decade later, Rakim understood that each syllable of a word had its own power, could provide a rhyme as easily as a whole word. Thus prefixes and suffixes and minor words, like articles and conjunctions, became tools for creating space. Silence had power too. A pause extended could snap a line to attention. Eminem learned. Consider for a moment the patterns of “The Way I Am:” “I sit back / with this pack/of zig zags/and this bag / of this weed / it gives me / the shit need / ed to be / the most mean/est MC / on this—/on this earth/and since birth/ I’ve been cursed/with this curse/to just curse/and just blurt/this berserk/ and bizarre /shit that works.” The anapestic fire in Eminem’s lyrics is matched only by the elasticity of the rhymes; they keep stretching past the point where they should be comprehensible. The first rhyme stream features four end rhymes that we can easily lock into. But the second syllables of each anapest also rhyme (known as internal rhyme) creating a sort of counter rhythm, like a high hat cymbal. The sibilant words (“sit,” “this,” and” zig”) even sound like a high hat. The internal rhyme carries over into the second stream, which stretches to six end rhymes. However, the internal fourwallsdown.com
rhyme ends after the first anapest, just enough to continue the impression that there has been no pause in the rhyming. This technique appears in many of Eminem’s songs and is a primary reason that his flow seems like a torrent—in a literal way, his rhymes never stop; they just keep leapfrogging over one another. Additionally, in this second stream Eminem begins splitting words, beginning anapests with the suffixes of words from the previous one (“needed” and “meanest,” for example). The second stream of six end rhymes is followed by a stream of eight, carrying us deeper and deeper into the song. With the standard couplet pattern, our minds digest a discreet packet of meaning every two lines. “The Way I Am” subverts this expectation. Where we expect a shift, none occurs. After we pick up the first stream of four end rhymes, the expectation is again thwarted when the second stream expands to six, and then again when the third stream expands to eight. Eminem draws us along with him, and when we are ready for a shift he does not let us go. The effect is mesmerizing, and Eminem, like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, guides us ever deeper into the bowels of his song. Page 15 of 22