Rap Music and the Anti-Tolkien

Corey Olsen descended from the presidential throne to present a paper at Mythmoot VI, entitled “The Song of Words: The Prosody of Eminem”. Everyone was scandalized, mostly because we enjoy being the kind of people who can be scandalized by an academic presentation.

Rap has several similarities to Anglo-Saxon poetics. It was intended to be heard, not read. A line doesn’t have a fixed number of syllables. Instead, it’s built around a fixed number of beats. Where Anglo-Saxons alliterated on the beat, rappers rhyme on the beat. Rap has a lot more complexity, though, because the DJ is laying down a beat that may be quite different from the stressed syllables. The interplay between the two beats is another of the raw materials the poet can use to convey meaning. (I am assuming that Anglo-Saxon bards didn’t have a rhythm track behind their performances, though there is no evidence to support such an idea.)

It takes like 10 seconds to make a picture of M&Ms in MS Office

The concept of “rhyme” experiences a certain amount of strain in the lyrics of Eminem, but it’s clearly audible. Assonance, plus a common stress pattern and one common consonant, build up patterns of 3- or 4-syllable rhymes. A lyric sheet with the various rhymes highlighted showed that Eminem has as many as three interleaved multiple rhymes going in succession. At one point, Prof. Olsen calculated that 89% of the syllables in a verse were participating in one of the rhymes. That’s an amazing figure. Chaucer managed 18 rhymes in succession at one point. George Starbuck wrote a ballad that briefly reached a figure of 100%, but only for the last 15 syllables. This kind of density neither CO nor I have seen before.

The most interesting part of the talk was when Prof. Olsen rearranged the lyrics to “Lose Yourself” to align with the beats of the rhythm track: the song has an internal section where the narrator (otherwise trapped in poverty) envisions himself succeeding on stage. In most of the song, the rhymes wind around the rhythm track in a just-barely oscillatory pattern. But during the dream-section, the principal rhymes line up with the beat. What’s more, it was the third beat in the line — the beat that always alliterates in Anglo-Saxon verse. (“Just sayin'” – CO)

The title of Prof. Olsen’s talk is a quote from the Silmarillion, but I’d like to wrap it around and come back to Tolkien again. It’s common to hear critics describe JRRT as reactionary. (Google Scholar returns over 2,000 hits.) Against what was he reacting? Well, in technology, theology, or prose style, practically everything, but in terms of poetry, I think I’ve found a specific person.

Dame Edith Sitwell published “Façade (An Entertainment)” in 1922. It was performed with music written by Sir William Walton. The poems are completely dedicated to rhythm and “the song of words”, with meaning as a secondary consideration. Eminem too is willing to sacrifice sense in favor of sounds; occupational hazard, I think.

Here’s the opening stanza of “Tarantella“, analyzed similarly to the way Prof. Olsen did it. I’ve numbered the rhymes and called out a slide into alliteration with letters:

Where the satyrs are chattering Nymphs with their flattering
            1          1          2                 1
Glimpse of the forest enhance
   2                    3
All the beauty of marrow and Cucumber narrow
                    4                   4
And Ceres will join in the dance
                             3
Where the satyrs can flatter The flat-leaved fruit
            1          1a          a          a          
And the gherkin green And the marrow
           b      b               4
Said Queen Venus "Silenus, we'll settle between us
             5      5                       5
The gourd and the cucumber narrow!"
      ----8-----            4
See, like palaces hid in the lake They shake -
             7                  6         6
Those greenhouses shot By her arrow narrow!
           7                    4     4
The gardener seizes the pieces, like
       8        6         6
Croesus, for gilding the Potting-shed barrow.
   6                                     4

There’s a kind of a-b-a-b rhyme scheme going, in two chunks, but there are four other rhymes interleaved with the two chunks. The two chunks pivot about the alliterative passage.  (I would never have noticed the slant-rhyme between “gourd and the” and “gardener” before I listened to Prof. Olsen’s talk, incidentally.)

I see a lot of connections between what Dame Edith did with poetry set to Modernist music and what Eminem does with rap.  I used the term “Anti-Tolkien” up above because, while there’s a shared knowledge of mythology and a genuine love for the sound of words here, JRRT was meticulous about keeping his word-play and his classical allusions within meaningful sentences. I suspect Sitwell’s Modernist embrace of Chaos is what JRRT pushed against with his own, superficially more traditional, verse.  I’m going to try to fill in the gaps in this idea for a paper next year — may the scandals continue!

Let me simplify the rhyme just to amplify the noise – “Mosh”