Diversification and post-regionalism in North American hip-hop flow

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1980s, North American hip-hop music grew into a dominant cultural force. Regional scenes boasted their own MCs (rappers) whose individual musical styles grew increasingly sophisticated and diverse. From approximately 2000 onward, a variety of factors have moved hip-hop music into an era of post-regionalism. Artists from disparate geographic regions routinely collaborate with one another, and the internet’s ability to facilitate virtual musical communities and genres has arguably rendered the idea of local space in hip hop less and less important. In this dissertation I first explore how rhythm and meter in flow (rapping) evolved and became more diverse during hip hop’s earlier years as a regional genre, and I then assess whether rhythm and meter in flow have become more homogeneous during this genre’s more recent, post-regional era. To achieve these goals, I developed and analyzed two song corpora drawn from Rolling Stone magazine and the Grammy Award category of Best Rap Song. I manually transcribed and analyzed 472 verses of flow from 160 songs, focusing on musical parameters such as rhyme, accent/stress, tempo, syllabic density, microtiming, and rhythm. Some of these parameters are analyzed across the 472 verses, while others—which involved more time-intensive analytical methods—are analyzed with greater scrutiny across a 249-verse subset of the corpora.Analytical results are presented in three contexts: statistical discussion, a newly developed theory of segmentation and phrasing, and a categorization scheme for flow profiles. I summarize the statistical component of the analysis by demonstrating that on the whole, flow practices of the 1990s were markedly more complex and diverse than those of the 1980s. The statistics also suggest that, rather than becoming more homogenous in the post-regional era, flow practices embody new forms of complexity and diversity in microtiming, rhythm, and syllabic density. I use the statistical norms to develop a theory of segmentation, phrasing, and meter in hip-hop music, which links the concept of phrasing to flow and the concept of meter to the beat layer (the instrumental accompaniment). This theory is contextualized in how listeners perceive phrasing and meter in hip-hop music: specifically, how phrasing and meter interact in temporal alignment and misalignment. Finally, I use observations from these statistical and phrasal analyses to propose a categorization scheme of flow profiles based on specific musical parameters of flow practices such as tempo, segmentation, or microtiming

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