Tips on writing rhymes

• Forget the vocabulary you most readily associate with the hip hop genre. Open your mind to all vocabulary. There is no established protocol of acceptable words in rap. Rap is poetry and poetry is literarily infinite.

• Be patient. If there’s something you want to express that is complex and difficult to realize, work through it. Take it one line at a time and make it happen. Do you want to be the rapper or the fan? The fan waits around for the rapper to articulate what he himself cannot.

• Avoid committing to a phrase or word choice immediately after you write it. While looking for its rhyming counterpart, a better option may emerge. Always be willing to revise your work, both for the sake of discovering which words sound best together and maximizing the originality of your choice of words. I can’t tell you how many times I wrote ‘beautiful’ for lack of a more creative choice, then later replaced it with either a better-sounding or more unique adjective:

Example:
Lay upon my mattress beautiful Catholic actress (rhymes better)

Girl with the beautiful musical face (more original)

It’s all true if it’s according to you, but you should always use a mirror look at your reflection when you think things through (more accurate – self-evaluation was what I really meant when I initially wrote ‘use a mirror’)

• The punch line of a joke is more satisfying when everything leading up to it is funny. The setup of a joke is part of the punch line. In the same way, every word you write is part of the rhyme. Alliteration increases the momentum of the rhyme and makes the words sound like they belong together. Many rappers give you one rhyme for every two bars, as in the classic, “My name is Chris Burns and I’m here to say, I rock the microphone in a major way.” Why waste two bars on one rhyme when you can use alliteration to create a sea of similar sounds?

Example:

Bar 1. thank God I don’t stutter, my words are butter, a plethora of odd
Bar 2. utterances, sentences with a penchant for senselessness,
Bar 3. it’s my sensible nature I’m sensitive and simply a hater,
Bar 4. I tend to degrade that which was meant to be greater.





• Visualize that the set of words in a line you wrote is a city skyline. Each sound is a different-sized building. When you write the next line, try to build an equal skyline:

I like you like like like you like high school
you’re bright &cool like white Nikes & ice cubes

• By no means does a rhyme need to be written linearly. If you have a specific phrase in mind that you feel is the perfect way to end a verse, write it down. Then go back and decide how you can set it up to rhyme. Below, I’ve numbered the order in which I wrote each of these rhyming phrases. Note the contrast between the origin of the content and when it appears within the verse:

1. lower-back tattoo
2. at or too
3. new latitudes
4. bad achoo

The eventual structure:

I resent sentences ending with at or too, bad sneeze is a disease, it’s called ‘bad achoo,’
girls keep getting the same lower-back tattoo, I keep liking them, no, I’m not mad at you, I breathe in and ascend to new latitudes

• The beauty of writing before you record is that you can rhyme retroactively, and that is truly a gift.





Tips on recorded rap:


• Resist the temptation to inform a girl* that she is your muse or source of inspiration. If you’ve written a song for a girl, tell her you want her to hear it and give her a copy. Let your music do the talking. If she doesn’t realize it’s about her, she doesn’t deserve the song, I mean, she doesn’t even know you for gosh sakes.

*feminine gender randomly used

• Don’t release a song to your friends or fans when you know it can be improved with a couple more days’ or weeks’ worth of work. You want nothing more than to share your finished product with others – the praise, the acclaim, the feedback – but it’s always worth making it as good as it can be before you take that step.

• Be aware that listeners generally accept the content of a rapper’s lyrics as his personality. If you can’t beat up the biggest bully in school then don’t say you can in a rap, because you won’t be able to back it up in reality. It’s far more effective to acknowledge that, of course, he is physically stronger, but you’re smart enough to destroy his credibility with your vocalized, poetic thoughts.

• Part of the reason the rap genre is considered so ‘real,’ aside from its rough inner-city origins, is because rappers usually express themselves in a way that is stripped of these literary devices (such as metaphor and symbolism) so frequently found in rock & roll lyrics. The result: as listeners we know a lot more about Eminem’s family life than we do of U2’s Bono. Rap lyrics are traditionally very personal. Protect yourself – spitting 16 bars about your significant other, your parents or your best friend is an excellent way to increase the vulnerability of those relationships.