Lovely Limber Lethal Lyrics
The sweet sound and iconic intelligence of alliteration in rap music
Above: Killer Mike and El-P of Run the Jewels, one of my favorite rap duos and masters of alliteration
“The MC possesses the great gift of communication. He has the ability to capture everyone’s attention with incredible displays of verbal acrobatics and the power to command a crowd.”
-Ice T
“Hip hop didn’t invent anything, but it re-invented everything.”
-Grandmaster Caz
“This Run The Jewels is murder, mayhem, melodic music.”
-Killer Mike
Part 1: Cardi B made me write this
The first true earworm song of 2021 for me was“Up” by Cardi B. To be fair, it wasn’t the first Cardi hit I’d found myself nodding along to. I’d long enjoyed her bravado, and the unapologetically lewd humor of her lyrics in songs like “Bodak Yellow,” “I Like It,” and the song that launched one thousand Ben Shapiro complaints: “WAP.” Yet something about “Up” hit differently for me. For most of February and part of March I listened to this song almost every day. I loved its confidence and its wittiness. I just couldn’t figure out what exactly I found so catchy about the first part of the chorus.
Big bag bussin' out the Bentley Bentayga
Man, Balenciaga Bardi back and all these bitches fucked
It's big bags bussin' out the Bentley Bentayga, man
Birkin bag, Bardi back and all you bitches fucked
Then it hit me.
This braggadocious chorus was a master class in alliteration. These 4 bars are jam-packed with a WAP-ing 19 alliterations with the letter b. I’d never heard a song with this much commitment to the craft of alliterative wordplay. Not only was there a bandolier of bouncy b-words in her chorus, but her clever choice of the letter b as an alliteration actually hit harder than almost any other letter possibly could have. My word nerd brain went wild for her commitment to dual wielding both alliteration and plosives in one chorus.
Plosives are certain words that release a lot of air from your mouth when you say them. Consonants expel more air than vowels. As a result, English has 6 plosive consonants: p, t, k, b, d, and g. Try saying a word that starts with any of these letters aloud now with a flat hand close to your mouth (particularly b and p) and you’ll feel a mini burst of air pop out as you say it. I know the peculiarities of plosives personally because in my podcast hosting days I had to invest in a pop guard. This is an essential piece of audio equipment specifically designed to stop the rush of air from your plosives and keep it from ruining your audio. Without a pop guard, a high quality mic like my Blue YETI will pick up on the tiny burst of air from an errant b or p word and make it sound like a hurricane force wind drowning out your thoughtful conversation.
Above: That circular thing in front of the authors mic is a pop guard, an essential piece of podcasting gear for trapping plosives.
Plosives power to elevate a rap song and ruin podcast audio are one and the same. When spoken aloud they literally produce an explosive force. It’s like hitting the afterburners on a syllable. So when Cardi B says: “Big bag bussin' out the Bentley Bentayga” she’s not just cleverly using words that begin with b, she’s verbally bludgeoning you with the potential energy innate to this string of words. It’s a bold display of dominance that goes perfectly with the tone and message of the chorus. She’s showing us and telling us that she’s on top. With the lyrics, she lets us know that she’s richer than we are, rocking an iconic trio of expensive brands: Balenciaga clothing, the Hermès Birkin Bag, and the Bentley Bantayga SUV. With the sounds of her words she’s also making us feel her dominance by rapping us into submission, literally banging on our ear drums with bodacious b-words. It’s this iconic display of catchy and confident wordplay that had me tapping the repeat icon on Spotify.
Part 2: The Art of Rap
While today he may be best known as a recurring character (and subject of many memes) on Law & Order SVU, Ice T had cemented himself as a hard-hitting rapper long before he became a fixture of legal procedurals. He penned hits like “6 in the Mornin” and “Cop Killer,” which pissed off as many old white folks as “Fuck the Police,” including George Bush Sr. As a sort of senior project for his rap career, in 2012 he produced a (in my opinion) ludicrously underrated documentary called Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap. In it, he interviews a fascinating spectrum of rappers past and present and we get a feel for the history, culture, and identity of rap as a genre. These interviews give us priceless moments like hearing Rakim talk about how he weaves unexpected imagery through his bars, Nas explaining how rap threatens and subverts the white status quo, and KRS-One providing a history lesson about “the dozens,” a game of insults and word play that started at the auctions of enslaved people that was likely the first example of rap in the United States. It’s fascinating to see these greats hold court on the genre they helped build. It is the same type of indulgent “super burrito with all your favorite fillings” for rap fans that The Last Dance was for basketball fans. You can’t help but leave with a deeper appreciation for why rap music feels and sounds the way it does. Conversing with this tapestry of greats leads you to the conclusion that the arrival of hip hop & rap was one of the biggest and best seismic shifts to happen to American music in the past half century.
The Art of Rap Rap cemented my belief that rap is one of the few definitively American cultural inventions. It’s up there in the pantheon of Barbecue, Blues, and Jazz— all of which we also must also acknowledge as indelible gifts from the African American community to America and the world. Like these, it’s also imbued with a spirit of Black resilience, joy, and creativity that are inseparable from its rich and complex history. This larger cultural and historical context is why discussing rap out of context disrespects its integrity as a music genre and is one of about 101 things that Ben Shapiro got wrong about WAP.
Just as you can’t fully understand the history of jazz without understanding African diaspora, tracing the contours of the Great Migration, and appreciating the impacts of the Harlem Renaissance, to understand the history of rap you have to understand the history of the Bronx in the 1970s. In Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap, Rakim shares a key insight as to why. When he was growing up in the 70s and 80s, music was being pulled out of public schools due to budget cuts. Grandmaster Caz adds his take, explaining that in a tough environment where actual instruments were becoming harder to find, rap emerged from digging through their parents funk and soul records and using these records as an improvised form of instrument. Talented MCs like Caz, Afrika Bambata, Big Daddy Kane, and others would play these records and then rhyme over the drum fills or “breaks” between verses on the record.
In an incredibly challenging environment of forced displacement, the racism inherent to NYC’s urban planning, and horrific fires, rap emerged like a rose through concrete. Yet rap doesn’t sound like it does in spite of these hardships; it sounds like it does because of them. As with other American musical forms like blues and jazz, constraint, ingenuity, and the unbreakable nature of the human spirit left a big mark on the style, tone, and subject matter of the nascent genre.
With rap, an underdog mentality, unconventional approach to music & language, and constant verbal competition between MCs were key pillars from day one. They were also the creative jet fuel that powered the fledgling genre as it exploded in popularity. What started off as a way to cut loose, express yourself, and show off at Bronx block parties gained steam and quickly took over not just New York City but the American music industry as a whole.
What caused this rapid ascent was in large part the boundless creativity of its wordsmiths. So understanding rap history and appreciating the intricacies of good rap lyrics are actually the same project. It makes sense that this is where Ice T heads next after covering rap’s “Revolutionary War” period that was the 1970s and 1980s. My very favorite part of the documentary is watching him get into the weeds with some of the greatest lyricists about their creative process.
Part 3: Into the Rhymezone
What’s the secret to truly masterful verbal architecture? The through line is an encyclopedic knowledge of the most clever corners of the English language and virtuosic control of their sound, syllables, and multiple meanings. While good rappers can make two verses rhyme, great rappers or MCs can make these same verses dance, harmonize, and sparkle with unique flair and charisma. It’s the difference between watching someone someone walk across a plank without falling and watching Simone Biles nail the double dismount off of the balance beam.
Articulating this key difference between rapper and a true MC, Big Daddy Kane articulates that:
“A rapper is someone that rhymes. You can consider Dr Seuss a rapper. You rhyme “cat with “hat” then you can be considered a rapper. An MC is someone that either has that party rocking skill or that lyrical skill.”
Listening to the rest of the founding fathers of rap it becomes clear that this means first and foremost not settling for a penny rhyme if you can think of a quarter, and not settling for a quarter if your wordplay can add up to a dollar. Innate to the art and craft of rap is honing your lyricism to a razor sharp point, cutting through the noise with the most impressive and unexpected rhymes imaginable. So the rhyme miners dig ever deeper into the crust of language, fueled by the need to outdo their peers. Explaining his own creative process when writing rap, Grandmaster Caz shares that:
“My writing process has always been geared towards going steps beyond what the next person is going to say, think, or write about.”
Later on in the documentary, Snoop Dogg echoes this sentiment. With the swagger and charisma that he’s had since he appeared on Dr Dre’s The Chronic as a teenager, he says that for him, rap boils down to a type of competition.
“It’s a sport to me because you’re driving me to want to outdo you.”
Ice T adds,
“When you hear a certain lyric it’s like you just saw a 360 dunk”
To which Snoop Dogg enthusiastically responds
“Oh I can’t have that. I need to try this 720. I’m gonna spin around two times and it’s gonna work.”
This verbal one-upmanship and competitive spirit are innate to the genre. It’s what has always driven it forward in a sort of verbal arms race. This voracious appetite for linguistic greatness keeps pushing the frontier of wordplay onwards.
More than most genres, rap is defined by the craft of working within constraints. Pull up Rhymzone.com as I have countless times and you’ll be sobered to learn that only so many words rhyme. Of these, there are few that can be coherently combined and fewer still that are at all original, clever, or insightful. However, this high level of difficulty makes sticking the landing even more satisfying to do and to hear. A truly great rhyme conveys authority, wit, and personality in a way no other lyric can. So when a rapper like Andre 3000 drops this verse in Aquemini:
“Live from "home of the brave," with dirty dollars
Beauty parlors, baby ballers, bowling-ball Impalas
Street scholars, majoring in culinary arts—
You know, how to work bread, cheese, and dough from scratch”
We see this soulful and poetic glimpse of his Atlanta as he does.
And when the late, great MF Doom dropped this masterclass in wordplay:
“Last wish: I wish I had two more wishes
And I wish they fixed the door to the matrix, there's mad glitches
Spit so many verses sometimes my jaw twitches
One thing this party could use is more... booze
Put yourself in your own shoes
And stay away from all those pairs of busted Timbs you don't use”
We nod, laugh, and bow our heads in reverence to one of the all time greats.
With this lens, choosing to rap with alliterations is adding one more constraint to an already fiendishly difficult type of wordplay. A bar that’s got an alliteration and a clever rhyme is that much more satisfying to get right. A rhyme that is also an alliteration is to a standard couplet what a Royal flush is to a straight in poker. Delivering one successfully is like winning a sword fight with your dominant hand tied behind your back.
Alliteration is also so fun in rap because it’s often unexpected. Our first exposure to alliteration is usually a nursery rhyme, a poem, or a childish tongue twister like “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” So as adults, we get a rush of recognition when we see it show up in unexpected places. Hearing this elusive species of language out in the wild sparks a hit of gleeful recognition. A surprising alliteration can add playfulness and whimsy to a verse the way herbs and spices punch up a sauce.
In Hamilton, when Christopher Jackson as George Washington raps:
“Now, I'm the model of a modern major general
The venerated Virginian veteran
Whose men are all lining up, to put me up on a pedestal
Writin' letters to relatives, embellishin' my elegance and eloquence”
We not only love Mirandas use of slant rhymes and multi-syllable rhymes (general with “men are all”); we also see Washington’s leadership, charisma, and command in vivid technicolor because of his precise mastery of the words he’s saying via rhyme and alliteration.
In “Alphabetical Slaughter, Pt 2,” perhaps the Mt Everest of alliterations in rap songs, rapper Papoose tells an entire story using alliterative sentences, one per letter of the alphabet. Here’s his verse using the letter T:
"Ten o'clock Tuesday, Tahoe traveling through traffic / Two thieving teenagers, tailgating, talking tragic / Tough talk turned to tragedy, two teflons thrown / They trying to take the TVs, the touch-tone telephone"
It’s truly impressive stuff.
Alliteration in rap stands out because it’s so elusive. While rhyme is commonplace, alliteration remains rare because it’s simultaneously hyper-stylized and hyper-difficult. Few people can get it right, which is why so few even try. However, when our ears pick up on a clever rhyming alliteration, we get the same kind of mini rush of awe that we feel watching a good martial arts scene, dance choreography, or sports highlight. Witnessing the ecstatic edges of any form of artistic expression is a singular human experience.
Case Study: Blockbuster Night Pt. 1 by Run The Jewels
One of my favorite examples of how alliteration can elevate a rap song is “Blockbuster Night Pt. 1.” While I think Run the Jewels’s wordplay reached its comedic zenith in RTJ 3 and its political zenith in RTJ4, “Blockbuster Night Pt. 1,” from their 2014 album RTJ2, is the pinnacle of their perfection of the art of alliteration. Listening to this song is the verbal equivalent of being beaten up by a karate master in juicy Matrix bullet-time slow mo.
Over a relentless, hard hitting synth line, drum machine, and deftly deployed castanets, El-P and Killer Mike take turns ferociously tag teaming some of their most potent rhyming couplets of all time. They come out of the gate swinging, Killer Mike ending the first verse with this lethal quatrain:
“You rappers doo-doo, baby shit, just basic boo boo
I'm Shaka Zulu, Mansa Musa, my money's beaucoup
My beats is bangin', fuck what you rappin'?, who produced you?
I slapped the snot, take what ya got and "Run The Jewels" you”
For those of you following along at home, he just called his competition shitty, compared his ferocity and wealth to two all time African greats, praised his partner El-P’s production as unimpeachable, and then threatened to rob you in four elegant lines packed with five different alliterations. Not only are five different parts of the verse alliterations, but three of them are also hard-hitting plosives (doo-doo, basic boo boo, beats bangin). Just wow.
Not to be outdone, El-P’s following verse hits just as hard. He tears through his verse with the following four lines:
“You itsy-bitsy, furry, frightened, and frickin' sickly
A little prickly, dick on display for winter swimming
Look at these kiddies, Mike, I'mma rat-a-tat 'em for living
I deal in dirty work, do the deed and then dash, ditch 'em”
They’re feeding off of each others energy, Killer Mike’s aggression rubbing off on El-P as they pass the mic. There’s saying a man is more poorly endowed than a failing community college, then there’s the brutal elegance with which El-P does it. I also absolutely adore the final alliterative line, whose six hard d sounds mirror El-P’s dismissive disdain his rap rivals.
This song truly has too many clever alliterations to exhaustively list them here. Besides, as we all learned when we were forced to read Shakespeare in high school, the written text has a fraction of the life, spark, and charm of the performance. So go listen to it if you haven’t. It’s one of my favorite songs to workout to and produces great reactions in new listeners, like my hushed silence the first time I heard Killer Mike swoop in to wish me a very violent good morning:
“No hocus-pocus, you simple suckers been served a notice
Top of the morning, my fist to your face is fucking Folgers.”
Before wrapping up the song and leaving us with this iconic mic drop:
“The gates of hell are pugnaciously pacin', waitin'
I give a fuck if I'm late, tell Satan "be patient"
Incorporating the word pugnacious into a rap song while telling the devil to fuck off is perhaps the most fitting end to this bruising boxing match of a song. “Blockbuster Night Pt. 1” is so devastatingly effective as a rap song because the world play is as clever as it is aggressive. This is perhaps the trademark of RTJ’s style. They use humorous and insulting rhymes and alliterations to add even more punching power to their hard-hitting lyrics and cement their status as a masterful rap duo for the ages.
Conclusion: Mic Drop
The first song I ever downloaded on the iTunes music store in high school was “Drop It Like It’s Hot” by Snoop Dogg. I still remember my anticipation as I watched the progress bar of my download creep slowly to the right over for more than fifteen giddy minutes. From the moment I finally got to listen to Snoop Dogg charismatically rapping over that Neptunes synth beat I knew only that I would play this song until my iPod mini broke. What I didn’t yet know was that this was a genre that would fascinate and inspire me for life.
For a lifelong student of wordplay like me it’s really hard to not gush about the heady rush of good rap music. No other genre scratches quite the same itch for me. I’m also not alone in this feeling. Today, whole websites like Genius exist to chronicle and analyze the best rap lyrics and entire podcasts like Dissect pour over their intricacies of good rap albums with a microscope, one episode per song.
Rap artists say things other artists can’t or won’t and they do so in ways that defy belief. Sometimes, as with Run the Jewels, these displays are in your face, the lyrics launching off a ramp like they’re trying to qualify for the Olympics. Other times, as with Outkast they’re soft, subtle, and elegant. Some rap feels like armed combat. When Immortal Technique or Eminem have something to say you can’t help but quiver as they pulverize the verse. Some rap feels like martial arts, disarming your opponent before they can attack, like when Kendrick Lamar takes a stab at rappers that don’t write their own material in his masterpiece King Kunta:
“I can dig rapping but a rapper with a ghost-writer? / What the fuck happened? / I swore I wouldn’t tell but most of y’all sharing bars like you got the bottom bunk in a two-man cell”
Sometimes a lyric is just about expressing how awesome you are, like Big Boi in ATLiens:
“Well it's the M-I-crooked letter, ain't no one better / And when I'm on the microphone you best to wear your sweater' / Cause I'm cooler than a polar bear's toenails / Oh hell, there he go again talking that shit"
Sometimes it’s about showing off your wit. I’ve never been a big Lil Wayne fan, I’m not sure anyone can top the cleverness of
Real Gs move in silence like lasagna
Other times rap is deeply funny, like in Coming 2 America when Ludacris says:
“My rap career goes back further than your father hairline. / It’s Ludacris – I pack more nuts than Delta Airlines”
Or when Weird Al Drops this self-referential burn in White and Nerdy
“MC Escher, that's my favorite MC / Keep your 40, I'll just have an Earl Grey tea / My rims never spin to the contrary / You'll find that they're quite stationary”
Writing rap has always been inherently difficult. The stiff challenge of these syllabic puzzles is not for the faint of heart or weak willed. Yet with each generation we see that there are actually more ways than ever to express yourself through rhyme than we ever thought possible. While the founding generations of Bronx greats are mostly retired, they’ve long since passed the torch to inventive rappers in other parts of the country, from Atlanta to Chicago, Houston to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, who’ve imbued the genre with the sound and perspective of their part of America.
Like standup comedy, rap asks you to repeatedly perform a verbal sleight of hand, perfectly packaging your unique insight so it cuts through the noise. When it works, there is nothing else like it. The verbal dexterity of a good rapper transports them and the audience to unexpected places. Rap is ultimately about defying limitations by creatively embracing them.
Or as Rakim eloquently puts it in “I Know You Got Soul”:
“I start to think, and then I sink
Into the paper like I was ink
When I'm writing, I'm trapped in between the lines
I escape when I finish the rhyme.”
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Are you a fan of rap music? Know any good alliterations?