Sweat the Technique

Without a doubt: Rakim is my favourite MC.

He has flow, he has wisdom, techniques that terrify and impress, and he has variety.

This is more a guide through Rakim's thinking and writing than an autobiography. He starts off by describing the essence of his writing process:

My writing starts in an empty room. It doesn’t really matter where because I have written everywhere. It’s just me and Four White Walls. Maybe one that just has some paint peeling in a corner of the ceiling or maybe one that has a window that looks out over the lights of a great city with those million stories bouncing through the streets. It can be a studio, a hotel, or the back of a bus. Probably they aren’t even white, but when I sit down, in my mind, it’s four walls that are as blank as the notebook I’m staring down at.

It has to start with dead silence. I have to turn off that morning’s music and distance myself from the distractions of life’s cacophony. No phones, no kids, no entourage or onlookers. I need to completely tune out so I can start to tune in. I focus on my purpose. That’s what has brought me into this room and that’s what will guide me now that I’m here. I dig back into the bag of observations and experiences that inspire me and start to craft a storyline.

I inject the spirituality that gives so much of that inspiration a greater sense of place and remember that my Self, my listeners, and my culture expect and deserve more than simplicity. They deserve a conscious message delivered through a thoughtful collection of ideas that are more than the words on the page. And that’s when I start to hear it. Just a pitch or a tone...a buzzing energy emanating from origins beyond each of us individually but encompassing all of us universally.

The energy takes a frequency, and the frequency forms into an idea. That idea takes inspiration from everything I’ve learned and observed, and blends it with awareness of my self and my artistry. And it breaks the silence with music that’s blended with memories and into something original. My pen starts to flow. The lines in my notebook fill up and spill over to paint pictures on the white walls around me. The rhymes come from anywhere. They come from everywhere.

I might have a story in mind that unfolds step by step or I might just know the end and have to work my way back. I could start with one bar or one phrase or even one word and circle around that, guided by the frequency, until the track takes full form. I draw from my knowledge and add the tricks of my technique to slip in messages that range from subtle to unavoidable. I wrap around wordplay and push boundaries of form. I stay focused on my intentions. Make something original. Outdo what I’ve already done. Write something to force the conscious listener to think, the music lover to clap, and every other rapper to turn their head and say, “Damn.”

I want to build monuments of monologue that stand the test of time. To guide artists and non-creatives alike through these revelations, I’ve channeled my reflections into 5 Pillars of Creativity: Purpose, Inspiration, Spirituality, Consciousness, and Energy. This is who I am and this is how I do it.

This is a somewhat strange book. Rakim doesn't really go into love and life, just life and music, life and work, life and religion.

Rakim is a follower of the Five-Percent Nation, a US-founded Islamic movement that focuses everything on God, and believe themselves to be the 'righteous teachers.' Rakim also focuses a lot on the teachings of Louis Farrakhan, a longtime follower and leader of Nation of Islam, a group whose members that have since long spouted or/and tolerated anti-semitic thoughts; Farrakhan himself has said that black people are genetically superior to white people.

In spite of that, it's interesting to see how much alike Rakim's ways of thinking are to those of GZA, a.k.a. the Genius, of Wu-Tang Clan; both are philosophically inclined, including other parts of Wu-Tang, but Rakim has a flow that I've never been able to shake: he's simply too good a rapper to not take seriously.

He started out in a poor family but set his aims high; he worked hard and tells stories of a very punishing father who beat the living daylights out of him while Rakim took it at austere face value: he was prepared to take a hiding and get better at things.

Simultaneously, Rakim kept making mistakes, as all young persons do; he slips up but gets back up and tries to learn from it. He also learned by listening:

I started listening to legendary saxophonist John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things really closely, and when I got to the part where he plays two notes at once, I completely bugged out. I was dumbfounded because you can’t play two notes at the same time. I know how to play the sax and I can tell you that it was impossible. But I couldn’t deny what I heard. He defied gravity in the same way I remembered Bruce Lee had physically—but Coltrane did it musically.

I saw that being the best meant imagining the impossible and then doing it. I couldn’t do that with a horn, but I could do that with a mic. I started thinking about my flows and asking myself, What would Coltrane do? He became my musical North Star. Coltrane wouldn’t stay within the limitations of fours bars, he’d play past the end of the bar, so I tried to write lines that didn’t stop at the end of the bar.

From his example, I wrote lines like this in “Move the Crowd”: “Standing by the speaker, suddenly I had this / fever. Was it me or either summer madness.” When I said “this” and took a pause, the listener’s mind would fill with anticipation and a little tension because I’d ended the line without concluding the thought. Before me, MCs finished the thought at the end of a line. Coltrane showed me another way.

I really felt how Rakim could start combining rhythm, nerve, mathematics, and brains, as he learned how to write songs:

When I sat down to write my third song, “I Know You Got Soul,” I had the sample from Bobby Byrd’s “I Know You Got Soul” all looped up, and I was thinking a lot about the Godfather of Soul. I always believed that James Brown was the first rapper. The way he talked on his records with all that attitude and ego shaped the way a lot of performers approached the mic. The way he groaned and screamed and grunted showed me how to use every part of my voice to make myself stand out on a record.

He showed me that I could communicate without using words. Those instinctive guttural sounds can really get under people’s skin. I didn’t understand half of what James was saying. It sounded so good, I’d listen anyway, which made me think it was okay if every person in the audience didn’t totally understand everything I said, as long as those people were moved by the music and the rhythm.

While some paragraphs sound strange due to Rakim's ethics:

I recorded all the verses on Paid in Full in either two or three passes. Never more than that. On all of those songs you hear me in a single recording. I rhymed the whole verse—straight through—like a real MC should.

...it's also lovely to see other parts of his ethics seem really nice:

One of the main reasons I never felt competition from other rappers was because I was only competing with myself, which also kept me pretty humble.

There's also some very strange braggadocio throughout the book:

There are volumes of documentation and speculation surrounding the creation, true purpose, and powers of the Pyramids of Giza and the Great Pyramid in particular. I’ve probably read most of it.

It was funny/scary/off-putting/soothing to read about how Dr. Dre's tardiness ruined his project with Rakim:

Dre and I had a common friend, so he had heard a lot of stories about me and my crew and that is what he wanted me to rhyme about. It was tough to fault him for it initially. It was the content that had driven so many of the classic albums he produced and made him millions of dollars along the way. Now he had a chance to do it with one of the most highly praised lyricists in the game and it wasn’t a stretch for him to assume I had some of those types of stories in my bag. All he had to do was turn to the photo on the back cover of Paid In Full and see a posse that included “the real” 50 Cent, the man his new artist had taken his name from, and conclude where I came from wasn’t all gossip, hype, or folklore.

Dre wanted me to make a record about that, but I wasn’t going to do it. That wasn’t who I wanted to be. I knew that we could’ve made the illest gangsta album ever, and it would’ve been a huge seller, but I was a father of three in my forties. I needed to do more with the mic than tell street stories. I wanted to expand consciously. After almost three years in LA I still hadn’t gotten a beat from Dre that I was really excited about. I made fifteen songs with Aftermath Entertainment, and I used over $300,000 in studio time, but Dre and I had made nothing that I thought reflected who I was as an artist.

Dre was a perfectionist. Dre was busy. But I wondered if part of the impasse was that after so much success Dre couldn’t risk a failure and gangsta rap was always a sure thing for him. I told Dre I was leaving. He said, “Give me a little more time.” He wasn’t ready to quit. He even offered me $250,000 to stay, but I couldn’t do it. He understood and was really cool about it—he said I could keep the songs I’d made, and we shook hands.

At the end of the day, it's interesting to get such a view into Rakim's perspectives of writing, but truthfully, for those of us who have studied his—and Eric B's—work for so long, it's a bit zany to miss out on some of what Rakim could have included. What about his love life? He's with the same person since forever but she's a blip in the book. Sure, it's his choice. What about what he's doing these days? The book seemed to cut a bit short.

Rakim is surely still a master at writing songs and rapping, but writing a novel has fallen somewhat short; his style is accustomed to the short song format where it should be remade to last for longer.