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Style marker
Biggie's signature swagger comes partly from the way he uses cross-rhythms. These "grouping dissonances" make his rhymes fall in unpredictable places.
These examples are one subtype of his syncopation strategy: when he puts two rhymes in one bar, he often places the first rhyme on beat 2, and the second rhyme on the "and" of beat 4.
He did it a lot more often on his first album than on his second. I don't know any prior rappers who used this flow.
Where am I?
SongPatterns.com is an encyclopedia of
- the musicological devices that contribute to the distinctive sounds of various artists, genres, and time periods
- the elements that songwriters draw from preexisting songsConnection
Why?
- to enrich your listening
- to empower your writing
- to promote awareness of the nature, prevalence, and legitimacy of musical borrowing
[...] the production and perception of music—like language—relies on knowledge that is not easily articulated and, to some extent, unconscious. Anyone who can speak and understand English has some kind of knowledge of the rules of English grammar, but few such people are able to state exactly what those rules are. Similarly, [...] creators and listeners of rock music have knowledge about the norms and regularities of rock, but largely at an unconscious level. In large part, my goal [...] is to articulate this tacit knowledge, to uncover the mental processes and representations involved in musical creation and perception.
— David Temperley, The Musical Language of Rock
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes 1:9