Transcribing KRS-One

Posted byEthan

In my most recent dissertation interview with Toni Blackman, I asked how a non-rapper like me might approach rap songwriting with music education students. The best approach, of course, would be to just invite Toni herself to come in and teach it, but I wanted suggestions for what to do when that’s not possible. She recommended giving the students some scaffolding: rather than having them work from a blank page, have them write their own lyrics to an existing rap verse. Specifically, she recommended using KRS-One’s flow from his iconic first verse in “Step Into a World (Rapture’s Delight.)”

A rap flow isn’t just a rhyme scheme or a rhythmic structure; it’s a melody too. The pitches might not be confined to the piano keys, but they are specific nonetheless. Asking students to write this way is therefore much the same as giving them an existing melody and having them write new lyrics for it. Using this particular KRS-One song is especially appropriate, because it begins and ends with new lyrics written to the tune of Blondie’s “Rapture.”

My music ed students are mostly classical musicians, and they have even less experience with rap than I do. I expect that they’ll have a better time writing to KRS-One’s verse if I give them a transcription as well as the recording. I have some qualms about doing this, though. It feels inappropriate to be using notation for a profoundly aural art form like rap. Toni assures me that it’s okay. As she puts it, hip-hop scholarship takes a village, and an outsider like me can make constructive contributions if I do it with respect and love. My hope is that, if KRS-One ever sees my chart, he’ll feel honored by it.

Beyond the ethical and cultural issues, there are practical challenges to transcribing rap into Western notation. There is no good standard way to do it. The most common method is to use unpitched percussion notation, but that is inadequate, because the pitch aspect of rap is important. It might be hard to map the pitches to the staff, but that’s no excuse to not try. I have used Melodyne to visualize rap melodies, and that works well, but a) it’s labor-intensive, and b) you need to have the isolated vocal, which isn’t available for this particular song. So notation is the best tool for the job in this instance.

So how do you quantize KRS-One’s pitches to the piano-key grid? It might be possible to capture all of his pitch nuances precisely in notation, but then the score would be too complex to be readable. Anyway, there’s no need to do that, because you can get the nuances from the recording. The real point of the transcription is to be a memory aid for aural learning, not a replacement for it. So really, all my chart needs to do is to convey the general melodic contour.

In the end, what I decided to do was to compose a new melody that refers to KRS-One’s flow without trying to copy it precisely. I used the B-flat minor scale implied by the instrumental, and centered the melody on the tonic. When KRS goes up or down in pitch, my melody does too. When his pitches swoop, I wrote down the pitch that I felt he was “aiming” for. Here’s what I came up with. (If you don’t hear anything when you hit play, listen to it here instead.)

Here is how my melodicized transcription sounds over the original recording:

My melody is an approximation at best, but it’s certainly an improvement on unpitched percussion-style notation. The transcription is more accurate on the rhythmic axis, but I had to do some simplification and abstraction there too. KRS phrases behind the beat a lot of the time, and it’s hard to know when to notate his performed rhythm exactly, and when to write down the simpler rhythms that (I assume) he’s expressively deviating from. For example, check out measure fourteen, on the line “Beware, the length of the rhyme flow can be shocking.” You would expect him to put the second syllable of “beware” on the downbeat, since that’s the syllable you would normally emphasize. But KRS puts the first syllable on the downbeat instead, which destabilizes the whole line. Is he emphasizing the “wrong” syllable deliberately as a compositional move, or is he just phrasing so far behind the beat that it sounds like it’s what he’s doing? I chose the first option, but I recognize that it’s a debatable editorial choice.

Most emcees of KRS-One’s generation place their rhymes in consistent places in each bar. In the “Rapture’s Delight” verse, most of the rhymes fall on beat four. However, there are some interesting variants, especially in the first few lines. He starts by putting rockin’ on beat four, establishing the pattern, and supporting it with stoppin’ on beat four in the next line. But he also intersperses options and knockin’ through the beats before that.

In the very next line, he destablizes the scheme, with toppin’ and droppin’ coming early and forgotten coming late. He returns to the pattern on hip-hoppin’.

In the next two lines, coppin’ and lockin’ are where you expect, but KRS precedes that second one with poppin’.

In the next two lines, clockin’ and gotten are in the expected place, but tockin’ comes early.

I am not the first person to try to map a rap verse to the piano-key pitches. Jason Moran has a spectacular arrangement of “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa. He uses lots of chromaticism, and while his pitch choices might not be literal representations, they powerfully convey the original.

Vijay Iyer plays a boldly dissonant take on the simple pentatonic melody of “Galang” by M.I.A.

Adam Neely translates “King Kunta” by Kendrick Lamar to fretless bass.

And in response to Adam, here’s Nate Holder playing “Venom” by Little Simz on saxophone.

I would love to hear more jazz musicians trying this approach. In the meantime, I’m interested to see what my music ed students come up with this spring over KRS-One’s flow.