ALTHOUGH THE EARLIEST academic research on rap music is now close to thirty years old, over the last decade in particular the field has witnessed the rapid development of a body of literature with an explicit music-analytical orientation.1 Studies of rap have become prominent in journal publications and conference presentations, and a diverse range of methodologies have emerged to address the sonic particularities of this musical practice. Much has changed since Kyle Adams (2008: para. 2) wrote that “many still hesitate to accept rap music as a valid art form, and even those who readily accept it are not necessarily interested in analyzing it.” Mitchell Ohriner's Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music is an innovative contribution to this discipline that mobilizes a corpus study of approximately two hundred verses by anglophone emcees to theorize the rhythmic dimensions of lyrical delivery, the titular “flow.” Formalizing notoriously slippery...
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October 1, 2022
Book Review|
October 01 2022
Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music
Mitchell Ohriner.
Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music
. Oxford University Press
, 2019
: xl +248 pp. ($41.95 hardcover).
Jeremy Tatar
Originally from Sydney, Australia, Jeremy Tatar is currently a PhD candidate in music theory at Montreal's McGill University, where he is supervised by Jonathan Wild. His research interests concern popular music in general and rap and hip-hop in particular, as well as meter, timbre, and disability studies.
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Journal of Music Theory (2022) 66 (2): 303–314.
Citation
Jeremy Tatar; Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music. Journal of Music Theory 1 October 2022; 66 (2): 303–314. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-9930974
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