Friday, December 22, 2017

Why the Rhyme of Rap song is hard to understand? Explained

Almost more than a decade ago I've heard from Canadian English tutor(? if I remember correctly) that English rap song is even hard for English speaking people to understand. Though the rhyme I exactly recollect is not that many (Eminem's The Real Slim Shady and Tupac's God Bless the Dead and another), I personally myself grasp why the rhyme of rap song is not that easy to understand. Would like to show you how this happens using example. Here the rhyme is going to be built from scratch, and two sentences which ends with the same vowel combinations created:


My name is John Brown.  Today I get out of this town.


Then the next step is to add a little more:


My name is John Brown.  Today I get out of this town.
Government always oppresses people, maybe next time I want Kindle.


Now we got a fair amount of rhymes as an example. But these sentences, though these are almost grammatically correct, still not well-structured lacking granularity and flexibility in the aspect of rhythm composition. So it has to be optimized to add granularity and more rap-oriented structure, to make it seamless to the composition of beat elements:


My name is John Brown Frown twice stopped Crown.  Today I gettin out of this town thus no Plan,  Standing Fan.
Government Rent Tax Grape always oppresses messin people lazy, maybe next time dime I want Kindle Riddle rhyme.


This time we added tiny fraction of words to increase the cohesion of the same sound reside together.
So even though original message and its clearness of the meaning drastically decreased, the tonal availability to set it on rap beat increased at the expense of the meaning. Then we modify it further:


Hey, My name is John Brown Frown Stack twice / stopped Crown Going DownLame, Today I gettin out of towel this town thus no Plan, Uh,  Standing Fan.
Gov-vernment Waste Rent Tax Grape State always oppresses messin people lazy, hating, maybe next time dime I want to cry Kindle Riddle rhyme.


Something like this: so the process is such that initially make the plain text and recursively the words are added or updated in order to make it more rhythmical.

To encrypt the word, sometimes conversion of consonants in word occur such as:


Jesus Christ  ⇨ Linus Swipe


Which is really hard to detect its original terms.

I think this is the reason why rap song is hard to understand. 😢

To make thing worse, when the negative words happens to be added on it, it makes listeners misunderstand they are dissed or criticized even though it is not. (But always conflict between rappers occur since this encrypted rhyme text is really easy to be misunderstood, even though you are criticizing government, the listener can think it as the personal attack to them, one of the biggest trouble in rap music).

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