Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music

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...