Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music
Jeremy Tatar · Journal of Music Theory · 2022
ALTHOUGH THE EARLIEST academic research on rap music is now close to thirty years old, over the last decade in particular the field has witnessed the rapid development of a body of literature with an explicit music-analytical orientation.1 Studies of rap have become prominent in journal publications and conference presentations, and a diverse range of methodologies have emerged to address the sonic particularities of this musical practice. Much has changed since Kyle Adams (2008: para. 2) wrote that “many still hesitate to accept rap music as a valid art form, and even those who readily accept it are not necessarily interested in analyzing it.” Mitchell Ohriner's Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music is an innovative contribution to this discipline that mobilizes a corpus study of approximately two hundred verses by anglophone emcees to theorize the rhythmic dimensions of lyrical delivery, the titular “flow.” Formalizing notoriously slippery concepts such as phrase, rhyme, accent, and, indeed, the very features of flow itself, Ohriner introduces a novel conception of “groove” for the analysis of emcees' stylistic fingerprints. At its core, a groove is the specific pattern of syllables that an emcee accents within a measure. As I describe in more detail below, Ohriner's theory of vocal grooves (and his attendant model of “fuzzy listening” for their identification) is the most substantial contribution of Flow, and is an analytical tool that I hope to see more widely used in the future. It alone is well worth the price of admission.Along with this study of the rhythmic practices of emcees, Ohriner's parallel objective with Flow is as a proof-of-concept for its methodology, which revolves around two interrelated concerns. First, Ohriner showcases the explanatory potential of computational music analysis (CMA), which he notes as possessing only a relatively small following within the music theory community. He situates CMA at the intersection between what Leonard Meyer (1973: 6–7) describes as “style analysis” and “critical analysis,”2 and he argues that it offers its practitioners the ability to ground close readings of a hermeneutic nature against a quantitative understanding of the shared attributes of a much larger body of music. As Ohriner (xxiii) writes, “the corpus approach formally identifies this field of possibilities and can characterize the exceptionality of artists' choices given the tendencies of the style.” Such a vantage point therefore allows him to consider, for example, “what are the most typical and least typical ways of flowing?” (xxiv), a question that in many respects distills the analytical project of the book as a whole.Flow's second methodological concern is with “reproducibility.” In principle, reproducibility refers to the ability of subsequent researchers to reach the same set of results if given the same data and using the same methods of analysis. While reproducibility is practically a necessity in certain branches of the sciences, it has not yet been widely adopted by music theorists.3 Ohriner primarily addresses reproducibility through an emphasis on transparent decision-making, and he consistently endeavors to show the working behind each stage of his analyses so that others might later revise, extend, or even refute his claims. As he writes, “My greatest hope for this book, and the reason I have not only adopted a computational approach but also made efforts to document the process of the analysis, is that other scholars might adopt a similar framework of using the power of digital computing to inspire, guide, and ground the humanistic inquiry they are already undertaking” (xxxi). Flow is therefore accompanied by a GitHub repository (https://github.com/mohriner/flowBook) containing the assorted source data for Ohriner's transcriptions (such as phonetic information, isolated vocal files, timings, segmentations, and annotations), the numerous pieces of code used in their analysis (written in the programming language R), and the graphical visualizations that are generated by these scripts. I possess only a passing familiarity with GitHub and an even less functional command of R, but I nonetheless found this resource easy enough to navigate through and to tinker with. Oxford University Press has also furnished a supplementary website for Flow, which contains most (but not all) of the audio and visual examples that are referenced throughout the book. Ohriner's diligent organization of his materials and his generosity in distributing them are additional features of Flow that I hope become more widespread within our discipline. Such an open-source model challenges the notions of proprietary knowledge and “expertise” that still characterize certain subfields and represents a step toward redefining the kind of work and the kind of scholars that get to “count” in music theory (Hisama 2021).Following an introduction that stakes out flow's unique position with respect to extant theories of rhythm in both music and spoken language, Flow is divided into two parts. Part I consists of five chapters and begins with an inspired turn. Seeking to delineate what, exactly, a flow's rhythmic features are, Ohriner asks emcees themselves. But rather than conduct interviews, he instead analyzes what emcees do when they rap about their flow—something that occurs, by the way, almost constantly. More specifically, he attends to the changes in an emcee's delivery when they announce that they are “flipping” or altering their flow midverse. Comparing a before-flow with a flipped-flow across several examples, Ohriner deduces a set of musical parameters that define the focus of his subsequent analyses: the cardinality of the metric space in which an emcee raps, the placement of their rhyming syllables, the durations between these rhymes, the durations between accented syllables, and, more generally, the consistency of each of these features (16). The strength of beginning with this artist-first conception of flow is that Ohriner can dive immediately into musical issues rather than taking, say, the more circuitous path of an extensive literature review. For all its emphasis on computation, Flow is suffused from the outset with an investment in the act of listening that in turn reflects a deep love of the music it examines.Chapters 2 and 3 revisit and expand on much of the material covered in an earlier article of Ohriner's (2016: 157–62) and detail the construction of his genre-wide corpus and the means by which he annotates features such as rhythm, phrasing, rhyme, and accent.4 Chapter 4 focuses on vocal groove, which I explain below, and chapter 5 tours the various statistical results from Ohriner's corpus analysis before demonstrating how these data can be used to locate the particular flow of a given artist (in this case, Black Thought of The Roots) within the general tendencies of the genre. By convincingly addressing both aspects of Meyer's stylistic and critical modes of analysis, chapter 5 is an exemplary illustration of the payoff of Ohriner's computational approach. Replete with analytical “aha!” moments, it was my favorite among the chapters.Part II of Flow draws on various other findings from the corpus to present three contrasting case studies on the expressive practices of emcees. Chapter 6 explores the relationship between accentual patterning and narrative in the music of Eminem, focusing specifically on the ways in which metric complexity is frequently associated with the topic of technical prowess in his lyrics. Chapter 7 returns to the work of Black Thought and The Roots to theorize the possible modes of rhythmic interaction between an emcee and their instrumental accompaniments and also considers how this is influenced by the exigencies of hip-hop's compositional process(es) and live performance. Chapter 8 analyzes how Talib Kweli's supposedly “off-beat” delivery can be reconciled with more general features represented by the corpus. This chapter addresses issues of microtiming and quantization that are vital rhythmic topics in contemporary hip-hop, but which nonetheless play a relatively minimal role in Ohriner's preceding analyses.Flow's structure is quite modular, giving readers the opportunity to mix and match sections according to their needs. Ohriner is careful to keep the chapters relatively self-contained and is cognizant that their relative appeal will vary depending on the reader. The three case studies that constitute Part II can be read in isolation—both from one another and from Part I—without any major loss of detail, and chapters 2 and 3 could easily stand alone as readings for seminar topics on corpus construction and the systematization of analysis, respectively. There are little touches here that make this possible: the introduction includes a brief section titled “How to Read This Book” that flags which chapters would be of most interest to which audiences (xxxi), and a primer on conventions contains an overview of the graphical representations used throughout (xxxvii–xl). There is also a glossary that collates approximately sixty-five specialized terms encountered across the book, and chapter 6 begins with a concise refresher on the mechanics of the grooves from chapter 4 (136–37). As a more general strategy for courting a wide readership, none of Ohriner's arguments rely on the ability to read Western staff notation, nor on any familiarity with concepts from conventional music theory such as keys, scales, or chords.There is a small price that is paid by this modularity, however, and the independence of the final three chapters, on Eminem, Black Thought, and Talib Kweli, precludes any building of momentum or sense of culmination across the book's second half. Curiously, Flow contains no explicit conclusion to wrap things up neatly (or even an epilogue or afterword), and by ending with a chapter on microtiming in Kweli's music—a topic relatively tangential to the book's main concerns—the overall experience of working through these successive analyses is somewhat anticlimactic. This minor quibble aside, and the sometimes-formidable technical descriptions notwithstanding, the discursive breadth of Flow is sure to render it appealing to a broad (though brave) readership.The capstone of Ohriner's theory of flow is his model of vocal groove. Operating in a cyclical metric space with sixteen possible positions—that is, a measure of 4/4 subdivided into sixteenth notes—these grooves define patterns of accentuation that are the technological progeny of the beat-class sets developed by Richard Cohn (1992), after Dan Warburton (1988).5 To illustrate, Example 1 reproduces two measures from Black Thought's verse in the song “Lighthouse” by The Roots (Ohriner's example 3.14b).6 The larger circles mark the accented syllables as identified by Ohriner's algorithm (see chapter 3), and the numbers in the black circles above the lines track instances of rhyming syllables. Counting from position 0 (the downbeat), we see that accents fall in a pattern of 2-2-3-3-2-2-2 across the two measures, except for the final vacancy at position 14. This distribution of accents represents the groove both inhabited and projected by Black Thought at this particular moment.In order to formalize a finite system of grooves, Ohriner imposes two main restrictions. First, grooves span exactly sixteen positions. Although he notes that this constraint is somewhat artificial, Ohriner argues that this is the prevailing subdivision of metric space in the examples he studied.7 Second, he prohibits accents on consecutive positions, joining a venerable tradition famously captured by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff's (1983: 69) Metric Well-Formedness Rule no. 3: “At each metric level, strong beats are spaced either two or three beats apart.”8 Under the principle of rotational equivalence, then, there are seven possible ways of sorting spans of two and/or three units within a total space of sixteen. These seven “groove classes” are summarized in Example 2 beside a rhythmic realization of their “prime form” (though Ohriner does not use this term) beginning on the downbeat. By convention, groove classes are indicated using angle brackets, with the durations of three packed to the left.9 When describing the appearance of these groove classes in emcees' verses, Ohriner indicates the specific rotation of a groove by labeling the position at which the prime form would abstractly start: Black Thought's groove in “Lighthouse” is therefore “332222-3.” Finally, Ohriner draws on concepts familiar from set theory and others described by Andrew Mead (1987) and Godfried Toussaint (2013) to tabulate the various qualities of these groove classes, both abstractly (e.g., their degrees of symmetry, their interval vectors, etc.) and when interacting with the meter across their different rotations (e.g., for a given groove and rotation, how many accents fall on “strong” beats?).But rapping is not an unrelenting stream of sixteenth notes and accents, and even the most loquacious emcees must break to breathe; not every measure of a verse will precisely articulate a groove of six-to-eight accented positions. Enter Ohriner's “fuzzy model of groovy listening” (94–99), which enables the identification of grooves even when they are incompletely or inconsistently present in the rapped surface.10 Modifying Andrew Imbrie's (1973) hypothesis of “conservative” and “radical” listeners, Ohriner proposes modes of “persistent” and “adaptive” listening for attending to grooves: persistent listening tolerates various degrees of accentual perturbation in order to maintain an established groove, while adaptive listening frequently changes among many grooves. By setting different rates of persistence in an algorithm, which he likens to the relative “effort” required to hear a given groove, Ohriner can thus segment verses into the different grooves present for these idealized listeners.11 Among its many uses, this fuzzy model lets Ohriner track groove-based trends across verses and entire songs, as well as uncover similarities between verses whose adaptive segmentations might seem divergent. Examining his genre-wide corpus through this lens, Ohriner identifies the verses containing the most typical and least typical distributions of grooves—a feat of critical analysis writ large. The versatility of Ohriner's theory of groove gives it an analytical potential that is difficult to overstate, and it represents a powerful addition to our toolkit for the study of musical rhythm.Despite Flow's many successes, however, there were three aspects that I found problematic. The first involves its various assertions of a connection between algorithmically derived results and some aspect of human cognition. While these algorithms show something—and, indeed, usually something of great interest—I was not always convinced that this something actually reflects any genuine cognitive process. This slippage occurs, for example, when the “metric complexity” of a groove's rotations, which is inversely proportional to the prevalence of its accentual pattern within Ohriner's corpus, is used interchangeably with its “cognitive complexity” (90–91). Although Ohriner cites the work of Jeff Pressing (1997) and especially Meyer (2000) as precedents supporting an accord between statistical frequency and cognitive ease, I would have appreciated a more robust defense of this claim given the nuances involved (see also Lakoff 1987). I also wondered whether this cognitive complexity operates from the perspective of the emcee or the listener, an issue that Ohriner does not explicitly address.12 Similarly, it appears that the listeners who hear grooves of lengths that are determined by different rates of effort are explanatory conceits only lightly grounded in cognitive the for example, that listeners can only more grooves for a Ohriner's for groove lengths is accompanied by little for its whether it is on a particular or somewhat and it is difficult to for the behind its To I the generated by these is and on its but that into the the second aspect of Flow that its discursive By this I that Ohriner's arguments of any of for that the that he studies are “the only by their rhythmic Rap represents for Ohriner in which to about rhythm, and and he it from its of and He is about and throughout the book there are of his analytical and as well as a of his as a position the investment in that music theory as a discipline. 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