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Learned Vol. 4, Issue 33
This week: Poetry is written in stanzas, songs in verses, and rap…rap is written in bars. Not that kind. We discuss how this came about and why it’s important. Then a bit of news, some footnotes, and then we’re out. Let’s get to it.
Over the past few decades, as rap has gone from the streets to novelty to respected art form, a whole dictionary's worth of vocabulary has emerged as a way to talk about rap and rappers. But one word has emerged as the de-facto standard for talking about rap and the people who write them: bars. As mentioned in the intro, bars is to rap as stanza is to poetry, so, where did it come from and why is it important? As always the second question is harder to answer and depends a lot on the first.
Let's start with the caveat - "bars" as used in rap is so new that dictionaries haven't quite finalized just what exactly it means but Dictionary (dot com) has a good, basic definition:
In hip-hop slang, bars refers to a rapper’s lyrics, especially when considered extremely good.
It's generally accepted that rap's use of bars comes from the general music-theory use of bars, which is basically a way of annotating repetitions in a piece of music. From Wikipedia:
a bar (or measure) is a segment of time corresponding to a specific number of beats...dividing music into bars provides regular reference points to pinpoint locations within a musical composition.
This makes it a lot easier to write down all the various parts of a song in a coherent and cohesive manner. By separating the entire composition into equal bars, you can transpose pieces between instruments or even have different instruments play at different tempos to create all kinds of effects.
Crucially, while bars have been used in written music since at least the 1500s, performers have not needed them as much. In other words, bars were far more important to composers and conductors than they were to musicians, especially those musicians who were playing without the benefit of written music. (Think traveling bands and the like.) The point is, bars have always been of more use to the people behind the performers than it has been to musicians.
In the early days of rap, most songs were rapped over borrowed musical sections from other songs. A DJ would find some records with catchy hooks and use those as a backing track for lyricists. In the 1980s and 90s, this practice got more-or-less sued out of existenceand suddenly rappers needed producers who could craft beats for them.
Producersfilled the role that composers had with a different generation and a different kind of music. Producers needed to put beats together in much the same manner that composers had arranged orchestral pieces. And for that, they needed bars.
As time went on, rap continued to evolve. Disparate features began to coalesce and solidify into standard patterns. Things like having a guest artist sing the chorus or having more established rappers perform a verse changed from interesting novelties to business-as-usual. Along with these changes came a greater formal understanding of how an individual rapper’s pace, pronunciation, and emphasis created the sound of a given song. You could give the same beat and same lyrics to four different rappers and the end result would be four individual flows. The word bars shifted from the background musical rhythms to lyrical flows, cementing the new use as a way of differentiating an individual's skill or contribution to a song.
Which brings us to the second question asked above, why is this important? Why should we care that rap, as an artistic expression, has evolved its own vocabulary?
In rap's recent past, a conscious attempt was made to equate rap to poetry. By making rap out to be a modern, street-level form of poetry, adherents could lend artistic credence to the form, taking it from a punchline on prime-time t.v. shows to a movement with its own forms and rules. Rap embraced this. Raps went from jokey couplets to fully scannable compositions with sophisticated techniques like internal rhyme and odd meters. By the time bars became a way of describing the lyrics to a song, rap had fully transitioned from its nascent form of talking rhymes to a sophisticated form of lyrical expression.
But, rap is no more and no less poetrythan pop or rock music is. Which is to say, just as some classic songs by the likes of Bob Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel could be considered poems set to music, some raps could be stripped of music and set on the page and find themselves easily collected with any other kind of poetry.
However. The reason songs and raps are not poetry, or are, at best, a particular subset of poetry, is because they need musicto be fully effective. And this is where bars comes back into play. Words create identity. Having a vernacular draws a line in the sand, this side of the line is one thing, that side is something different. Bars is that line in the sand. Poems are written in lines and stanzas. Songs are written in verse, chorus, verse. But raps are written in bars. By making this statement, rap is declaring itself to be its own medium, something distinct from poetry, pop music, or any other artistic expression.
Linguistics in the News:
Merriam-Webster has released its updates to the dictionary for 2021. All 455 of them. There are a lot of fun ones in here as well as several sure to fluster the overly-excitable pedant in your life, but I've got a couple I'm really chuffed about.
First and foremost, I'm really happy that horchata has been added. I've been drinking it for years; I've written about it here at least twice. Good job!
I'm equally excited that FTW is now officially in the dictionary. I started using this acronym back when I was a young gamer and now I feel fully justified in my life choices. Especially because some of my younger students are unfamiliar with it and I was beginning to wonder if it was fading out of use.
On the other side of the ledger, I'm less excited about otaku making the leap from Japanese to English, mainly because I speak Japanese and it's not a terribly nice word to use to refer to someone. It's not a great word to use in English either, but the English-speaker's tendency to try to "reclaim" derisive words means that there are a whole bunch of people who will come to Japan happily calling themselves otaku, never realizing that what they think they're saying and what Japanese people are hearing are vastly different.
Anyway, it's an interesting list. Take a look and see which one you can use to stimulate conversation around your Thanksgiving table this weekend!
I mean, the jokes write themselves.
Sampling is still around, but for a good look at what it was vs. what it is now, read the 33 1/3 book about the Beastie Boys' album Paul's Boutique.
There has always been a bit of rivalry between musicians who read music and those who don't; there is a lot of deep, music-specific history here that I'm eliding to save space and time. But it's worth looking into, especially if you're a musician who aspires to either songwriting or publishing.
I'm speculating here; while this era of rap is pretty well documented, there were not a lot of linguists hanging around the scene doing research into how the language was changing.
As opposed to the innate understanding of people who grew up with rap and are therefore more fluent in its scaffoldings and structures than those of us looking in from the outside.
I know. That sentence alone is like throwing chum into shark-infested waters. It's an old debate and I'm not all that interested in it beyond the point I make above. That said, if you have an opinion on whether songs are or are not poetry, leave a comment and let's get into it. :)
Need an example? Look at Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat, one of my all-time favorite songs. It began its life as a letter to a friend but in lyric form. It even ends with Cohen signing his name the letter. But the sung version is so much more impactful than the written form; there's a section where Cohen has written off his friendship with the addressee, singing with his signature growl that "his woman is free." And then, just a line later, he softens, saying "thank you, for the trouble you took from her eyes," before again growling, this time excoriating himself, "I thought it was there for good, so I never tried." My point is, the lyrics are interesting on paper, but they take on life and fire when they're sung.