Ch-ch-ch-check out, check out check out my melody

My computer dictionary says that a melody is “a sequence of single notes that is musically satisfying.” There are a lot of people out there who think that rap isn’t music because it lacks melody. My heart broke when I found out that Jerry Garcia was one of these people. If anyone could be trusted to be open-minded, you’d think it would be Jerry, but no.

I’ve always instinctively believed this position to be wrong, and I finally decided to test it empirically. I took some rap acapellas and put them into Melodyne. What I found is that rap vocals use plenty of melody. The pitches rise and fall in specific and patterned ways. The pitches aren’t usually confined to the piano keys, but they are nevertheless real and non-arbitrary. (If you say a rap line with the wrong pitches, it sounds terrible.) Go ahead, look and listen for yourself. Click each image to hear the song section in question.

Eric B and Rakim – “Follow The Leader”

The first four lines:

“Stage is a cage, the mic is a third rail”

I would have expected Rakim’s voice to be a monotone, but “Follow The Leader” spans almost a full octave.

Nas – “Nas Is Like“

The first four lines:

The chorus:

Nas follows a pattern that a lot of emcees use, which is to sit within an approximate minor third. His “tonic” is somewhere in the neighborhood of F# or G. The chorus isn’t rapped directly, it’s made of sections of other Nas songs scratched in by DJ Premiere. There should be more pitch variation, but Melodyne gets confused by fast turntable scribbles and renders them as long single notes.

Missy Elliott – “Work It”

First half of the chorus:

“Listen up close while I take it backward”

The chorus of “Work It” spans two octaves. On “worth it” she jumps up a tenth, and on “work it” she drops a ninth. Speech-like cadences use much wider pitch ranges than more song-like ones. The line “Listen up close while I take it backwards” is followed by “sdrawkcab ti ekat I elihw esolc pu netsiL.” The axis of reflection is just before measure 66. It looks like Timbaland scratched the backwards line in by hand, rather than just reversing it in the DAW, because its pitch and timing don’t precisely match the original.

Jay-Z – “99 Problems”

The chorus:

“I ain’t passed the bar but I know a lil bit”

Like Nas, Jay mostly hops up and down within a second or minor third, but he’ll jump up or down a fifth when he really wants to emphasize a word.

Notorious BIG – Things Done Changed

End of the first verse:

This phrase sticks pretty close to the A flat major scale. Biggie oscillates between 4^ and 5^ for the first half of the section and then takes a rambling walk down to the tonic.

Outkast – “Bombs Over Baghdad”

The first four lines:

Andre 3000 has a sing-song flow even when he isn’t singing outright. Every syllable here has a noticeable pitch swoop on it, and this is at an extremely fast tempo. Big Boi is similarly melodic. At slower tempos, their melodic quality is even more pronounced.

Janelle Monáe – “Tightrope”

Big Boi’s guest verse:

Here’s a typically melodic Big Boi flow: the first half of the passage is a sequence of wide interval leaps, and then it converges onto a tighter pattern within the usual rapper interval of a minor third.

 

Rappers have never doubted their status as singers. The term “rap singer” is a widely used synonym for emcee. Fans praise emcees they admire by saying they have a melodic flow. The Eric B and Rakim song that this post is named for invites you to check out Rakim’s melody explicitly.

Bone Thugs aim specifically for the piano-key notes in their flows. Tupac, Eminem, and Cee-Lo are all notably melodic rappers, and the latter two mix in a fair amount of straight singing. There’s a whole wave of rappers exaggerating their melodies by quantizing the pitches with Auto-Tune, most famously Lil Wayne and Kanye West. But while hip-hop fan forums are full of discussions about melodic flow, almost no “real” musicians have done serious analysis of rap melodies. Google searches turned up Chilly Gonzales and not much else.

Not many instrumentalists have engaged with rap melodies either. Jason Moran is a rare example. In his amazing arrangement of “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa, he plays the rap verses on piano, following their rhythms and general pitch contour, but using specific notes of his own choosing (I assume–maybe he analyzed them with Melodyne.) I would love to hear more of this approach.

The boundary between speaking and singing has always been hazy. All language uses prosody. Pitched languages like Mandarin use prosody for their grammar. Supposedly “unpitched” languages like English still rely on pitch to convey punctuation, emotion, tribal identity, and much else. Like when young people? End all their phrases? With a question mark? They do that by using rising pitch where you expect falling pitch. We talk to babies in a strongly melodic voice, and they respond to the music long before they can understand the words. My son is two and talking up a storm, but we still use a speech/singing hybrid when we’re trying to get him to sleep, or to comfort him when he’s upset.

Stephen Mithen thinks that both language and music evolved from purely prosodic vocalizing, which in turn evolved from the emotionally inflected calls of our primate ancestors. There continues to be more music in everyday speech than we tend to realize. Rappers might be in the hazy boundary zone, but they’re closer to the singing side of that zone. People who claim not to hear the melody in rap are not listening carefully.