How To Rap
The goal of this blog is to teach you how to rap. Not just to impress your friends but to teach you how to be a great artist. If you were to become a DJ there are endless techniques and resources to study. The same resources are not available for MC’s. All you have available are the songs you grew up with and a few books (How to Rap Vol.1 & 2 by Paul Edwards, both I highly recommend) neither of which are good enough to make you an artist. But, if we study the classics, we can begin to piece together a strategy to write a classic rap.
The Path
If you searched this post looking for a “how to” guide, that will tell you how to rap in under a thousand words, such a guide doesn’t exist. Rap is not a skill you can learn while smoking a few blunts and drinking a 40 ounce. Rapping is a path. The same ten thousand hours required to learn to play an instrument, for example, are required to learn how to rap.
I am going to assume you already know certain things about hip hop. For instance, the fact that the term MC stands for Master of Ceremonies. What I am not going to assume is that you are an expert wordsmith just yet. Even if you are advanced, your goal should be: Progression.
Be HUMBLE.
Restart your knowledge. Start this blog from the very beginning. Resist the urge to skip ahead. Follow the process and exercises I suggest. Master the basics before you learn the advanced techniques. I find the problem most rappers have after their initial burst of creativity is that their skills plateau or they get writer’s block. They failed to master one of the simple skills. They started with the difficult patterns and became pretty good but they’re not able to get over.
How to use this blog
I am going to be writing rhymes throughout this blog so you can witness my progression in real time. Follow along with the steps I take and we will master the art of rap together. The goal in the beginning is to write raps easily without restricting the process. We’ll achieve this by writing simple raps and writing a lot of them. When you do something repeatedly and think in a certain way often, your brain will create a neuro-pathway, making it easier to perform that action. We will train our brains to rhyme effortlessly and endlessly. Eventually, when we have mastered the foundation of rap, we will build our skills to the advanced techniques (like multi-syllable and internal rhymes) heard in great rap songs. So if you want to learn to rap forever and become a true MC, turn to the next post.