Book of Rhymes (14 page)

Punning similes are now the norm in rap, displaying a versatility of tone and intention from the comic to the serious. When Juelz Santana drops this line on “I Am Crack,” he's not cracking a joke, he's flexing his mic skills: “I'm more amazing than Grace is when I say shit / You should say ‘Amen' after my name, kid.” Kanye West, however, delivers this punning simile from “The Good Life” with a wink and a
smile: “The good life, so keep it comin' with the bottles / 'Til she feel booze like she bombed at Apollo.” This bit of wordplay relies upon the pun on “booze/boos,” the kind you drink and the kind that lets you know when it's time to leave the stage. The simile only makes sense after we've made the mental adjustment to the double meaning, and it is complete only after we reinterpret the first part of the simile in light of the second. Those crowds at Harlem's Apollo Theatre are notorious for booing poor performers off stage (they even booed a young Luther Vandross), so we know through the simile that Kanye's female companion is in for quite a hangover.

Most rappers use similes to convey meaning from one thing to another. This is a simple enough thing to do. Rap's recognized masters of wordplay distinguish themselves by crafting inventive comparisons and surprising turns of phrase. Some are comedians, using similes to deliver punch lines. Others are more self-consciously dramatic, underscoring meaning with similes that force us to consider two unlikely subjects in the same terms. In other words, while all similes follow the same basic structure, the meanings they create can range from the witty to the whimsical, the sorrowful to the sublime.

One MC who has earned a reputation for his highly crafted similes and metaphors is Immortal Technique. His rhymes are densely layered with figurative language, particularly punning similes. They serve both as weapons and as wake-up calls to jar his listeners to attention. One of the best examples of his wordplay in action is the opening eight bars of “Industrial Revolution.” His lyrics offer a series of examples that display a multiplicity of effective similes in action.

 

 

These lines include five similes, each structured in a different way from the next. The first, “I leave you full of clips like the moon blockin' the sun,” relies on oral expression—when he raps the line “full of clips” it also sounds like “full eclipse.” It shows the range of possibility open to an MC that is closed for the most part to a literary poet. Another complex simile is “like an escape tunnel in prison, I started from scratch.” In this case, “I” is the tenor and “escape tunnel in prison” is the vehicle. The vehicle transfers the phrase “started from scratch,” which has a dual meaning—both literal and figurative. We hear it as both “starting with nothing but the raw materials” and as “starting by scratching away at a wall placed squarely in your way.” By literalizing this common—even cliché—figure of speech, Immortal Technique creates an unusually potent simile.

Finally, the last line, “Get your fuckin' hands out my pocket, nigga, like Malcolm X,” demonstrates some of the ambiguities in interpreting similes. The overall meaning of what he's saying couldn't be any clearer: record executives need to stop taking money away from him for his music. However, the simile isn't nearly as clear. For one, it doesn't
respond well to the way we've been breaking the previous similes down. What is the tenor? “Your hands”? And the vehicle? Certainly it's “Malcolm X,” but does he mean the man or the Spike Lee film? (The line that follows—“but this ain't a movie”—favors the latter.) Whatever the vehicle, the meaning it conveys is “Get your hands out my pocket,” the phrase that one of Malcolm X's assassins yelled to cause a distraction when Malcolm was gunned down on February 21, 1965, while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom. However, this only makes sense with the movie in a general way; that line, or its near equivalent, is in the film. Suffice it to say that this simile, though it doesn't quite work in the strict formal sense, nonetheless does the job, and does it well on the level of feeling. It is effective because it is emphatic, surprising, and historically grounded. Rap doesn't always play by the book.

Eminem is another master of the simile; he seems to revel in the ways that he can break and reshape the laws of the language. Unfortunately for those with sensitive ears, his rhymes must be considered required reading (not to mention listening) for anyone seriously interested in rap wordplay. One of the best examples of Eminem's creative expansion of simile comes from the opening lines of “The Real Slim Shady” where Eminem unleashes a single simile that takes up four full lines:

The tenor and the vehicle, in this case, aren't simple nouns or verbs, but rather situations: the tenor being the shock of seeing a white person rapping, and the vehicle being the shock of seeing Tommy Lee abuse Pamela Anderson. The vehicle, then, is transporting the degree of shock (jaws on the floor) from the latter to the former. But what's so remarkable about the exchange is that while the tenor is implied in the first line, it is never explicitly stated. And the vehicle? It takes up twenty-two words and nearly three lines. By the end, you almost forget that he is using a simile at all. At that point, however, the simile has already done its work, communicating its meaning with dark humor.

Innovative MCs like Immortal Technique and Eminem have so expanded the simile that their lyrics barely resemble the basics discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In their rhymes, the line between simile and metaphor, though visible and significant, is never impermeable. Some MCs use similes with a kind of directness that comes closer to the effect commonly achieved by metaphors. A fine example of this can be found on a remarkable track from Andre 3000's
The Love Below,
“A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre (Incomplete).” Andre rhymes without interruption for five full minutes, a rarity in recorded rap. The lines I've chosen come from a section describing the sexual exploits of life on the road.

 

Andre pauses right after “like” before completing the simile. The tenor, the “description” he seeks, is the description of sex, which he compares with the highly unusual vehicle “fifteen doves in a Jacuzzi catchin' the Holy Ghost.” But what does the vehicle convey? Remarkably, nothing but itself. But in this case that is certainly enough. The “like” here, which helps identify this as a simile, seems almost extraneous. We experience this comparison unmediated by anything else. In this case, the simile really
is
a metaphor—or at least is acting like one.

Rap metaphors, though they are not nearly as common as you would expect given how often rappers mention the word itself in their rhymes, are nonetheless essential components of hip hop's figurative language. They have the benefit of directness and of self-conscious poetic artifice. In their simplest form, they positively assert that one thing
is
another, or at the very least that one thing is equal to another in some essential way. So when Kanye West boasts on “Swagger Like Us” that “my swagger is Mick Jagger,” he's using metaphor to equate his confidence on the mic to the Rolling Stones' consummately cocky front man. For the instant it takes him to deliver that line, it's as if you've caught a glimpse of Mick himself strutting across the stage. Metaphors have that capacity to give the abstract concrete form.

In 1993's “Pink Cookies in a Plastic Bag,” LL Cool J delivered perhaps one of rap's most unusual metaphors: “The
act of making love is pink cookies in a plastic bag getting crushed by buildings.” Like Andre in the example above, LL attempts to express the concrete act of lovemaking in the abstract terms of figurative language. Here the metaphor functions not so much to define as to obscure, obliterating tangible meaning (the “act of making love”) by refashioning it in a series of incongruities (cookies, plastic bags, and buildings). This is but an extreme example of something that rappers do all the time with metaphor, extending meaning to just this side of the breaking point. It also illustrates the point I've been making about simile and metaphor's difference in form, but commonality in function. How would it change the expression, for instance, if LL had said instead that “the act of making love is
like
pink cookies in a plastic bag getting crushed by buildings”? It becomes somewhat less striking, more common, but it generally retains the essential effect of the comparison.

Metaphors lend themselves better than similes to certain types of abstract expression in rap. On “I Feel Like Dying,” Lil Wayne offers up a series of metaphors to capture the drugged-out state of intoxication:

As a metaphor for addiction, “I'm a prisoner locked up behind Xanax bars” is a powerful description, particularly given his pun on “bars”: the name often used to refer to Xanax tablets and the bars of a prison cell. Weezy even resurrects and revitalizes the dead metaphors (those comparisons so overused that they retain little figurative impact) “roses are red, violets are blue” by recontextualizing them and capping them with the stark finality of “the flowers are dead.” Capturing both the celestial highs and the morbid lows of his addiction, Lil Wayne's metaphors achieve an expressive power unattainable through conventional speech.

Rappers have occasionally employed metaphors in extended forms, often taking up the bulk of a verse or even an entire song. When metaphor does this, we understand it as a conceit. In literature a
conceit
is an extended metaphor that usually comprises the entirety of a poem. It asks the listener to consider a comparison between two things or two circumstances that might not immediately seem plausible. When combined with
personification,
endowing inanimate things with human traits, it can expand our understanding of the thing in question in ways that direct description could not.

Perhaps the MC with the most experiments in hip-hop personification to his name might be Nas. From the self-explanatory “Money Is My Bitch” to the more nuanced “I Gave You Power,” where Nas raps in the first-person voice of a gun, he seems well aware of the expressive potential to be found in appealing to the human element in inanimate things. “I Gave You Power” is actually a species of personification known by its Greek name,
prosopopoeia,
a rhetorical device in which the poet writes from the perspective of another person
or, in this case, object. By shifting the listener's perspective to that of a gun, Nas finds a way of speaking out against gun violence without being preachy. The song ends with the gun jamming, refusing to shoot at the victim: “He pulled the trigger but I held on, it felt wrong / He squeezed harder, I didn't budge, sick of the blood.” Ultimately, though, the gun has limited control over its own fate. When its owner dies, shot by the person he meant to shoot, the gun finds itself in the hands of another.

Personification lends itself to such critiques. Rap's defining example of personification is undoubtedly Common's 1994 classic “I Used to Love H.E.R.” The song works on two levels. On the literal level, it is Common's love story with a young girl he sees grow into womanhood, facing a host of challenges along the way. On the metaphorical level, it is the story of hip hop itself. Common asks us to see hip hop personified in the girl, and his love for hip hop, both lost and found, in his love for her. If we didn't grasp this metaphorical doubling on our own, Common makes sure that we get it. He gestures to the song's potential double meaning before he starts rhyming, simply in the acronym of the title (H.E.R.). Even if we have no idea what the acronym stands for (purportedly it is “Hip-Hop in its Essence and Real”) we are tipped off that a double meaning, whatever it is, is there to be uncovered. If that weren't enough, his final line spells it out in no uncertain terms: “'Cause who I'm talking bout, y'all, is hip hop.” What makes “I Used to Love H.E.R.” work is that Common never overburdens his lyrics, on the narrative or the metaphorical level—indeed, it is possible to appreciate it simply as a love song without ever comprehending the conceit at work. Still, Common's doubling of meaning
renders the song powerful on two levels, validating its reputation as one of the finest raps on wax.