Improvisation in Freestyle Rap Oxford Handbooks Online Improvisation in Freestyle Rap Ellie M. Hisama The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 2 Edited by Benjamin Piekut and George E. Lewis Print Publication Date: Sep 2016 Subject: Music, Musicology and Music History Online Publication Date: Mar 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199892921.013.24 Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores the process of improvisation by emcees in freestyle, or improvised, rap. Drawing on interviews with and writings by freestyle practitioners as well as on recent scholarship in linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and sociology, it argues that freestyle is an everyday activity and a fundamentally social act. The chapter examines a recent study that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure cognitive activity of improvising emcees, and it suggests that the study’s physical constraints on the emcees, its focus on emcees in isolation rather than on those improvising in a cipher (a group of people who take turns improvising rhymes), and its lack of attention to the effects of gender, race, ethnicity, and other identifications on freestyle performance limit the force of its conclusions. Keywords: freestyle, improvised rap, fMRI, cipher, gender, race, ethnicity, hip hop, neuroscience SPANNING a range of kinetic, sonic, and visual expression, hip hop emerged as an improvisatory art four decades ago.1 Freestyle, or improvised rap, provides an arena for emcees to develop and display their rhyming skills. Often performed in a cipher, a group of people in a circle who take turns to improvise rhymes informally, freestyle is sometimes playful but sometimes not. In a freestyle battle, performers compete to establish their superior rhyming skills, with the audience determining the winner.2 The definition of freestyle has changed since the 1980s, when it initially referred to rap not focused on a specific topic. In the words of Divine Styler: “It’s a non-conceptual rhyme. … It’s just random thought. … Now they call freestylin’ [off] the top of the head” (Fitzgerald 2004). In Canibus’s definition of freestyle, “You’re not rhyming about a subject matter in particular. … You’re not being so specific about what you’re talking about” (Spady, Lee, and Alim 1999, 220). Big Daddy Kane elaborates on this early understanding of freestyle: Page 1 of 11 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Cornell University; date: 26 October 2016 Improvisation in Freestyle Rap The term, freestyle, is like a new term, because in the ’80s when we said we wrote a freestyle rap, that meant that it was a rhyme that you wrote that was free of style, meaning that it’s not [on] a [particular] subject matter—it’s not a story about a woman, it’s not a story about poverty, it’s basically a rhyme just bragging about yourself, so it’s basically free of style. … Off-the-top-of-the-head [rapping], we just called that “off the dome”—when you don’t write it and [you] say whatever comes to mind (Edwards 2009, 181–182). Thus whereas old-school freestyle could be written or memorized, the term freestyle now in circulation generally does not permit written or prepared rhymes, a stance enunciated by Rifleman [Ellay Khule]: “Freestyle is you being spontaneous [he snaps]: right now. Improvise: right now. On the spot” (Fitzgerald 2004). In an interview with James (p. 251) G. Spady, Canibus acknowledges using an “old freestyle” on the radio (Spady, Lee, and Alim 1999, 220), a phrase inconsistent with current understandings of freestyle. This later definition of freestyle as rhyming that is “spontaneous” and takes place “right now” corresponds to Leo Smith’s definition of improvisation: “Improvisation is an art form used by creative musicians to deliver an expression or musical thought at the very instant that their idea is conceived” (Smith 1973, n.p.). Erik Pihel, following T-Love’s identification of three elements necessary to a freestyle, suggests that freestyle must rhyme, cohere, and fit to (“ride”) the DJ’s beat (Pihel 1996, 254–257). Jooyoung Lee points to lyrical complexity, delivery, and humor as those aspects valued by regulars at Project Blowed in Los Angeles (Lee 2009b, 313). Freestyle, like improvisation more generally, is sometimes romanticized as a product of genius, revealing gifts mysteriously bestowed on only a select few, but emcees themselves frequently acknowledge the work that goes into freestyling.3 In my interview with Ace, founder of the Columbia University Society of Hip-Hop (CUSH), he remarked that “some people see [freestyling] as magical, but for me, it’s practicing a mode of expression” (Patterson 2011a).4 Those training in the freestyle practice have to continually work at pulling words from their heads, transforming thoughts into coherent verbal expressions, expanding their mental glossary and fighting to articulately freestyle no matter the conditions (Patterson 2011b, 1). Emphasizing that freestylers are made, not born, Myka 9 of Freestyle Fellowship recalls that “[kids] can sit on the staircase and exchange rhymes instead of going around getting Page 2 of 11 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Cornell University; date: 26 October 2016 Improvisation in Freestyle Rap into crimes” (Edwards 2009, 182). The everyday nature of freestyle is further underscored by One Be Lo of Binary Star: It was a day-to-day thing. All we used to do was sit around all day and freestyle. … We were just trying to be the best we could be, and we were bouncing it off each other. We woke up freestyling, we went to sleep freestyling. We would just be sitting in the basement trying to come up with songs, and we’d just start freestyling. We was just having fun—we wasn’t trying to make records or make history (Edwards 2009, 183). Ace describes freestyle as an activity he sometimes does with a friend “just because”: “Freestyling is a way of talking to each other, to talk about your day … with no judgment between [a friend] and me, and no audience … the most beautiful thing about it” (Patterson 2011b). Rather than the product of exceptionally gifted individuals, freestyling is a commonplace activity; rather than “magical,” it is a learned practice “sharpened and presented to a critical circle” (Spady, Alim, and Meghelli 2006, 6). Derek Bailey’s observation that a successful improvising group has a “common stock of material—a vocabulary” that is developed individually and collectively (Bailey 1992, 106) resonates with the practice of freestyle, which draws from a pool of words (p. 252) as well as non-verbal sounds and gestures. Ace describes the process of freestyling as “rhyming while talking; a combo of hearing flow, knowing how to flow, feeling flow, making up your own flow, starting knowing what rhymes, getting the words so richly mosaic … different words ‘eagles fly—pizza pie’ lead to other words, other thoughts” (Patterson 2011a). Emcees distinguish between improvised rhyming and precomposed rapping, or “writtens.” As Boots of The Coup reflects, “There’s two different art forms: there’s written rhymes and there’s freestyle. And usually the people that are good at one are not good at the other” (Fitzgerald 2004). Freestyle is sometimes used as a precursor to perfecting one’s written rhymes through a process of editing. Kurupt, for example, observes: I think in freestyle … I might freestyle and say something that I just think is so catty. So, then I just sit down and write the freestyle rhyme I said, but then I calculate it more. … I put more brain power to it when I just sit and write it because I can think more about how I can word it (Spady, Lee, and Alim 1999, 537–538). Page 3 of 11 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Cornell University; date: 26 October 2016 Improvisation in Freestyle Rap This process by which one develops a freestyle into a rhyme that is more “calculated” is also recognized by k-os, who muses that “freestyling helped me learn how to make my more calculated raps sound sweeter” (Edwards 2009, 184). An optimal state for a freestyler to reach is “the zone.” As Ace describes it: “When a freestyler gets to the point where his thoughts are in sync with the words that he’s spitting at the pace that he’s spitting at the imagined complexity of which he’s utilizing, he is now in the zone. … His lines are delivered with such a polished smoothness and fortification that inhibits others around him to cut through or penetrate” (Patterson 2011b, 1–2). He describes some of the bodily changes discernible in a freestyler who is in the zone: He has transformed, and this conversion can even be visible. His eyes appear shut down; his mind is doing all the seeing. His hand gestures become more rapid, piercing the atmosphere with such fierce expressiveness (Patterson 2011b, 1). Interest in charting discernible changes to the body during musical performance led researchers to conduct neurobiological studies of improvisation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures blood oxygenation to the brain and the brain activity that results from increased neural activity.