A Timeless Wavelength

Lightnin’ Rod – Sport

Anyone who thinks that rap music hasn’t grown more musically sophisticated over the years would do well to listen to any contemporary hip-hop track, and then revisit Lightnin’ Rod’s legendary 1973 album Hustlers’ Convention. I’m not saying it’s a bad album; I quite like it.  But this album is to hip-hop as the Apple II is to personal computing:  important for being the first to gain widespread recognition, and fondly remembered by its fans, but nowhere near as advanced as what would come later.

This track, the album’s opener, is a representative sample.  Its stock bassline and ’70s Blaxploitation guitar riffs (provided by Kool and the Gang, no less) are nothing special, but it’s in the lyrical delivery that this album really stands out by utterly failing to stand out.  This song, and every other song on the album, more or less adheres to the lyrical meter of anapestic heptameter.  This is the same meter used in Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” a poem that I will never again be able to read without hearing wokka-chikka-wokka in the background.   The hip-hop hits of the ’80s didn’t use this exact same rhythm, but they tended to have a fairly rigid pattern of their own, one that could easily incorporate lines rhyming “hands in the air, y’all” with “just don’t care, y’all”.  Now compare that to the present day, when every rapper is expected to have his own distinctive “flow” and most rap songs are impossible to describe in terms of a single metrical style.

What’s fascinating to me is that the wide metrical gulf that separates Lightnin’ Rod from, say, Chamillionaire is contrasted with a stark lack of diversity in other areas.  Rap music, regardless of era or style, tends to have the same basic drumbeat, in 4/4 time, with bass on 1, snare on 2, and a slight variation of the same on 3 and 4.  I am not aware of any rap song that has ever been set to waltz time or 5/4 swing; I would love to be proven wrong.  And while it has become popular in recent years to incorporate “R&B breaks” or little pieces of melody (these days unfortunately usually provided by that detestable machine, the vocoder), most rap vocals are strictly rhythmical and so have no melodic or harmonic components to speak of.  Yet we have barely scratched the surface of what can be accomplished within this seemingly rigid musical framework.

This post was mainly an excuse to use the phrase “anapestic heptameter.”  It’s what NLP researchers and Amazon.com call a “statistically improbable phrase.”