Welcome to a new series at The Canon where Varun Raghupathi analyzes some of the most influential and lyrically impressive cyphers of hip hop history. Please be seated and take out your notebooks: it’s time for MC Master Class.
One of the best parts of hearing someone rap for the first time is getting to see how many boxes they can check with their bars.
Can they rhyme multi-syllabically on a consistent basis and still make sense? Can they create vivid yet economical descriptions of repeatable actions that stick in your brain? Can they do word play, and maybe mix in some cultural references while they’re at it? Can they stay in the pocket while switching up their flow? And, lastly, can they end their verses with great lines?
The above is standard stuff these days. Go watch a Funk Flex freestyle or an LA Leakers video or something of that ilk. Pretty much every MC on those shows has to check all of those boxes — at minimum — to be considered “nice.” Unless, of course, they go off the dome, which most do not.
But three decades back, the idea that you could spit complex, thoughtful rhymes and still be commercially successful was in its incubate stages. Early-to-mid 80s hip hop was still very much connected to Jamaican “Dancehall” music, one of the genre’s primary building blocks, especially tunes coming from New York City, the birthplace of rap.
The biggest hits were party songs and the biggest names were DJs like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, the record spinners who ran the parties. The beats were catchy, and the bars were simple. Even the instant classics with a social conscience that transcended the genre like Flash’s “The Message” featured primarily monosyllabic rhymes, in this instance from the great Melle Mel:
A child is born with no state of mind/Blind to the ways of mankind/God is smilin’ on you but he’s frownin’ too/Because only God knows what you’ll go through
-Melle Mel, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
The same can be said for Run-DMC later in the decade. Let’s be clear: that’s an iconic group, a global game-changer of a musical outfit. But go back and listen to the rhymes. It’s clear that, as the 80s became the 90s, hip hop was going to experience growth across multiple branches of evolution in terms of style, content, and, thanks to people like Rakim, lyricism.
Like many (some would say most) great MCs, William Michael Griffin Jr. was born in the greater New York City area — Long Island, specifically. In 1986, he met a DJ named Louis Eric Barrier, Eric B. for short and stage, and adopted the name Rakim Allah after converting to Islam. Within two years, he’d be known as one of the greatest MCs alive. When he wrote and recorded the song “Lyrics of Fury” for the 1988 album Follow The Leader, he was barely 20 years old.
Remember those boxes we talked about checking a few minutes back? Rakim checked all of the ones already in existence — spelling his name, shouting out his DJ, ending his verses with dope punchlines — more cleverly than those who preceded him and then proceeded to create the rest of the boxes himself in this one song. I have no empirical evidence to validate that rather absurd claim, but I know for a fact that Rakim is considered the first iconic proponent, among many other things, of two taken-for-granted weapons in an MC’s arsenal.
1) Mixing multi-syllabic and internal rhyme schemes. Most MCs weren’t doing multi-syllabic rhyming, let alone incorporating extra sets of rhymes into their bars. Rakim executed this dual concept multiple times in “Lyrics of Fury.” To wit:
The “R” is in the house, too much tension/Make sure the system’s loud when I mention/Phrases that fearsome…you wanna hear some/Sounds that not only pound but please ya eardrums
Rakim, ‘Lyrics of Fury’
The guy was navigating essentially uncharted waters and almost single-handedly reshaping the mold of a traditional MC. As a teenager. He even did himself one better later in the song! He bracketed a multi-syllabic rhyme with ones that many of his HOF-caliber peers couldn’t conceive of, let alone spit. Check it:
For words the sentence, there’s no resemblance/You think you’re rougher than suffer the consequences
Rakim, ‘Lyrics of Fury’
It should be noted that hip hop was really coming into its own in 1988, solidifying and legitimizing a Golden Age during which the genre was very much in its prime but still had a ton of room to grow. Rap simultaneously became more world-renowned and diverse-sounding by the day — seemingly in equal measure — over the course of a decade-plus era, churning out groundbreaking records at a dizzying pace.
Other albums from that year include NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and Slick Rick’s The Great Adventures of Slick Rick. Rakim wasn’t lyrically lapping the field during a cultural institution’s nadir like Eddie Murphy was comedically when he ran circles around early-80s SNL. He was verbally outclassing some of his fellow immortals such as Ice Cube, Chuck D, and Big Daddy Kane when all were at or near their apexes — the hip hop equivalent of Hakeem Olajuwon outdueling Patrick Ewing, David Robinson, and Shaquille O’Neal in the playoffs in the mid-90s.
2) Harnessing a flow that sounds like crisp whiskey, conveying intensity sans volume. It’s arresting. It’s “ice cold,” in Outkast terms. You know who else thought so? A young Nas, who was heavily influenced by Rakim.
The guy is firing off more words than any of his contemporaries — with much denser rhymes — and he’s doing so at a pace that is both faster and more controlled than anyone else’s. No other rapper was combining those attributes at that time, so there’s nothing to compare him to sonically during his prime.
It’s like watching Usain Bolt run a race. He’s going so much faster than everyone else that it feels like he’s taking his time. It’s as if he’s saying, ‘I can go faster than this, but I don’t need to.’ Same with Rakim. You finish listening to “Lyrics of Fury” and think ‘huh, that dude sounds like he has three more quality verses in him.’ It’s like he’s saying, ‘I can give you more bars, but I don’t need to.’ Both sprinter and spitter knew they were comfortably better than their competition.
We throw around the phrase “ahead of their time” quite a bit nowadays. Rakim, however, was a genuine innovator, one of rap’s most essential brick masons. By eschewing the excessive peacocking of many of his predecessors and peers and focusing on the structural integrity of his bars, Rakim single-handedly redefined the look and sound of alpha MCing, maturing an entire genre in the process. Hip hop as an art form would be much less cool — and credible — without him.
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