notes (called quadruplets), which is what happens in 4/4 music. However, that is not to say you can’t divide it in other ways, such as by fitting 5 sixteenth notes (“quintuplets”) or 6 sixteenth notes (“sextuplets”). It’s just not done very often because it’s so hard to pull off. This means that more notes are being fitted in the same amount of musical space, the beat, so they sound faster. As you can see from the sheet music here:

On the “And I pray”, he fits 3 sixteenth notes (“triplets”) where usually only 2 goes, such as for the words “lobby”, which are on 2 sixteenth notes. He does this again later on in the bar when he repeats “and I pray.” This is what that bracketed 3 means above the notes. Throughout the rest of the bar and this verse in general, Kendrick continues all of these tendencies we just described, such as using internal and end multisyllable rhymes. Also, he accents interesting words in the sentence (like the “-ping” of “popping”). He does this by placing them on the beat of the music, which means he puts it on a part of the music that gets emphasis. For instance, normally, you would accent the “POP-“ in the word “popping”, but Kendrick doesn’t do this. He accents “wrong” syllables a lot in this first verse, such as in the following:

You wouldn’t accent the “it” (“park it in front of Leuder’s), “to” (“Next to that Church’s Chicken”), and so on.

The third chorus is the most interesting, though, so we will skip there.

Here, Kendrick changes the end of the hook, previously “All my life I want money and POW’R / Respect my mind or die from LEAD SHOW’R”, to “All my life I want money and POW’R / Respect my mind or nigga it’s go TIME.” Notice how they are start off the same way, but end differently. The first line is the same, but this time the 2nd line ends on a different rhyme: a rhyme on “mind”, not “pow’r.” Simultaneously, we are reminded of what has come in the previous choruses, but also know it’s new with the new material in the 2nd line. This makes a flawless transition into the 3rd verse, where he continues his rhymes on that –i- vowel sound: “I roll in dough with a good GRIND…” and so on. In this way, the new ending is similar but different. We call this “elision” in music, where the end of one section of music is joined strongly to the start of the next one.
Notice also throughout the 3rd verse how Kendrick ups the musical tension by increasing the speed of his rhythms: you can see the triplets with the three above them, as well as 32nd notes (the word “mother” in the phrase “motherfucking Hit Boy beat” – the more lines, called beams, there are above a notehead means the shorter the note value is. The 16th notes have 2 beams, such as on the word “options”; the 32nd notes have 3 above them, which you can see here):

This is a very good idea to do, since we are at the end of the song, and typically musical pieces should reach their climax here, which can be reached by increasing musical tension as Kendrick does.

Here in the 3rd verse Kdot also increases the rate at which sentences come. We’ve been calling them “sentences”, but that isn’t really correct, because fragments (sentences with a noun but no verb) are also structural units unto themselves. For instance, when he says “Bee-otch” again and again, we hear those as separate from each other. You can see here:

That there are six fragments in a 2 bar space, as indicated by those curved lines (called “slurs” in music.) This increase in their pace raises the musical tension, a very good idea to do at the end of a song. He again elides the phrase by changing the rhyme “go play” during the 2nd “Bee-otches” to rhyme with “OJ” instead of repeating “go play” again, like he had the first time around. Again, we remember what has come before, and recognize the new material as related but different. This makes the whole verse very tightly knit and connected. And, like any good music-maker – producer, composer, whoever – he brings the tension down at the end of the song to resolve it. He shortens his multisyllabic rhymes to single-syllable ones, and increases the length of his sentences while making them fall within the bar with his final hook.

So, why should we all pay attention to what Kendrick’s doing musically?

His ability to seamlessly transition between different rhythmic levels, from quadruplets, to quintuplets, to sextuplets, to double-quadruplets, is on a level I have never seen before. I’ve seen these rhythms before, most predominantly in Busta Rhymes circa the “Genesis” album, Outkast’s albums circa “Aquemini”, and Eminem post-2001 until Relapse. But I’ve never seen anyone able to put it all together at once like Kendrick and move from one to the next almost effortlessly.

Also, his placement of rhymes and accents are very idiosyncratic – that is, unique to him. They are rather obtuse, not always coming at the end of rhymes, and not always coming as much as you think they should.

Finally, his innovations in conventional rap structural forms, like the freestyle, are things I’ve never seen before as well. This is the “elision” we were talking about it – the rhyming across verse structures is very new.

Below is a video following along to a performance of the notated sheet music of Kendrick’s “Backseat Freestyle” verse. Just follow along to the green line, which marks the notes that the computer is following. The rhythms of Kendrick’s words are being played by the triangle in the middle of your speakers, and a simplification of the beat is off to the right. Hopefully, this gives you some appreciation for Kendrick as a musician and not just as a poet, even though he is well accomplished at both:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XsGedLrhcc&feature=youtu.be

Thanks for reading!

-Martin Connor, from the “Composer’s Corner” blog

If you enjoyed this article, check out Martin’s blog, “Composer’s Corner”, for more rap analysis on Nas, Eminem, Notorious B.I.G., and more. The Composer’s Corner blog deepens a listener’s appreciation for rap by showing exactly how it is one should listen to rap, and what to listen for in it. The blog features rap analysis, rap sheet music and notations, free rap lessons and free beats from Martin, and more. Martin is a 2012 graduate of Duke University with a degree in music theory, and works as a freelance blog writer, composer, rapper, and producer. You can follow Martin on Twitter @composerscorner, or email him with questions or comments at martinedwardconnor@gmail.com.