Ch-ch-ch-check out, check out check out my melody

My computer dictionary says that a melody is “a sequence of single notes that is musically satisfying.” There are a lot of people out there who think that rap isn’t music because it lacks melody. My heart broke when I found out that Jerry Garcia was one of these people. If anyone could be trusted to be open-minded, you’d think it would be Jerry, but no.

I’ve always instinctively believed this position to be wrong, and I finally decided to test it empirically. I took some rap acapellas and put them into Melodyne. What I found is that rap vocals use plenty of melody. The pitches rise and fall in specific and patterned ways. The pitches aren’t usually confined to the piano keys, but they are nevertheless real and non-arbitrary. (If you say a rap line with the wrong pitches, it sounds terrible.) Go ahead, look and listen for yourself. Click each image to hear the song section in question.

Eric B and Rakim – “Follow The Leader”

The first four lines:

Eric B and Rakim - Follow The Leader - first four lines

“Stage is a cage, the mic is a third rail”

Eric B and Rakim - Follow The Leader - "The stage is a cage, the mic is a third rail"

I would have expected Rakim’s voice to be a monotone, but “Follow The Leader” spans almost a full octave.

Nas – “Nas Is Like

The first four lines:

Nas - Nas Is Like - first four lines

The chorus:

Nas - Nas Is Like - chorus

Nas follows a pattern that a lot of emcees use, which is to sit within an approximate minor third. His “tonic” is somewhere in the neighborhood of F# or G. The chorus isn’t rapped directly, it’s made of sections of other Nas songs scratched in by DJ Premiere. There should be more pitch variation, but Melodyne gets confused by fast turntable scribbles and renders them as long single notes.

Missy Elliott – “Work It”

First half of the chorus:

Missy Elliott - Work It - first half of chorus

“Listen up close while I take it backward”

Missy Elliott - Work It - "Listen up close while I take it backward"

The chorus of “Work It” spans two octaves. On “worth it” she jumps up a tenth, and on “work it” she drops a ninth. Speech-like cadences use much wider pitch ranges than more song-like ones. The line “Listen up close while I take it backwards” is followed by “sdrawkcab ti ekat I elihw esolc pu netsiL.” The axis of reflection is just before measure 66. It looks like Timbaland scratched the backwards line in by hand, rather than just reversing it in the DAW, because its pitch and timing don’t precisely match the original.

Jay-Z – “99 Problems”

The chorus:

Jay-Z - 99 Problems - chorus

“I ain’t passed the bar but I know a lil bit”

Jay-Z - 99 Problems - "I ain't passed the bar but I know a lil bit"

Like Nas, Jay mostly hops up and down within a second or minor third, but he’ll jump up or down a fifth when he really wants to emphasize a word.

Notorious BIG – Things Done Changed

End of the first verse:

Notorious BIG - Things Done Changed - end of first verse

This phrase sticks pretty close to the A flat major scale. Biggie oscillates between 4^ and 5^ for the first half of the section and then takes a rambling walk down to the tonic.

Outkast – “Bombs Over Baghdad”

The first four lines:

Outkast - Bombs Over Baghdad - first four lines

Andre 3000 has a sing-song flow even when he isn’t singing outright. Every syllable here has a noticeable pitch swoop on it, and this is at an extremely fast tempo. Big Boi is similarly melodic. At slower tempos, their melodic quality is even more pronounced.

Janelle Monáe – “Tightrope

Big Boi’s guest verse:

Janelle Monáe - Tightrope - Big Boi's guest verse

Here’s a typically melodic Big Boi flow: the first half of the passage is a sequence of wide interval leaps, and then it converges onto a tighter pattern within the usual rapper interval of a minor third.

 

Rappers have never doubted their status as singers. The term “rap singer” is a widely used synonym for emcee. Fans praise emcees they admire by saying they have a melodic flow. The Eric B and Rakim song that this post is named for invites you to check out Rakim’s melody explicitly.

Bone Thugs aim specifically for the piano-key notes in their flows. Tupac, Eminem, and Cee-Lo are all notably melodic rappers, and the latter two mix in a fair amount of straight singing. There’s a whole wave of rappers exaggerating their melodies by quantizing the pitches with Auto-Tune, most famously Lil Wayne and Kanye West. But while hip-hop fan forums are full of discussions about melodic flow, almost no “real” musicians have done serious analysis of rap melodies. Google searches turned up Chilly Gonzales and not much else.

Not many instrumentalists have engaged with rap melodies either. Jason Moran is a rare example. In his amazing arrangement of “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa, he plays the rap verses on piano, following their rhythms and general pitch contour, but using specific notes of his own choosing (I assume–maybe he analyzed them with Melodyne.) I would love to hear more of this approach.

The boundary between speaking and singing has always been hazy. All language uses prosody. Pitched languages like Mandarin use prosody for their grammar. Supposedly “unpitched” languages like English still rely on pitch to convey punctuation, emotion, tribal identity, and much else. Like when young people? End all their phrases? With a question mark? They do that by using rising pitch where you expect falling pitch. We talk to babies in a strongly melodic voice, and they respond to the music long before they can understand the words. My son is two and talking up a storm, but we still use a speech/singing hybrid when we’re trying to get him to sleep, or to comfort him when he’s upset.

Stephen Mithen thinks that both language and music evolved from purely prosodic vocalizing, which in turn evolved from the emotionally inflected calls of our primate ancestors. There continues to be more music in everyday speech than we tend to realize. Rappers might be in the hazy boundary zone, but they’re closer to the singing side of that zone. People who claim not to hear the melody in rap are not listening carefully.

6 replies on “Ch-ch-ch-check out, check out check out my melody”

  1. Being a long-time fan of Jerry’s musicality I’m not going to dismiss him out-of-hand. If this is someone Ornette Coleman wanted to sit down with then I’ll take him seriously (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwQvcMQsOfU). And, of course I’m not suggesting, Ethan that you don’t.

    The amount of new music in the classical world that stems from vocal samples is, of course huge (monumental, legendary). I was at the Bang On A Can Marathon on Sunday and it seemed like a quarter or third of the pieces performed started as field recordings. Scott Johnson’s “Soliloquy” from the Kronos Quartet’s “Short Stories” album is, I think emblematic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaoE1qy-NLc).

    What’s my point? Listen to what composers like Johnson do with the sample. It’s informed by a wealth of musical history. It’s musically interesting. I don’t generally compare this to rap. They’re different things. Rap has it’s good points (I guess). The Scott Johnson, though is (to my ear) exquisitely beautiful. I suspect it would have intrigued Jerry. Listen to his electronic & tape music from the “Garcia” record (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbhAsj-QbHE) and you can see his ears were wide open.

    I’m trying to challenge the knee-jerk reactions that some of your readers may be feeling by introducing some relevant material, that’s all.

    1. Jerry’s statement was such a disappointment for me because I’m the world’s biggest Deadhead, and because Jerry was my gateway into so many challenging forms of music (including Ornette.)

      I like hip-hop because it takes the concepts of musique concrete and such and uses them to make music that a person can dance to. I find hip-hop to be more exciting and inspiring than any other pop form, and more than most art music too.

      1. As luck would have it I’m listening to John (Plunderphonics) Oswald’s “Greyfolded” — his 2 hr blend of 50 different versions of “Dark Star” (recorded over a 20 year period) right now. It’s, in some ways a DJ mix of a Dead classic.

        I enjoyed listening to the examples you provided in your post but I walked away unconvinced. It seems to me that hip-hop pointedly jettisoned a lot of what makes R&B beautiful (accessible) in an attempt to become un-cooptable. It reminds me of the French New Wave cinema in that regard (especially Goddard). i sympathize with and respect that impulse. But, feel that you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. The disco-with-a-side-of-rap that Debbie Harry, Chaka Khan, and Janelle Monáe present is powerful because it mixes non-alike materials. The Jason Moran “Planet Rock” is, of course brilliant. It’s like Sun Ra’s essential (meaning of-the-very-fickin’-essence) “Rocket Number 9” which I assume inspired Bambaataa in the first place.

        1. I love Greyfolded.

          Unconvinced of what? That hip-hop is melodic, or that it’s awesome? Hip-hop is certainly less pretty than R&B, but for me it’s not any less impactful, just different. Miles and Coltrane are less pretty than Basie and Ellington, you know?

          Debbie Harry rapping is painfully bad. I love Blondie, but girlfriend can’t rap.

          1. On a scale of one to ten, one being the Inna Gadda Da Vida drum solo and ten being a Mendelssohn Violin Concerto rap hovers around a two or three (generally). That doesn’t make it bad music. And it certainly doesn’t mean, as Garcia stated (possibly taking an exaggerated position for rhetorical effect) that rap isn’t music. Rap is obviously music. It’s just a music that emphasizes other musical components over melody to a great degree.

            I’m reading Philip Glasses excellent autobiography “Words Without Music” at the moment. I had almost forgotten that when he first reached a national audience there were people who called him a musical idiot. They said his music wasn’t music at all and hinted that it might be a joke on the audience. It’s hard to believe it now, but it’s a music that made some people angry just being confronted by it.

            One thing about Jerry’s comments– he didn’t have the benefit that we do have now of having time to get used to rap. This interview took place a number of years before his death in ’95 (judging from the (lack of) grey in his hair) which means rap was still pretty new. Given time he may have gotten to see rap evolve and come to appreciate some of what it does do well. We’ll never know.

            BTW: What would Pigpen have thought about rap? Would he have found it “Hard To Handle”(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPDlMeJ6bZY)? I think he was a born rap artist.

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