Paul Edwards’ new book on the Art & Science of the Hip-Hop MC
“You want to be able to stand out from the others and just be distinct, period. A lot of shit sounds the same, so when you got something that can separate you from everybody else, you gotta use it to your advantage.”
B-Real, Cypress Hill
You can get a textbook for pretty much anything these days. The Weird Book Room collates such frightening titles as The Humanure Handbook, Bombproof Your House, How to Teach Physics To Your Dog and 50 Ways to Use Female Hygiene Products in a Manly Manner. So perhaps Edwards’ new tome (out through Chicago Review Press) tackling the mechanics and logistics of the MC’s art will not only find an audience, but given hip-hop’s worldwide penetration, is arguably overdue. For, while once teenagers the world over ‘Hank Marvin’d’ with a broomstick in front of the mirror, likely today’s youth has cast the guitar simulacrum aside and is spitting rhymes at their reflections and dreaming of the OG lifestyle.
Edwards uses a largely first-person narrative storyboarded by an impressive cohort of MCs, breaking it down between content, flow, writing and delivery. The Performing Live section, for example, has subsections as prosaic as ‘Rehearsing’ through to ‘Rocking the Crowd’. In the Content Tools section there’s some Eng-Lit nostalgia so you can remind yourself of the difference between conventions such as assonance and consonance. It’s often backed up by a primo example from the canon, sometimes illustrated in tabular form, right down to stressed syllables.
There are some revelations for those of us for whom a career in rapping is no longer (or never was) an option. Chuck D has always used baseball analogies, but here he confirms he envisioned his episodic interventions to be modelled on those of a commentator relaying the action play by play. Schoolly D opts for a quarterback simile. We learn that Gatling Gun hardcore MC Tech N9ne actually writes to a framework whereby his oxygen intake can be accommodated. In terms of research, most contemporary rappers seem rather too trusting of wikiwisdom with the exception of Imani of the Pharcycde and Gift of Blackalicious, who will actually go buy or borrow a book to research his subject matter.
The devil’s advocate argument here is an obvious one – none of these artists arrived at this juncture by reading a book. They unanimously cite prior listening as the key to moving the art form forwards – a point on which will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas is particularly eloquent. But then no-one had ProTools or FL Studio back in the day either and hip-hop’s jackdaw mentality has always been about seizing what’s available. As Kool G Rap notes in his introduction, to be a great MC, “you gotta hear it, you gotta feel it”. Nothing wrong with some crib notes along the way, There are some useful insights here for the aspirant master of ceremonies.
