Toni Blackman recommends a rap writing exercise: take an existing flow and replace the lyrics with your own. In order to do this with my music education students in the spring, I’m going to provide them with notated transcriptions as well as recordings. I’ve transcribed a couple of Toni’s recommended verses. The first was KRS-One’s “Step Into a World (Rapture’s Delight.)” The second is Lil’ Kim’s feature on Mary J Blige’s “I Can Love You.”
This song repurposes the instrumental from Lil Kim’s “Queen Bitch.”
The piano sample in “Queen Bitch” comes, in turn, from “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” by Roberta Flack. The beat is from Funky Drummer Volume 1 by Ralph Vargas, and there’s some turntable scratching of “Back Stabbers” by Junior MAFIA.
Lil’ Kim’s track repeats the F-sharp minor loop for its entire duration aside from a short break two thirds of the way through. The Mary J track adds lots more instruments (keys, strings, guitar, bass) that play a chord progression over the Roberta Flack piano loop, which leads to some hip chord clashes.
That’s all very interesting, but I’m here to look at Lil’ Kim’s verse specifically. It’s important to me that my transcriptions convey her pitches, not just her rhythm. However, the speech-like pitch structure of rap is too complex to be easily represented on the quantized grid of Western notation, so I have had to do some simplifying. My method is to write a new melody that follows the contours of Lil’ Kim’s flow as closely as I can. I’m not trying to replicate her pitches exactly, I just want to evoke them. The point is to assist students’ aural learning, not to replace it. Here’s my chart. The rhymes are color-coded for easier identification. If you don’t hear anything when you press play, try listening here.
You can compare my melodicized version with Lil’ Kim’s vocal directly here:
As with the KRS-One verse, I found lots of fascinating musical details through transcribing that I missed on a casual listen. To understand what follows, you need to know how a measure of 4/4 time gets subdivided. Take a look at the Groove Pizza, set here to play the “I Can Love You” beat:
Your default expectation is that a 4/4 rhythm like this will be symmetrical. In a simple beat, the two halves of the circle would be identical (rotationally, not mirror-imaged.) In an even simpler one, the four quarters would all be identical. To put this another way, you’d expect any event on the circle to be matched by an identical event on the opposite side of the circle. In some ways, the “I Can Love You” beat is symmetrical: the snare drum on beat two (slice 5 on the Groove Pizza) is mirrored by a snare on beat four (slice 9 on the Groove Pizza.) Also, the kick on slice 7 is mirrored by the kick on slice 15. However, if the beat was totally symmetrical, it would be too predictable and boring. Notice that there’s no mirror image counterpart to the kick on slice 1 or the hi-hat on slice 10; these asymmetries keep you off-balance enough to hold your interest.
Okay. Now we’re ready to study Lil’ Kim’s amazing flow. Let’s start in measure 51: “If I told you once, I told you twice.” The word “twice” falls a sixteenth note after beat three (slice 10 on the GP.) It rhymes with “ice” in measure 52. You’d naively expect both rhymes to be in the same place in their respective bars, but no, “ice” falls on the “and” of four (slice 15 on the GP.) In measure 53, the word “heist” carries on this group of rhymes, but in yet another different position in the bar, this time on beat two (slice 5 on the GP.)
Let’s go back to measure 52, which rhymes “booty” and “groupie.” Each word is in a strange syncopated position that puts deliberate emphasis on the “wrong” syllable. The obvious way to place these rhymes is in the same relative position in each half of bar–that is, opposite each other on the Groove Pizza. But “booty” is on the “and” of one (GP slice 3), while “groupie” is squarely on beat three (GP slice 9), rather than on the “and” of three (GP slice 11) where you’d expect.
The fun continues in measure 56, on the line “Tricks inside colossals turn your castles to brothels.” The rhyme in “colossals” falls on beat two (slice 5), and you’d expect the corresponding rhyme in “brothels” to fall on beat four (slice 13). Instead, Lil’ Kim places it a half a beat early (slice 11).
In the next bar, she does a similar thing. The lyric is “Who you lovin’, who you wanna be huggin’.” Once again, the rhyme in “lovin'” comes on beat two (slice 5), so you expect “huggin'” to be on beat four (slice 13). This time, though, Kim shifts it only a quarter of a beat early (slice 12).
The next bar, “on ya ninja Honda with Tanisha and Rhonda,” uses this same syncopation: “Honda” is on beat two (slice 5), while “Rhonda” is a sixteenth note ahead of beat four (slice 12). And the bar after that, “You work more body than Jane Fonda,” continues the rhyme, but “Fonda” is a sixteenth note earlier than “Rhonda” (slice 11).
The next bar, “Physical fitness, Mary Blige be my witness”, also places the fitness/witness rhymes in unexpectedly non-parallel places in the bar.
This is the kind of jazzy sophistication that aficionados like Toni look for in a great flow. I can see her point.