by Adam Bradley
they first were divorced, throwin’ her over furniture . . .
The tenor and the vehicle, in this case, aren’t simple nouns or verbs, but rather situations: the tenor being the shock of seeing a white person rapping, and the vehicle being the shock of seeing Tommy Lee abuse Pamela Anderson. The vehicle, then, is transporting the degree of shock (jaws on the floor) from the latter to the former. But what’s so remarkable about the exchange is that while the tenor is implied in the first line, it is never explicitly stated. And the vehicle? It takes up twenty-two words and nearly three lines. By the end, you almost forget that he is using a simile at all. At that point, however, the simile has already done its work, communicating its meaning with dark humor.
Innovative MCs like Immortal Technique and Eminem have so expanded the simile that their lyrics barely resemble the basics discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In their rhymes, the line between simile and metaphor, though visible and significant, is never impermeable. Some MCs use similes with a kind of directness that comes closer to the effect commonly achieved by metaphors. A fine example of this can be found on a remarkable track from Andre 3000’s The Love Below, “A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre (Incomplete).” Andre rhymes without interruption for five full minutes, a rarity in recorded rap. The lines I’ve chosen come from a section describing the sexual exploits of life on the road.
Girls used to say, “Y’all talk funny, y’all from the islands?”
And I’d laugh and they’d just keep smilin’
“No, I’m from Atlanta, baby. He from Savannah, maybe
we should hook up and get tore up and then lay down—Hey, we
gotta go because the bus is pullin’ out in thirty minutes.
She’s playing tennis disturbing the tenants:
Fifteen-love, fit like glove.
DESCRIPTION IS LIKE . . . FIFTEEN DOVES IN A JACUZZI
CATCHIN’ THE HOLY GHOST
MAKIN’ ONE WOOZY IN THE HEAD AND COMATOSE. Agree?
Andre pauses right after “like” before completing the simile. The tenor, the “description” he seeks, is the description of sex, which he compares with the highly unusual vehicle “fifteen doves in a Jacuzzi catchin’ the Holy Ghost.” But what does the vehicle convey? Remarkably, nothing but itself. But in this case that is certainly enough. The “like” here, which helps identify this as a simile, seems almost extraneous. We experience this comparison unmediated by anything else. In this case, the simile really is a metaphor—or at least is acting like one.
Rap metaphors, though they are not nearly as common as you would expect given how often rappers mention the word itself in their rhymes, are nonetheless essential components of hip hop’s figurative language. They have the benefit of directness and of self-conscious poetic artifice. In their simplest form, they positively assert that one thing is another, or at the very least that one thing is equal to another in some essential way. So when Kanye West boasts on “Swagger Like Us” that “my swagger is Mick Jagger,” he’s using metaphor to equate his confidence on the mic to the Rolling Stones’ consummately cocky front man. For the instant it takes him to deliver that line, it’s as if you’ve caught a glimpse of Mick himself strutting across the stage. Metaphors have that capacity to give the abstract concrete form.
In 1993’s “Pink Cookies in a Plastic Bag,” LL Cool J delivered perhaps one of rap’s most unusual metaphors: “The act of making love is pink cookies in a plastic bag getting crushed by buildings.” Like Andre in the example above, LL attempts to express the concrete act of lovemaking in the abstract terms of figurative language. Here the metaphor functions not so much to define as to obscure, obliterating tangible meaning (the “act of making love”) by refashioning it in a series of incongruities (cookies, plastic bags, and buildings). This is but an extreme example of something that rappers do all the time with metaphor, extending meaning to just this side of the breaking point. It also illustrates the point I’ve been making about simile and metaphor’s difference in form, but commonality in function. How would it change the expression, for instance, if LL had said instead that “the act of making love is like pink cookies in a plastic bag getting crushed by buildings”? It becomes somewhat less striking, more common, but it generally retains the essential effect of the comparison.
Metaphors lend themselves better than similes to certain types of abstract expression in rap. On “I Feel Like Dying,” Lil Wayne offers up a series of metaphors to capture the drugged-out state of intoxication:
I can mingle with the stars, and throw a party on Mars;
I am a prisoner locked up behind Xanax bars.
I have just boarded a plane without a pilot
and violets are blue, roses are red
daisies are yellow, the flowers are dead.
Wish I could give you this feeling I feel like buying,
and if my dealer don’t have no more, then (I feel
like dying).
As a metaphor for addiction, “I’m a prisoner locked up behind Xanax bars” is a powerful description, particularly given his pun on “bars”: the name often used to refer to Xanax tablets and the bars of a prison cell. Weezy even resurrects and revitalizes the dead metaphors (those comparisons so overused that they retain little figurative impact) “roses are red, violets are blue” by recontextualizing them and capping them with the stark finality of “the flowers are dead.” Capturing both the celestial highs and the morbid lows of his addiction, Lil Wayne’s metaphors achieve an expressive power unattainable through conventional speech.
Rappers have occasionally employed metaphors in extended forms, often taking up the bulk of a verse or even an entire song. When metaphor does this, we understand it as a conceit. In literature a conceit is an extended metaphor that usually comprises the entirety of a poem. It asks the listener to consider a comparison between two things or two circumstances that might not immediately seem plausible. When combined with personification, endowing inanimate things with human traits, it can expand our understanding of the thing in question in ways that direct description could not.
Perhaps the MC with the most experiments in hip-hop personification to his name might be Nas. From the self-explanatory “Money Is My Bitch” to the more nuanced “I Gave You Power,” where Nas raps in the first-person voice of a gun, he seems well aware of the expressive potential to be found in appealing to the human element in inanimate things. “I Gave You Power” is actually a species of personification known by its Greek name, prosopopoeia, a rhetorical device in which the poet writes from the perspective of another person or, in this case, object. By shifting the listener’s perspective to that of a gun, Nas finds a way of speaking out against gun violence without being preachy. The song ends with the gun jamming, refusing to shoot at the victim: “He pulled the trigger but I held on, it felt wrong / He squeezed harder, I didn’t budge, sick of the blood.” Ultimately, though, the gun has limited control over its own fate. When its owner dies, shot by the person he meant to shoot, the gun finds itself in the hands of another.
Personification lends itself to such critiques. Rap’s defining example of personification is undoubtedly Common’s 1994 classic “I Used to Love H.E.R.” The song works on two levels. On the literal level, it is Common’s love story with a young girl he sees grow into womanhood, facing a host of challenges along the way. On the metaphorical level, it is the story of hip hop itself. Common asks us to see hip hop personified in the girl, and his love for hip hop, both lost and found, in his love for her. If we didn’t grasp this metaphorical doubling on our own, Common makes sure that we get it. He gestures to the song’s potential double meaning before he starts rhyming, simply in the acronym of the title (H.E.R.). Even if we have no idea what the acronym stands for (purportedly it is “Hip-Hop in its Essence and Real”) we are tipped off that a double meaning, whatever it is, is there to be uncovered. If that weren’t enough, his final line spells it out in no uncertain terms: “’Cause who I’m talking bout, y’all, is hip hop
.” What makes “I Used to Love H.E.R.” work is that Common never overburdens his lyrics, on the narrative or the metaphorical level—indeed, it is possible to appreciate it simply as a love song without ever comprehending the conceit at work. Still, Common’s doubling of meaning renders the song powerful on two levels, validating its reputation as one of the finest raps on wax.
Wordplay resides in such multiple meanings, even in the very names MCs choose to call themselves. Most rappers have aliases. You might not have heard of Dante Terrell Smith but you surely have heard of Mos Def. Dennis Coles is Ghostface Killah, sometimes just Ghostface, and also Iron Man or Tony Starks. This process of naming, of exchanging one identity for another, has found its way into the very language of rap lyricism. In general, rhetoricians classify such names as epithets, which literally means “imposed.” A more specific variety of epithet is kenning, a trope that exchanges a given word or proper name for a compound poetic phrase. This style was first popularized in Old English poetry, largely forgotten, and now reborn today in rap. We can see kenning at work in rap precisely because it is the type of trope that elevates the speaker. So when Biggie rhymes “Teflon is the material for the imperial / mic-ripper, girl-stripper, the Hennysipper,” we see the MC rendering himself in epic proportions, and in the process reviving a figure of speech that peaked in popularity over a thousand years ago. The same holds true for these lines from Jean Grae’s “Hater’s Anthem,” a vicious battle rap: “The cancer-toker, the Mad Hatter, the Jabberwocky of rap.” Beginning with kenning, she moves to a more general form of epithet drawn from, of all things, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
Kenning is related to another important rhetorical figure in rap, the eponym, which in Greek means “named after.” Rap eponyms usually appear when MCs exchange a particular attribute or action (in other words, an adjective or a verb) for a famous name that brings it to mind. This is a fairly rare figure, which makes it all the more surprising that Jay-Z has not one but three of them on a single song. On “Threats” from The Black Album he delivers the following eponyms:
I’m especially Joe Pesci with it, friend
I will kill you, commit suicide, and kill you again.
We Rat Pack niggas, let Sam tap dance on you, then I Sinatra shot ya goddamn you.
Y’all wish I was frontin’, I George Bush the button.
Jay-Z’s threats take the shape of eponyms invoking famous individuals who represent danger in the characters they portray (Pesci’s ruthless Tommy DeVito from Goodfellas), the reputations that they carry (the Rat Pack with their reported links to the Mob), and the power they wield (Bush’s presidential control over America’s nuclear arsenal). Using eponyms instead of similes, Jay not only fashions more unusual—and fresh—figurative language, but also makes his meaning more powerful by enlisting his listeners’ minds in making apparent the meaning of the lines.
Jay-Z returns to this same rhetorical figure on 2007’s American Gangster album, combining it with another figure, metonymy—the use of one word to refer to something with which it is closely associated—to deliver the following clever line on “Party Life”: “Your boy’s off the wall, these other niggas is Tito.” The line works because it engages the listener in a mental process of indirect and abstract communication. It asks us to make meaning out of context; our minds might not necessarily jump to Michael Jackson from the mention of “off the wall” alone, but with “Tito” too, Jay’s line provides enough information for us to draw a strong inference. “Off the wall” is in a metonymic relationship with Michael Jackson because, as the title of his best early album, it is strongly associated with him. Tito works as an eponym because, unfair as it may be, his name is most often invoked to signal obscurity or failure. Just in case these meanings escape us, Jay glosses his own verse, speaking these lines over the hook: “Damn. Hey, baby, I said I’m off the wall, I’m like a young Michael Jackson, these other niggas is Tito. Shout out to Randy. Real talk!” It’s a bravura gesture, a playful show of amazement at his own lyrical virtuosity. In its own way, it’s also a kind of wordplay.
Metonymy’s form of indirect but artful expression offers MCs new ways of saying familiar things. Few topics are more familiar to rap than the diss, which makes rhetorical figures like metonymy into a lyrical weapon. For instance, Nas uses metonymy in 2008’s “Queens Get the Money” to deliver a coded diss at 50 Cent, who had suggested in an interview that Nas’s rhyme skills had waned. Nas answers with a rhyme that delivers a blow even as it asserts his own lyrical ingenuity: “Hiding behind 8 Mile and The Chronic / Get Rich but Dies Rhymin’, this is high science.” Using album titles to stand in for the artists with whom they are associated, Nas charges 50 with hiding behind Eminem and Dr. Dre, while riffing on the title of 50’s own album Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Through the very force of his art, Nas rebukes 50’s criticisms while refreshing his own language with a poetic figure.
Wordplay doesn’t always rely upon complex games with meaning. Some of the simplest rhetorical figures of all consist of manipulations of sound itself. “Woop! Woop! That’s the sound of da police,” KRS-One famously chants on the hook of “Sound of da Police” from 1993’s Return of the Boombap. The unmistakable sound he makes in place of the police siren is an example of onomatopoeia, the trope that works by exchanging the thing itself for a linguistic representation of the sound it makes. It would seem impossible for an oral poetry like rap even to contain a concept like onomatopoeia, given that onomatopoeia is defined by the written word. If the sound remains a sound without the middle ground of the page, then onomatopoeia can’t exist. So when we speak about onomatopoeia in rap, we are assuming that the lyrics exist in a book of rhymes or at least in a listener’s transcription.
Eminem offers a dramatic onomatopoeic example on “Kill You”: “invented violence, you vile venomous volatile bitches / vain Vicodin, vrinnn Vrinnn, VRINNN!” That last sound, if you couldn’t recognize it, is the sound of a chainsaw (excuse my transcription; I’m sure Em did it better if and when he wrote it down). By combining onomatopoeia with alliteration, he shows the natural progression of one figure to the next. The alliteration in the v sounds leads Eminem to surrender to the sound itself through onomatopoeia, which in turn somehow leads him back to a thing once again, the chainsaw. If this all seems rather involved—well, it is. But the brilliance of Eminem’s wordplay is that we experience it as effortless lyricism rather than complex poetic negotiation.
Where onomatopoeia celebrates sound itself, two other devices use sonic similarities to play games with meaning. Homonyms are two words with the same sound, same spelling, but different meanings—like fire (as in “flame”) and fire (as in “terminate from employment”). Homophones are two words with the same sound, different spellings, and different meanings—like led and lead. Chuck D rhymed on “Bring the Noise” that “they got me in a cell ’cause my records, they sell.” “Cell” and “sell” are homophones.
MCs have taken advantage of these types of words to fashion clever wordplay, and in turn transform meaning in the process. For example, Jay-Z’s opening verse to Beyoncé’s 2006 single “Déjà Vu” goes like this: “I used to run base like Juan Pierre / now I run the bass, high hat, and the snare.” Here we have a simile comparing how Jay-Z used to run drugs to how Juan Pierre, the fleet-footed centerfielder for the Dodgers, runs the base pads. This relies upon “base” as a homonym. Rather than stopping there, he follows it up with the next line that flips the homonym into a homophone by introducing “bass” as a drum. An even more ingenious example comes from “Blue Magic,” the first single off of Jay-Z’s 2007 American Gangster album:
Blame Reagan for making me into a monster
Blame Oliver North and IRAN-CONTRA
I RAN CONTRAband that they sponsored
Before this rhyming stuff we was in concert.
It testifies to Jay-Z’s lyrical ingenuity that even though we fully experience these poetic lines by ear rather than by eye, looking at them on the page calls attent
ion to their individual effects, not just their cumulative impact. Equally as impressive as the homonym is that he delivers it while making a fairly complicated point, all while rhyming four lines together. Lil Wayne achieves a similar effect on his ubiquitous 2008 hit “Lollipop (Remix)” when he rhymes these lines:
Safe sex is great sex, better wear a LATEX
’Cause you don’t want that LATE TEXT
That “I think I’m LATE” TEXT
While these are not perfect homophones, they become so through Lil Wayne’s performance of the lines. These are a virtuoso’s lines, ones that Weezy himself seems to appreciate as he chuckles after delivering them. However, in both Jay-Z and Lil Wayne’s rhymes, as complex as the wordplay becomes, the lyrical effect remains one of absolute effortlessness.
Some MCs have taken this same technique and made it not just the basis of a hot line, but the foundation of an entire rhyme style. Rarely is it that a single rhetorical form can essentially define the poetics of not just one MC but of an entire clique. Such is the case with the Diplomats and the figurative trope of antanaclasis. Antanaclasis is when a single word is repeated multiple times, but each time with a different meaning. For the Diplomats, the popularity of it likely began with Cam’ron, the leading member of Dipset, who started his career rapping alongside Mase. Consider the following lines off one of his mix-tape releases: “I flip China White, / my dishes white china / from China.” Playing with just two words, he renders them in several distinct permutations. China White is a particular variety of heroin. White china is a generic term for dishware, and he then goes on to specify that his dishware actually is from China. What might sound like nonsense or repetition for the sake of sound alone soon reveals itself as a rhetorical figure in action.