Working out how to transcribe rapping is slowly becoming its own academic niche, with people like Paul Edwards, Adam Bradley, Martin Connor, and — most recently — Mazbou Q coming up with inventive ways to mark out features of rhythm, rhyme, dynamics and pitch alongside lyrics. However, while these auditory features are incredibly important, they only make up one branch of the linguistic tree; and while Kendrick Lamar is an interesting rappers from a musical perspective, his lyrics are just as interesting when it comes to things like semantics (meaning) and lexis (word choice). Arguably, if we only approach his lyrics as music, it overlooks the degree of craft that he puts into these linguistic elements, along with ignoring the way that most of his audience gain a deeper understanding of his music (since most everyone can interpret meaning in language while even some rappers have to learn to count bars). There’s also an argument to be made that Lamar himself is a words-on-a-page writer; while it’s becoming more common for rappers improvise in the booth and craft their writing by punching in different sections, Lamar mostly focuses on crafting his words and syntax before recording begins while memorising the musical features of his delivery.

Kendrick Lamar’s handwritten lyrics for an unused third verse for “PRIDE.” from the album DAMN., shared by Top Dawg Entertainment’s president Punch on Instagram.

For this reason, I’ve chosen to break each essay in two parts: the first half focuses on musical elements (such as the beat, the melodies, and so on), while the second half focuses on the linguistic elements (such as the metaphors, allusions and structural motifs that Lamar employs throughout the album). Specifically, the musical half of the essays rely on a blend of evocative language³My decision to use this type of language is primarily influenced by Philip Tagg‘s Music’s Meanings, an exhaustive book that explores how to write about music for people who aren’t familiar with terms used by musicians and musicologists and sheet music (created in Sibelius) to illustrate my points, along with occasionally providing audio clips and screen caps from Logic Pro, my digital audio workstation of choice, where I’ve painstakingly recreated the songs from scratch. In the places where I’ve felt it’s useful to transcribe Lamar’s rapping into sheet music, I’ve colour-coded the rhymes by highlighting both the notes and lyrics. Lamar is a an incredibly versatile rapper — in the span of one album, he can go from sounding like Snoop Dogg to E-40 to DMX⁴Though even virtuosos have their lane: you can’t really imagine Lamar doing the kind of wild melodic backflips that you’d expect on a Young Thug or Lil Uzi Vert record — but his main mode of rapping uses the same kind of intonation that his hero, 2Pac, used, often bouncing between three or four untuned pitches and volumes to accent particular words like a drummer hitting hi-hats, cymbals and toms against a steady backbeat. For this reason, I’ve mostly chosen to employ the neutral clef for Lamar’s raps while providing however many ledger lines it takes to approximate his changes in pitch. On the other hand, when Lamar employs a more diatonic and melodic style (like on “You Ain’t Gotta Lie [Momma Said]”), I’ve opted for the bass clef, with the different pitches indicated using standard noteheads.⁵These methods for notating rapping are taken from Robert Komaniecki, whose journal article “Vocal Pitch in Rap Flow” provides a great overview of the strengths and weaknesses of using this kind of approach.

By comparison, the second half of each essay features a lyric sheet that contains annotations in a style similar to the website Genius. Since there are so many annotations, each one is colour-coded, and the annotation itself can be pulled up either as a tooltip or a footnote. On laptops and desktop computers, the tooltips are found by hovering your mouse over the superscript number; on tablet and smartphone devices, they can be found by tapping the number, which will then open the note beneath the paragraph as a collapsible block element.⁶I want to take a second to thank Sean K Williams here for his brilliant WordPress plugin Modern Footnotes, which allowed me to achieve all of this with excellent user-friendly aesthetics instead of spending days futzing around with CSS and HTML trying to get things to look just slightly not-shit.

In those moments where the musical features of Lamar’s rapping are particularly important, I’ve mentioned them in the first half of the essay and provided some detailed analysis with sheet music and audio examples; in those moments where the features are merely worth noting, I’ve included it the annotations to the lyrics. Ultimately, this two-part essay structure is a bit of a kludge, since it implies that the musical and linguistic elements of rapping can be separated when they’re really inextricable. Such is the nature of analysis, I guess — even the deconstructionists end up imposing their own structures on everything.

In any music, there’s an interplay between the hidden heartbeat of the metre, the bounce, snap and clatter of the beat, and the gallup of the vocals that make it almost impossible to accurately transcribe with just words on the page. Of course, the alternative is to notate all of the music including the vocals, which is an equally OTT thing to do when you’re primarily focusing on the lyrics. A kind of hybrid solution, then, can be captured if we partially do away somewhat with the grammatical function of punctuation, and instead turn the line break into the main unit indicating a pause in rhythm. For example, compare these lines:

At first, I did love you, but now I just wanna fuck.
Late nights thinking of you until I get my nut.
Tossed and turned, lesson learned—
you was my first girlfriend.
Bridges burned all across the board—
destroyed. But what for?

At first I did love you
But now I just wanna fuck
Late nights thinking of you
Until I get my nut
Tossed and turned, lesson learned
You was my first girlfriend
Bridges burned, all across the board
Destroyed, but what for?

While the lines on the left are more accurate in terms of delineating the grammatical relationship between the words, the lines on the right are easier to audiate in a similar way to the original song. And you can already see that we’re going to become pretty reliant on dashes if we continue with the heavily punctuated approach, because rappers often use angular poetic syntax when it comes to combining phrases rather than a prosaic one. In other words, they don’t really write in straightforward subject–verb–object sentences; there is no subject to the clause “tossed and turned, lesson learned”, while the clause “bridges burned all across the board” lacks a verb. So it would be disingenuous to punctuate these like sentences. Instead, the line breaks work as terminal marks for rhythm because they can be used anywhere within a series of words, so it reflects the fact that the two primary ways poets create rhythm on the page is through space and the implied stress of a new line.

There are also those smaller pauses, such as between the phrases “tossed and turned” and “lesson learned”. In these cases, I’ve used the comma to indicate these rhythmic pauses. Again, the thinking behind this is descriptive rather than prescriptive; you’ll find thousands of people online and IRL saying that a comma indicates a pause in speech, despite the fact that even open-minded linguistic guides like Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language make it pretty clear that this isn’t the case. Because the reality is that people do like to use commas in this way, and not just in text messages and other forms of demotic writing: I’ve always loved the fact that Jane Austen’s famous opening line to Pride and Prejudice says: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Austen’s commas make no sense in terms of traditional grammar; she’s treating the word “that” as if it introduces a relative clause, like “which”, and she simply puts a comma before “must” because it feels right to her. So I’ve opted to use commas the way Austen uses commas, as an indicator of rhythm.

In terms of grammar and syntax, transcribing Lamar’s lyrics runs into the thorny issue of how to capture Black American English in written Standard English.⁷For a detailed exploration of why different linguists refer to this language variety by different terminology, check out this post from Language Jones, who’s a shining representation of how you can get invited to the cookout by simply bothering to taking up a lifelong interest in people who don’t look and talk like you When someone speaks in a distinct variety of English, how much do you deviate from the linguistic prescriptivism of Standard English in an attempt to render things like phonology and grammar? Or, to put it differently, how can you make sure you don’t end up writing something that sounds like the characters in Porgy and Bess?

In my view, an easy kludge is to render all the grammar and almost none of the phonology. In other words, when Kendrick says “I remember you was conflicted”, I’m not going to correct that to “were”, since the nonstandard “was” is literally a different word; but I’m also not going to render “misusing your influence” as “misusin’ ya influence” because employing eye dialect creates the implication that everyone except Black Americans pronounce words exactly as they’re written, when in reality most North Americans drop the velar nasal sound at the end of “misusing” when they have to read the word aloud. As any dyslexic person will tell you, English orthography doesn’t really reflect pronunciation, so altering the spellings to reflect Black American English is just another way of othering black people and implying they aren’t normal, which is its own pernicious kind of racism.

Finally, there are plenty of moments where Lamar relies on a polyphony of voices to to create both rhythm and dialogue within the music. In these moments, it’s not enough to simply lay the words out using the traditional top-to-bottom structure of English typesetting. For example, Anna Wise and Whitney Alford’s chants of “tax man coming!” at the end of “Wesley’s Theory” rise up in volume right as George Clinton and Thundercat singing “money, go back home” tails off. The closest way this can be approximated on the page without resorting to sheet music is to steal a trick from comic books and use a multidirectional column-and-grid layout, since it disrupts our sense of whether to read left-to-right or top-to-bottom first, thereby indicating that there are two things happening at the same time.

The pinch being, of course, that this layout is still reliant on the annotations being read on a device that has plenty of screen space. If you’re reading this on a phone, then it will simply place everything in a hierarchical top-to-bottom shape of block elements. Of course, this kind of responsive design is still preferable to constantly scrolling left and right in an attempt to read everything linearly.

Now, let’s get on with the show: hit the arrow to go back to the tracklist at the top of the page.