FIVE SKILLS YOU MUST HAVE TO BECOME A RAPPER

Want To Become a Successful Rapper in India ?

Here, we are dropping few insights about how can you approach towards your goal in a systematic manner.

In order to excel in this competitive Indian rapping scene, you must acquire the proper skills that help you in creating and delivering your artistic content in an expressive style.Without polished skills you'll always find it difficult to ride your rhythmic content on the beat.

It is also important to understand that the process of acquiring skills requires patience and perseverance. Thus , consistency matters.

So,here are the following points that will definitely help you to hone your skill.

1. CONTENT IS KING

Content of a rap song includes every subject an artist talks about in his lyrics.It is the main theme on which you're rapping about.Different MCs prefer to talk about different type of topics , depending on their familiarity or experience with that subject. Artists tend to experiment with different types of content such as - Real-Life content (Eg - Mobb Deep) , Fictional Content (Eg - KRS-One) , Club/Party Content (Eg - Badshah).

Thus, it is important to focus on the content to amplify your voice towards diverse types of audience.

2. CONTENT TOOLS

Once you've decided the content form of a song , then , the next part is to understand about the content tools.The overall structure of a song might be conceptual or abstract, but within that structure you might use a number of different content tools , such as imagery,metaphor , or wordplay.

You can have a basic understanding of this figurative language by clicking this link.After that, you can study the application of these tools by analyzing the lyrics of legendary rappers such as - Eminem,Lil Wayne , Black Thought etc.

3. RHYME

You can not imagine rap without rhyme.Rhyme is considered one of the important factors in rap writing - MCs often refer to rap lyrics as "rhymes". Along with rhythm , rhyme is what gives rap lyrics their musicality , because similar sounds being repeated are interesting to listen to.

To become a successful rapper , you've to garner skills to spit both simple and complex rhymes.

There can be different types of rhymes such as:

• Perfect Rhyme : Simplest and most obvious form of rhyme.
  

• Example - Cat/Hat

• A child is born with no state of mind,
  Blind to the ways of mankind
  

•  Assonance : It occurs when two words don’t have exactly the same ending but instead use a shared vowel sound to create a rhyme.

• Example - Flip/hip

• His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
  There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti

• Compound Rhymes (Multi-syllable Rhymes)

• In this , a rhyme is more than one syllable long.

• For instance , Rhyming “random luck” with “handsome fuck,” “we cop vans
  and trucks”.

Apart from the above categories , we will definitely discuss this topic of rhymes as a separate topic to provide you detailed insights with some cool examples.

It should also be noted that,along with the rhymes,rhyme schemes are also important.The rhyme schemes also help us to design our flow.

To understand more rhyme scheme patterns you must analyze rhyme schemes of rappers like - Eminem,MF Doom,Rakim etc.

4.  FLOW

In a hip hop song,flow contains the rhythms and rhymes ,that will take your rapping skills to the next level.A strong flow is valuable in conveying the content clearly and effectively or as an element that takes center stage to impress listener.As hip-hop has progressed,flows have become more and more complicated .

For instance , you can understand the concept of flow by analyzing the following lyrics of the Pharcyde's track "Drop" :

Let me freak the funk, obsolete is the punk that talks
More junk than Sanford sells. I jet propel at a
Rate that complicate their mental state as I invade their
Masquerade. They couldn’t fade with a clipper

Now , the same lyrics are shown in the flow diagram:

The design of a flow depends on the beat and the bars.We'll cover this in detail in a separate section.

5.  DELIVERY

Until you deliver your lyrics in a recording or a live performance,they're just words on the page or in your head.To develop an effective and interesting  vocal delivery,you must master several basic vocal techniques , for instance:

• Breath Control.

• Enunciation (refers to how accurately and clearly words are said).

• Vocal style ,where you can alter the pitch of the voice and make your delivery more melodic.
  

• Syncopation (It is a form of vocal styling in which an MC delivers the lyrics very slightly before or after the beat , rather than exactly on the beat)

If you are not able to grasp the understanding of these easily,do not worry because we are going to cover this section in detail as a separate blog. 

So,these are few of the most important skills that you must have if you aspire to be a rapper.

Do comment to let us know what are the other things that you would like us to add in this list.

 Keep rhyming...