Having transcribed verses by KRS-One and Lil’ Kim, I wanted to take on something more current. I decided to do Noname‘s haunting neo-soul-infused song “Don’t Forget About Me.”
The song evokes D’Angelo, and calls him out by name.
In some ways, this Noname track was an easier transcription project than the verses by KRS-One or Lil’ Kim. Noname sings a clear melody on the G-flat major pentatonic scale, so even when her pitch is casual, it’s still obvious what note she’s pointing at. However, Noname’s flow is quite a bit more rhythmically complex and ambiguous than the relatively straightforward sixteenth note grid of boom-bap. The main question for me is how literally to take her performance. There are phrases where it sounds like she might have mentally conceived of a string of straight sixteenths, but then dragged or rushed for effect. Or maybe she did all these complex tuplets deliberately? Rather than try to read her mind, I ultimately opted to write out her performed rhythms as exactly as I could.
This verse is very different from the 90s classics. There are a few rhymes scattered around, but they don’t appear regularly. Several lines contain no rhymes at all. The phrase lengths are unpredictable, stopping and starting in asymmetric bursts. There is order and structure here, but it’s mysterious and oblique, more stream-of-consciousness than conventional couplets.
I had intended to offer this to my music education students as a possible basis for a rap songwriting exercise, where they take an existing flow and write their own lyrics to it. However, this verse might be too idiosyncratic and complicated to be usable. Maybe I should just have the students write to the 90s boom-bap verses, and to do some close listening to this one so they understand where the state of the art form is.