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the beat rather than the
MC’s distinctive flow. To ears accustomed to the verbal acrobatics of Eminem or the understated complexity of Jay-Z, these lyrics seem almost embarrassingly rudimentary. But even here, with rap at its most basic, subtle poetics are in practice. Rap’s revolution in poetic rhythm has already begun.
    The poetic revolution in “Rapper’s Delight” is rooted, oddly enough, in the old poetic tradition of the ballad. Ballad meter, also called common measure, dates from at least as early as the thirteenth century, when the oldest extant ballad, Judas, was recorded in manuscript form. Ballad form fits the structure of song, lending itself to memorization and musical performance. With some variation, it has emerged through the centuries more or less intact in the form of four-line stanzas or quatrains consisting alternately of four and three stresses apiece, rhyming abcb (and occasionally abab ). The rhythm achieved by the ballad stanza is immediately recognizable even when left unidentified. It is one of the basic rhythms of our culture.
    Â 
    Now WHAT you HEAR is NOT a TEST
I’m RAP pin’ TO the BEAT .
And ME , the GROOVE , AND my FRIENDS
are gonna TRY to MOVE your FEET .
    Â 
    Â 
    Wonder Mike need not have set out to deliver his rhyme in ballad stanzas, he need only to have come of age in a culture where, regardless of race, class, or circumstance, he would be exposed to the rhythms and rhymes of this elemental form. Whether through an advertising jingle or a gospel hymn, a television theme or a classic literary verse, the ballad form asserts itself upon the consciousness of all around it, regardless of race, class, or any other distinction.

    Wonder Mike’s likely unwitting use of ballad stanzas underscores two essential facts about rap poetics. Rap was created by black Americans. Rap is a Western poetic form. These are not contradictory assertions. “Blacks alone didn’t invent poetics any more than they invented the American language,” Ralph Ellison once argued when asked about the “black aesthetic.” “And the necessary mixture of cultural influences that goes into creating an individual poetic style defies the neat over-simplifications of racist ideologies.” The revolutionary nature of rap, in these early days all the way to the present, lies in the constant defiance of racist assumptions about the cultural fluency of black artists. The caricature of the artistically and intellectually impoverished street thug so often put forward by critics of so-called gangsta rap fails to account for the linguistic virtuosity and cultural literacy required to rap effectively to a beat.
    It is no mere coincidence, then, that rap lyrics respond so well to the classical tools of poetic analysis. The opening lines of “Rapper’s Delight” approximate the meter of the iambic foot, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. The first two lines of the verse follow strict iambic meter, and the third line seems to be doing the same until something happens in the middle—two stressed syllables in a row (“groove and”). Further complicating matters, the next line begins with three unstressed syllables in a row (“are gonna”) before returning to a regular iambic meter. These irregularities do not signal a flaw in the rhyme, nor do they suggest an error in our method of analysis. Rather, they prove the point that rap’s rhythm is not governed by strict metrics alone but by the beat of the drums and the individual creativity of the lyricist.
    If we now go back and listen to the track, we’ll notice a couple important things. First, Wonder Mike is rapping
securely in the pocket of the beat. Hand claps punctuate the twos and the fours, lending extra emphasis to the words he stresses; for instance, “hear” falls on the two and “test” falls on the four. Second, his flow actually gives the