SLANT RHYME
25
Slant Rhyme
droppin’ knowledge
“I used to write poetry; that’s how I started writing
rhymes... I have rhymes, I have books of rhymes from
years back, but that’s because I had nothing else to do. I
was chillin’ in school and when I was
supposed to do my work in school, I
was writing rhymes.” — Remy Ma
The basis of rap is rhyme, and an emcee is just a
painter creating a picture with rhyming words, a poet
with flow. It might sound obvious, but one of the best
ways you can excel as an emcee is by picking better
rhyming words. It’s all like Rakim says on “I Know
You Got Soul”:
I start to think and then I sink
Into the paper like I was ink,
When I’m writing I’m trapped in between the line,
I escape when I finish the rhyme
Reread that. That right there is the dopest, most
beautiful summary of what it is to be a rapper. You go
into your own mind and sink into the paper. You’re
using words, but they trap you like bars in a jail cell
unless you conquer them with rhyme. It’s rhyming
that sets the emcee free and gives him control over
his raps. It’s rhyming that lets the emcee rock the
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microphone, and gets a crowd jumping. It’s rhyming
that forms the foundation of your flow.
As Rakim demonstrated, however, we’re not talking
about “Hickory Dickory Dock.” In rap, not every
rhyme has to be at the end of a line. Rhymes don’t
have to be in a certain order or a certain word length.
In fact, some of the most prevalent types of rhyme
in hip-hop don’t rhyme perfectly at all. That’s called
slant rhyme.
Slant Rhyme vs. Perfect Rhyme
Here is the definition of perfect rhyme from the
American Heritage Dictionary:
Perfect Rhyme
Definition: Rhyme in which the final
accented vowel and all succeeding consonants
or syllables are identical, while the preceding
consonants are different.
Examples: cat, hat, bat; cake, bake, fake. They
do not need to be spelled the same: great, late,
freight; height, fight, cite. And the words don’t
have to be the same length: rider, beside her;
dutiful, unbeautiful.
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27
Perfect rhyme will work fine in a lot of situations.
But hip-hop innovators (and poets before them)
found it too limiting. Rappers began using slant
rhyme to allow themselves more freedom to express
themselves. Here is the definition of slant rhyme
from the American Heritage Dictionary:
Slant Rhyme
Definition: A partial or imperfect rhyme,
often using assonance or consonance only.
Also called half rhyme, near rhyme, oblique
rhyme and off rhyme.
Examples: heat, heart; Tim, skin; dry, died;
love, fluff.
In the Rakim line quoted earlier, he rhymes the word
“rhyme” with “line.” Those words don’t perfectly
rhyme with each other. “Rhyme” rhymes with “time,
dime, mime, I’m, and crime.” “Line” rhymes with
“mine, pine, whine and tine.” But the two words
sound remarkably close. So Rakim uses slant rhyme
to “finish the line.”
When Slant Rhyme is a Must
When should you use slant rhyme? Anytime. But
there are moments when using slant rhyme isn’t an
option; it’s a must.
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1. The word has no perfect rhyme
There are lots of words in English that don’t have
perfect rhymes. Here are a few: orange, silver, purple,
month, angst, sixth, breadth, ninth, pint, wolf, opus,
monster, dangerous, marathon, napkin, hostage,
discombobulate and many, many more.
As you’re writing raps, if you ever wanted to rhyme
with any of those words you couldn’t. Not unless you
used slant rhyme. That’s exactly what Nas does in “NY
State of Mind.”
Pro Example
Or the legal luxury life, rings flooded with stones, homes,
I got so many rhymes I don’t think I’m too sane,
Life is parallel to hell but I must maintain,
And be prosperous, though we live dangerous,
Cops could just arrest me, blamin’ us, we’re held like hostages,
Nas, “NY State of Mind”
He uses the word “dangerous,” which has no perfect
rhyme, but he makes it flow anyway, rhyming it with
“blaming us.” He also slant rhymes “prosperous” with
“hostages,” all to get his point across.
You can find a list of slant rhymes for words with no
perfect rhyme in Appendix III of this book.
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29
2. Avoid Tired Rhymes
The other time when slant rhyme is really crucial
is when you’re dealing with a rhyme that is really
stale and played out. For example, how many times
have you heard the word “knowledge” rhymed with
“college”? People overuse that rhyme like skeezy
businessmen use too much cologne. In order to avoid
that, use slant rhyme.
Knowledge – mall kids, honest, ballas, taller, on it,
admonish, cabbage, all this, collard (greens), smallish,
awful.
So instead of just rhyming like this:
“I’ve learned it all, always expand my knowledge,
The type of stuff that you can’t learn in college.”
You can rhyme:
“Southern like collard greens, from streets to college greens,
I’m ballin’ taller than most of these smallish dweebs,”
The great thing about slant rhyme is that it helps you
avoid one of most dangerous pitfalls for beginning
emcees: obvious rhymes. If a listener can tell what
you’re going to say before you say it, that’s almost
always a bad thing. It basically means that you’re not
being creative, you’re just repeating tired rhymes. So
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use slant rhymes to avoid falling into that trap.
For example, instead of rhyming “money” with
“funny” or “honey,” try using slant rhyme: gin rummy,
Sunday, dummy, crumbly, Tony, blunt be, hunt me, some
tea, plenty.
Some artists use line after line of slant rhyme, but
because of their flow and the way they pronounce the
words, you don’t even realize that they are slant rhymes.
Take a look at Mos Def’s verse from “Respiration”:
Pro Example
We New York, the narcotic,
Strength in metal and fiber optics
Where mercenaries is paid to trade hot stock tips
For profits, thirsty criminals take pockets,
Hard knuckles on the second hands of working class watches,
Skyscrapers is colossus, the cost of living is preposterous,
Stay alive, you play or die, no options,
No Batman and Robin, can’t tell between
The cops and the robbers,
They both partners, they all heartless,
With no conscience, back streets stay darkened,
Where unbeliever hearts stay hardened,
My eagle talons stay sharpened, like city lights stay throbbin’,
You either make a way or stay sobbin’
Mos Def, “Respiration”
In a verse that describes New York City with the eye of
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a poet, Mos sticks to one rhyming sound throughout.
Slant rhyme allows him to build such a sick verse
because he’s able to rhyme “options,” with “robbers,”
with “partners.” Since he has more words to choose
from, it allows him more freedom to determine the
content of what he’s saying, and it makes his lines
innovative and creative.
Practice This
Write a few bars using some very obvious rhyme words
(“cat, hat, flat”). Then go back and replace the rhyme words
with slant rhymes and rewrite the verse. See how it changes
your verse.