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doubled-up stresses in the third line room to breath by including a slight pause between “groove” and “and” that the written words on the page do not suggest. Similarly, he lessens the effect of the three unstressed syllables by further truncating his pronunciation of “gonna.” The resulting rhythm is unmistakably related to iambic meter, yet loose enough to sound unforced and natural.
    Almost two centuries before “Rapper’s Delight,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner employed the ballad form for many of the same reasons. He chose the form for its musicality, and also for its efficacy as a storytelling medium. The poem’s opening lines, like the opening lines of “Rapper’s Delight,” set the rhythm as well as the story.
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    It is an Ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
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    Beyond the similarity of form, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Rapper’s Delight” share a common purpose in storytelling. The ballad stanza harkens back to literary poetry’s oral tradition when rhythm and rhyme served as mnemonic devices enabling the poet or speaker to recall long narrative passages. Perhaps the best-known example of the ballad stanza in pop culture is the theme from Gilligan’s Island; for one of the least likely mash-ups in history try
singing the tune using the Sugar Hill Gang or Coleridge’s words. What the Sugar Hill Gang, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and whoever wrote the “Gilligan’s Island” theme understood—either explicitly or intuitively—was that the ballad form creates pleasing rhythms that approximate natural speech patterns in English, helping to tell a story.
    â€œRapper’s Delight” was at once new to the music world, but true to the poetic tradition. It’s a safe guess, however, that Wonder Mike was not counting the number of stresses in his lines, nor was he consciously modeling his verse on the ballad stanza. What the formal resemblance reminds us is that poetic form grows out of the natural habits of speech. When poets understand those forms, they are able to control with greater accuracy the effects those forms will have on their audience. When an audience understands the forms, they are better prepared to respond with sensitivity and awareness to the poet’s creations.
    With the thirty-year anniversary of “Rapper’s Delight,” it is instructive to reflect upon what remains of its once-startling appeal. When played today, it has a quaint and kitschy sort of funkiness, more akin to the disco records of the era than the radical rejection of disco that rap amounted to at the time. The rhymes sound naïve to those acquainted with the street themes of Rick Ross and Young Jeezy and the intricate poetics of Nas and Ghostface. And those who know the song’s history can’t help but hear it as a fraud perpetrated on the unschooled ears of the masses. Even the rhymes themselves are flawed; they are too insistently dictated by the rhythm of the track. They fall into or, rather, helped to fashion the singsongy style that dominates many old-school rhymes. It was a necessary precursor to today’s
rap poetics, and yet it is as distinct from contemporary rap as Mother Goose is from Wallace Stevens. And yet for all of this, “Rapper’s Delight” is a landmark recording in rap’s poetic tradition: It makes beauty out of little more than rhythm alone.
    Rap’s early years are rich with easily observable poetic forms like those of “Rapper’s Delight.” The sound that would soon come to be identified as “old school” is a product of MCs’ strict reliance on formal patterns like the ballad stanza. Listen to these lines from the Fatback Band’s 1979 “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” widely considered to