On Some Serious Next Millennium Rap Ishhh

Abstract

By examining the Hip Hop poetics on Pharoahe Monch's album, Internal Affairs (1999), this article demonstrates the linguistic inventiveness and innovativeness of contemporary African American lyricists. As poets, Hip Hop MCs (rhymers) have both built on and expanded far beyond the American poetic tradition, using a form that is highly intertextual and that demonstrates multilayered poetic complexity. While Hip Hop MCs draw upon alliteration and assonance and other traditional rhyme forms, they also employ new rhyme strategies that require new categories of knowledge, such as compound internal rhymes, primary and secondary internal rhymes, chain rhymes, back-to-back chain rhymes, and bridge rhymes. Hip Hop MCs also employ various literary techniques, such as wordplay, simile, metaphor, narrativity, flashback, role-play, suspense, irony, and imagery in their lyrical compositions. Often constructing these rhymes in a multirhyme matrix, Hip Hop MCs offer a vast corpus of literary and linguistic texts to be analyzed.