Recently, Alyssa Rosenberg praised the smooth, albeit incomprehensible, flow of a french female rapper, Diam.

I like flow fast, and full of bravado.  But most of all, I need my flow to be smooth.  You can’t hear the breath pauses in Diam’s voice.  She’s going fairly fast.  The phrases aren’t chopped up.  Just gorgeous.  I realize this is a prejudice, born out of debate (and yeah, it’s called flowing there too) where the ratings you got for your speeches declined the choppier and breathier you sounded (content counted too, of course).

I don’t enjoy commenting on rap or hip-hop because I barely listen to it, and there are people out there who know so much more about it than me, but this statement bothered me. Ignoring the obvious problems with her love of Diam’s raps given the language barrier — content counts too — I think having this view of flow in rap is a little limiting. And yes, I know that she’s only making a statement about her preferred form of flow, but even with that caveat this seems too restrictive.

That amazing BET Cypher I posted a few months back exemplified what I’m talking about here and that’s that flow is flow, smooth or rough. Mos Def kicks it off with a silky smooth free-style, just totally relaxed with the words practically melting off his tongue. I love it, but after that Black Thought comes in a goes to a whole other level, with the staccato roughness of the rhythm. You can hear the gasps in between words, he’s fighting to get the words out, his mind’s racing faster than his muscles can work. There’s an intensity to it that just elevates the already amazing words. It’s a different sort but it still flows, more than the others to my ears.

I surely have my own prejudices that lead me to enjoy the struggled staccato a little bit more than the effortless silky delivery, but I think bowing down before either style, regardless of the content and the message, is a mistake. I think you have to know where the words are coming from to understand and appreciate the flow; the breathiness, the choppiness, and everything else all contributes something to the content of the song; whether its endorsing, subverting, or otherwise affecting the content, it’s there for a reason.

I thought I should clarify how ‘white’ I am as it relates to that BET Cypher I posted last night. I didn’t really know of Mos Def as a musician until earlier this year — I remember him performing on Chappelle’s show, but I never made the connection that he was an actual musical artist — having first seen him in the Italian Job and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I hadn’t heard of this guy Black Thought, who I thought ‘won’ that Cypher despite all three guys being amazing, at all though I knew very vaguely of his band The Roots.

Still though, I feel a little cheap writing about how ‘white’ I am when just last night I wrote a critique of Andrew Sullivan for talking about how ‘black’ America is. I also didn’t really do this completely by accident. I think that talking about how we talk about race is sort of a big deal. When Sullivan spoke about the blackness of America, what he seemed to be writing about was the culture of the South. Most of his readers who wrote in spoke about being white and Southern. It’s apt that I woke this morning to Ta-Nehisi Coates doing what he does best:

There are many reasons why it’s wrong to presume that your particular, specific, individual narrative of blackness is The Only Narrative Of Blackness Ever In All History.

Blackness is a lot of things, and I think conflating it with ‘Southern’ is probably not a great idea. It’s not wrong, but it’s not all right.

PostBourgie linked earlier today to a sick video that reminded me why white¹ is so frequently, and so deservedly, seen as a synonym for lame²:

Update: YouTube took down the original video I linked to, but there are many copies out there so I changed my post to point to an active one.

I also wanted to describe a little bit about how I feel about each of the three raps in the video. Mos Def’s is the first and probably the weakest, but it’s got a real laid back delivery that makes it feel more casual than most of the rap freestyles I’m accustomed to. Black Thought’s is the best overall with a throughline to the lyrics, lots of great similes, and just so smooth and controlled. Eminem’s, the one that seems to be seen as the best by the majority of people, is probably the best from a pure rhyme spitting level. He’s got a couple great lines in there, and he doesn’t let the beat slow down his frenetic flow. That said, he doesn’t win it in my eyes because he hasn’t grown up and started rapping about something other than teen pop stars, prescription drugs, and general violence. He can get a lot of rhymes out of that material — ‘kill a koala’ and ‘maul a chihuahua’ come to mind as does the killer line ‘My dick is so big, if I add another inch to it, you would swear when I raped you that you was actually into it’ — but I’m over it and so should he.

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Footnotes

1. Nobody thinks of Eminem as white [↩]
2. I had slightly more to write about this awesome video, mostly related to how white I am and was ignorant of the existence of these ‘cyphers’ and whatnot, but my browser crashed without auto-saving. C’est la vie. [↩]