How to Rap by Paul Edwards

Author:Paul Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2009-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

Freestyling

Freestyling, to most MCs, means coming up with lyrics off the top of your head. In early hip-hop, however, the term had a different meaning.

Big Daddy Kane

That term, freestyle, is like a new term, because in the ‘80s when we said we wrote a freestyle rap, that meant that it was a rhyme that you wrote that was free of style, meaning that it’s not [on] a [particular] subject matter—it’s not a story about a woman, it’s not a story about poverty, it’s basically a rhyme just bragging about yourself, so it’s basically free of style. . . . That’s really what a freestyle is. Off-the-top-of-the-head [rapping], we just called that “off the dome”—when you don’t write it and [you] say whatever comes to mind.

This earlier definition of freestyling has evolved into the meaning that most MCs associate it with today.

Myka 9, Freestyle Fellowship

That’s what they say I helped do—I helped get the world to freestyle, me and the Freestyle Fellowship, by inventing the Freestyle Fellowship and by redefining what freestyle is. Back in the day freestyle was bust[ing] a rhyme about any random thing, and it was a written rhyme or something memorized. We have redefined what freestyle is by saying that it’s improvisational rap like a jazz solo, so as a result we actually helped create another trend and culture, another pastime. So now kids can do something else other than just play basketball or whatever—they can sit on the staircase and exchange rhymes instead of going around getting into crimes. It’s a good thing to not only MC but freestyle, because it kinda helps promote free thinking.

A number of artists first learned how to rap by improvising lyrics on a regular basis. Some of them made freestyling into a type of game that improved their rapping and served as a fun activity at the same time.

David Banner

First four years of my record I just freestyled. I learned how to be the best freestyler—looking at stuff that was in my environment and rapping about the stuff that was in my environment.

MC Shan

We used to have a thing called the rhyming game. Somebody would start the sentence, and you gotta finish it. If you didn’t make the rhyme rhyme, you’re out, so it kept us on our toes all the time as far as rhyming off the top of the head and things like that. Just out of the blue, [someone] would say, “Rhyme”—boom, you better spit something!

One Be Lo, Binary Star

It was a day-to-day thing. All we used to do was sit around all day and freestyle—that’s all we did. We were just trying to be the best we could be, and we were bouncing it off each other. We woke up freestyling, we went to sleep freestyling. We would just be sitting in the basement trying to come up with songs, and we’d just start freestyling. We was just having fun—we wasn’t trying to make records or make history.

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