Freestyle Rap Quotes

The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy – even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagines East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines. Fortunately for Adam, this shifting of aggression to the domain of language was sanctioned by one of the practices the types had appropriated: after several hours of drinking, if no fight or noise complain had broken up the party, you were likely to encounter freestyling. In many ways, this was the most shameful of all the poses, the clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity and its representational regimes, a small group of privileged crackers often arrhythmically recycling the genre’s dominant and to them totally inapplicable clichés. But it was socially essential for him: the rap battle transmuted his prowess as a public speaker and aspiring poet into something cool. His luck was dizzying: that there was a rapid, ritualized poetic insult exchange bridging the gap between his Saturday afternoons in abandoned high schools and his Saturday nights in unsupervised houses, allowing him to transition from one contest to the other.

Sitting with some of the other members of the Scholastic Decathlon team, quiet, studious Martha Cox heard snatches of the lunchtime poetry. Her ears instantly pricked up. "What's going on?" she asked, her eyes bright. Betty Hong closed her book and leaned close. "Taylor McKessie told me all about it," she whispered. Betty told Martha about next week's poetry-reading assembly and how Taylor was trying to help half the starting basketball team locate their muse. "That's totally fresh!" Martha cried. "Too bad I'm not in Ms Barrington's English class." Betty made a face. "You like poetry stuff? I thought you were into maths and science." "I like it all," Martha replied. "I love astronomy and hip-hop-" Betty rolled her eyes. "Not hip-hop again." "Word, girl," Martha replied. "You know I've been bustin' out kickin' rhymes for years. It helps me remember lessons, like last night's astronomy lecture." "No," Betty said. "You didn't make up a rap to that." "Just watch," Martha cried. Leaping out of her chair, she began to chant, freestyle: "At the centre of our system is the molten sun, A star that burns hot, Fahrenheit two billion and one. But the sun, he ain't alone in the heavenly sphere, He's got nine homeys in orbit, some far, some near. Old Mercury's crowding in 'bout as close as he can, Yo, Merc's a tiny planet who loves a tan.... Some kids around Martha heard her rap. They really got into it, jumping up from their tables to clap and dance. The beat was contagious. Martha started bustin' some moves herself. She kept the rap flowing, and more kids joined the party.... "Venus is next. She's a real hot planet, Shrouded by clouds, hot enough to melt granite. Earth is the third planet from the sun, Just enough light and heat to make living fun. Then comes Mars, a planet funky and red. Covered with sand, the place is pretty dead. Jupiter's huge! The largest planet of all! Saturn's big, too, but Uranus is small. So far away, the place is almost forgotten, Neptune's view of Earth is pretty rotten. And last but not least, Pluto's in a fog, Far away and named after Mickey's home dog. Yo, that's all the planets orbiting our sun, But the Milky Way galaxy is far from done!" When Martha finished her freestyle, hip-hop flow, the entire cafeteria burst into wild applause. Troy, Chad, Zeke, and Jason had been clapping and dancing, too. Now they joined in the whooping and hollering. "Whoa," said Chad. "Martha's awesome.

His rap was fluid, on time, and in tune. He ad-libbed—or “freestyled”—using a range of poetic tricks, from rhyme and repetition to assonance and alliteration:

But when I landed in college, I noticed what looked like a gleaming. A goofy, doofy, curly-haired man with broad shoulders brushed by me in the hallway one day. He smelled like cinnamon. He had teddy-brown eyes and performed in the college’s improv group. He was the best one by far, made big gestures, made jokes from a place of kindness and whimsy, pulled ripples of laughter out of this cold, hard world. I used to sit in the audience and marvel. He seemed like an impossibility. It took years. Years of slowly befriending him through mutual friends. Years of calling into his late-night, freestyle-rap radio show, daring my tongue to try… to rhyme on the fly! I even joined the improv group. And eventually, one night I told him how I felt and instead of flinching away, as I had assumed he would, as the boys in the hallway had made it seem that he would, he kissed me. After graduating college, we moved in together, to a small one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with a red Formica table and a great front stoop. I finagled my way into a job helping produce a radio program all about science and wonder. He was continuing with comedy—stand-up and improv and writing—and working as a yellow-cab driver to support himself. We stayed up late into the night, sipping beers on the stoop, talking about our days, turning awkward moments and missteps into jokes. I felt like I had found the thing I had thought could never exist. Refuge. It smelled like cinnamon and its walls were made of bad puns and cheap rhymes, piling higher and higher against the chill of the world. My head became full of visions for the future. The TV shows we would write, the tree houses we would build, the way the grass would curl between our toes as we chased our kids through the yard. Until, seven years into it, I toppled the whole thing. Late one night on a beach five hundred miles away from him, possessed by moonlight and red wine and the smell of a bonfire, I reached out for the bouncing blond girl I had been trying not to eye all night. She was wet from swimming; she was prickled in goose bumps, hundreds of goose bumps, that I wanted to press flat with my tongue. She smiled as I placed my hand on her waist, as I touched my lips to her neck. The stars wrapped around us. Her steam became mine. When I told the curly-haired man what I had done, he told me it was over.

If you are a Black man, the key to any white person's heart is the ability to shuck, jive, or freestyle. But use it wisely and sparingly. Otherwise you're liable to turn into Steve Harvey.

A coaching session can be compared to the creative process of freestyle rap. Neuroscientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders scanned the brains of twelve professional rappers with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. The scientists discovered that although the brain’s executive functions were active at the start and end of a song, during freestyle, the parts of the brain responsible for self-monitoring, critiquing, and editing were deactivated. In this context, the researchers explained that the rappers were “freed from the conventional constraints of supervisory attention and executive control,” so sudden insights could easily emerge.1 In other words, the rappers used the executive functions of their cognitive brains as they started rapping to deliberately set the intention of the composition up front. Once they had a sense of where they were going, they switched off their inner critic and analyzer. This allowed for more activity in the inner brain, where the eruption of new ideas—creativity—takes place. As they moved to closing out the song, their cognitive brains came back online to provide a consciously designed ending to the composition.