Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius

by Rakim

“My name is Rakim Allah, and I’m about to flip the whole script”?

My writing starts in an empty room. It doesn’t really matter where because I have written everywhere. It’s just me and Four White Walls. Maybe one that just has some paint peeling in a corner of the ceiling or maybe one that has a window that looks out over the lights of a great city with those million stories bouncing through the streets. It can be a studio, a hotel, or the back of a bus. Probably they aren’t even white, but when I sit down, in my mind, it’s four walls that are as blank as the notebook I’m staring down at. It has to start with dead silence. I have to turn off that morning’s music and distance myself from the distractions of life’s cacophony. No phones, no kids, no entourage or onlookers. I need to completely tune out so I can start to tune in.

I’ve channeled my reflections into 5 Pillars of Creativity: Purpose, Inspiration, Spirituality, Consciousness, and Energy.

I was six the first time I saw hip-hop. It was the summer of 1974. My big brother Stevie took me to see it. They didn’t call it hip-hop or rap back then, but it was already a lot more than just a sound.

DJs were taking disco, soul, and funk records—anything that was high-energy and powerful and danceable—and isolating the breakdown, the part where it’s just rhythm, percussion, and drumming that makes people want to dance with some force. Any record could become part of a rap DJ’s set because DJs weren’t concerned with the whole record. They focused on those breaks and mixed two copies of the record back and forth so they could extend the break and change the power of the record entirely.

Everyone learned the sonic power of the break from DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant from the South Bronx who started spinning parties in the rec room of the building where he lived.

Herc went all around the city, spreading the gospel of hip-hop. His formula was to extend the breakdown part so the serious dancers could get down and perform for the crowd. It wasn’t music meant to get boys and girls dancing together. It was music meant to get boys dancing instead of fighting in gangs. New York had a gang issue before early rap came along, and it mostly ended when the gangsters transitioned into music. A lot of early dancing was about warring crews battling by break-dancing without ever touching each other. Symbolic violence was a lot better than killing.

I always believed there was a hip-hop way of thinking, because listening to this music was like taking musical steroids. It was sonic confidence. It made you bop harder, stand up straighter, stick your chest out more. It fed your ego. At a time when a lot of people in the hood were getting strangled by poverty, hip-hop came along and offered a boost of confidence and a jolt of fun. It was music from the hood for the hood, meant to make people feel good. And it spread like wildfire. In my elementary school years, everyone I knew around my age loved hip-hop. It was almost like the shared religion of our tribe.

I was seven when I wrote my first rhyme. I had seen guys on the block rhyming and wanted to try it. I wrote, “Mickey Mouse built a house / he built it by the border / an earthquake came and rocked his crib / and now it’s in the water.” Now I had the DJ’ing bug. With some life experience and some work on my vocabulary, I could start bringing things together.

“This guy knows Marley Marl and Mr. Magic,” Alvin said. “He wants to make a record. His name is Eric.” Those were two of the biggest names in hip-hop at that moment. Marley was the hottest producer in the game, and he was really shaping the sound of hip-hop with the records he produced for MC Shan and Roxanne Shante. Mr. Magic was a powerful radio DJ on WBLS who was then one of the few jocks playing rap records on the radio. Someone who knew both of them had to be for real. I said, “He can come in.” That’s how I met Eric B.

He was thinking about making a DJ album, presenting a group of MCs, like all the best MCs he’d met traveling around for his job. So he was asking people in every town, “Who’s the nicest MC around?” When he asked that in Wyandanch, of course he ended up at my place.

Years before that moment, back when I was rhyming in the park, I would rhyme all amped up because that got me heard in that loud outdoor environment. Plus, that was the way most people did it in the early days. That was the style of Run-DMC and LL Cool J. They kinda shouted on the mic as if they were giving a pep talk to a football team before the Super Bowl. It sounded forceful and tough. I respected those MCs, but I didn’t want to sound like that. I wanted to be more thought-provoking, and if people were going to really hear my ideas and the intricacies of my rhymes, it was better to have a calmer delivery. I had to yell in the park, but when I went into the basement studios, I saw that I could rhyme without yelling. I liked being more conversational because then I could have more control over the tones in my voice, and you’d be better able to really hear me. If you could hear me, then you’d have to think about what I was saying. I put a good deal of effort into intentionally changing my delivery, and over time I taught myself how to remain calm while I rhymed. With that, I sounded like no one else—and I loved that. So when Marley asked me to do it with more energy, he didn’t know that he was side stepping into a journey I’d been on for a while. I knew the sort of MC I wanted to be, and I wasn’t going to let anyone, not even the great Marley Marl, change me.

Marley came back, and we finished “My Melody,” but he was frustrated. “He don’t take instructions, he don’t listen to no one. His rhymes are great, but he’s gonna put people to sleep.”

The next night we went back to Marley’s. I was amazed by Marley’s ability to bring my James Brown beat and Eric’s Fonda Rae beat together perfectly. He played the bass line on the synthesizer, and I got on the mic. “I came in the door . . .” This time Marley didn’t complain about my energy. He just let me go. Maybe I was giving it a little more pep, but I got the feeling that Marley was starting to see what I was doing. Eric named it “Eric B. Is President” even though I never said that phrase in the song. He did that partly because the sample was from “Funky President” and partly because Eric wanted to build his reputation as a famous DJ. Also, it was a time in hip-hop when, among the underground fan base, the DJs still enjoyed a degree of celebrity that nearly paralleled MCs.

Additionally, “How to Emcee” was a commentary on the dumbed-down rap scene at the time. So few artists in 2009 were using real skills or anything that made you think. I felt it was a perfect time to say, “Yeah, I’ll teach y’all how to rap.” That was my sarcastic flow.

I think of wordplay as playing drums with words. It’s fun sometimes to take a few multi-syllable words and play drums, making the syllables implement the beat and making the beat sound different with the flow. It’s also one of the ways I show my skill. I can take three- or four-syllable words and, in the first four bars, place them in a certain order. However, I sequence my rhymes. I’ll place similar-sounding multi-syllable words somewhere different on the beat. In the first couple of bars, I might start a word on the one: boom, boom, boom. But then when I want to switch it up, I might come in on the second beat: boom, boom, boom. You take a breath and start it a little later or start it a little earlier, and what that does is it implements the beat a little differently. It’ll be, Duh, duh, duh, Duh, duh, duh, Duh, duh, duh, Duh, duh, duh (123, 123, 123, 123). You take a breath and start it a little later or start it a little earlier, and what that does is it implements the beat a little different.

In the early days, originality was part of the hip-hop ethos—a distinctive style was part of any rapper’s identity. Originality speaks volumes for artists and writers at all levels. Sometimes discovering who you are and what makes you unique helps you to find your style. What comes from your mind makes your art different from everybody else’s. Take advantage of that. It’s what attracts people to your art. Too often emerging artists prefer to go with the norm. The result is that repetition in art, music, etc., becomes normal—until someone is able to change up the tempo. Often audiences are attracted to the unusual. Don’t be afraid to find that in your work. Use that to make people stop and look and listen. A lot of the time people can’t find their own style or purpose because they’re too busy trying to be someone else. Individuality is what makes someone uniquely interesting. A person who knows how to project individuality is going to go a long way.

Music is vibration, and when it hits a certain spot, it boosts your energy. And it gives you a photo-flash memory of that moment. That’s why you remember it: something happened that transformed you. It’s like your first kiss. You remember that? Do you remember right where you were when you heard a certain song when it came out? I can hear certain songs playing now, and they bring to mind the scent of my mom’s perfume. Certain records can make me feel like I’m sitting in the car, going over to my cousin’s crib.

Good music makes you sit back and think of something, but it’s not like you’re straining to remember it. Some things are logged in your memory, but with music it’s more than just a memory. With music, you don’t have to strain. When the music comes on, it’s like bang and you’re there. And you can’t even back out of that moment, that feeling, until it finishes with you. And you can’t deny it. Once you hear art, you have no say. It’s going to do one or two things to you. It’s going to hit that nerve and make you appreciate it. Or if it’s a song you don’t like, you may not appreciate it.

But your ultimate goal is to put yourself in a position where you’re your only competition, and the only way you can do that is to pick your own lane and do something that’s innovative and original. When you can do that, you don’t have to reinvent yourself. You can keep making music because it doesn’t matter what any other artist puts out. You’re not competing with that. You’re competing with the last thing you did. That’s one way of sticking to your guns and letting who you are speak through your work.

“Squeeze the green off.” I thought he meant don’t lose it, so I held on to it tight until I got to the store and spent all of it. I didn’t understand until years later that he meant don’t spend it quickly. He was telling me to hold on to it so long that the ink would come off on my fingers.

lay the beat, at least to the point where it’s almost done, then take out a pad and start writing. Maybe two hours in, I would have the lyrics done. Then I’d go right into the booth and read my rhyme, and lay it onto the record. Back then we were so young and excited. There was no manual, so that became the recipe.

I also liked the way the word “mahogany” expressed the word “Black” in a different way. Mahogany. When I first heard it, I remember thinking, Damn! That’s a dope-ass name.

Since the Average White Band’s song was called “School Boy Crush,” I wanted to do my crush: the microphone. But I didn’t want to call it “Microphone Crush.” So I called it “Microphone Fiend.” That was my way of keeping the title similar to the original title but still adding that hip-hop flavor to it. “Microphone Fiend” recounts my experience as a young rapper obsessed and in love with MC’ing. I mention kicking holes in speakers and pulling out plugs, which was basically me retelling a moment of my childhood going to Wyandanch Park. I didn’t realize at that time how ridiculous it was to think these guys would listen to me. But now I can imagine a little eight-year-old kid approaching the booth and asking a DJ spinning at a party if he can rap. The DJ would probably laugh. “Yo, somebody get this little kid out of here before he falls and hurts himself. Whose son is this?”

James Brown had a really big influence on the way I thought hip-hop should sound. First of all, he was rapping before we were. Add to that the way he was doing his music: the drums on his tracks, the way the horns would hit, the way he would scream. I used to try to imagine what he was thinking when he was making his music. Nobody was doing that back in the day. He invented that, and he just brought his own style—even the way he danced!

But sometimes it’s not about having the best voice or being the greatest singer or performer. A great example is Frank Sinatra. Sinatra just felt genuine. He was able to use his voice and put his songs together in such a way that he came across as a regular person who knew how to sing. Nobody can do what he did the way he did it. And when I listen to his singing today, there’s still that special something about it.

You need a certain aggressiveness for rap. Aggression is also the forte of dictators. And just as the performer’s goal is to persuade large groups of people to listen to and repeat their messages, buy their albums, and come to their concerts, these men influenced massive groups of people to commit gruesome atrocities. Even as you raise the question “How did they do that?” set limitations and find your moral center.

To limit oneself to the study of only your own discipline can stifle artistic progression when you must always strive to stimulate it. So a piano player should obviously research Mozart and Monk but also look to Moses and MacArthur and Spielberg and Sartre. Inspiration is everywhere, and to gain the knowledge required to become your best self and create your best work, seek inspiration not only in the obvious but across all spectrums of culture.

Years later, when I began to think of the importance of having an alter ego in hip-hop, it brought to mind that Colt .22: having an alter ego as a rapper is like having a gun on you.

“Let’s call it the Love Brothers,” one of the guys said. I was down with that. I became Love Brother number four. I gave myself a new MC name: Kid Wizard. It could be shortened to Kid Wiz or the Whiz Kid,

bright records that were escapist and fun and dance-y, like disco. If hip-hop had followed the lead of those songs, it could’ve turned into light party music. It didn’t because a lot of us followed the lead of a song that came out a little later: “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Flash was a legendary DJ and another one of the fathers of hip-hop. He found five MCs to be in his crew, including Melle Mel, one of the greatest of all time because of his tough, gritty voice and the way the sound of it communicates so much. His pen is so blunt and direct and powerful. “The Message” was Mel’s tour de force and the group’s biggest record and one of the most important records in hip-hop history because it showed us how to make great songs about our reality. “The Message” showed us there was much more power in making serious records that were painful and honest to a fault. At the end of the song, the guy dies in prison. That was so far away from anything we ever heard on the radio. It was far away from what could be heard in the era of routines. It was a hard look at how bad things were in the hood.

To be a good writer you have to be sensitive to what’s going on in the world. This means that you have to learn how to sympathize and relate to what people go through. You also have to communicate that back to them through your work—whether to comfort, to motivate, or to heal. Knowing there is a higher power makes it easier to understand not only how to do that but also your role in the process and your purpose for doing so.

what I’d learned through my lyrics and songs. When you share knowledge, consistently and unobstrusively, people will start to commend you for it. If you put your ego aside, you realize that helping others achieve understanding is something greater than the act and greater than yourself. Likewise, as you mature intellectually and spiritually, you recognize that maybe you are being guided by a higher power.

There’s no proof that the first humans roaming Earth and starting civilization knew geometry. But the monuments were built with geometry. For example, the Great Pyramid of Giza is placed directly in the center of Earth’s landmass. How could a human know that and build it exactly at the intersection of the longest line of latitude and the longest line of longitude? So I started asking questions like “Who built this?” “Do these monuments tell us that aliens exist?” Machu Picchu, Chichén Itzá—there’s no way humans did this. Another thing I studied was the golden ratio, a proportion between objects that equals essentially 1.618, and how it affects nearly everything. It’s intelligence. It’s not a coincidence. Like the measurement from your toes to your belly button is 1.618 times longer than the distance from your belly button to the top of your head. It doesn’t matter how tall you are. Spiraling patterns with the same golden ratio are also found in flowers and trees. That’s crazy. The surface area of the Great Pyramid divided by the area of its base also equals the golden ratio. This embedded intelligence shows us there’s a higher power. Certainly at that point the grass is not boring. Flowers, trees, fruit, the way living things grow—you start to appreciate things a little more. As an MC, this information only helps me express myself better. I never wrote a rhyme about grass, but learning about the golden ratio gave me a deeper understanding and a deeper love for life.

My brother Stevie wasn’t studying Islam specifically, but he did temporarily assume the name “Hakim.” One day, he wrote the name on the sidewalk, and at first, I just liked the way it looked. Later, when I thought about choosing a name, I decided on “Rakim.” It’s amazing how the universe works because I didn’t know what it meant at the time. I just liked the name because it sounded strong and familiar like “Hakim” but was still original. As my teens became my twenties and I learned the history of the name—that in Egyptian religion “Ra” meant Sun God, and that “Kem” meant Kemet or Egypt, and “Rakim” also meant “the benevolent one” and variations referred to “writer, architect, builder”—it all fueled power into my purpose.

That whole summer of 1986 I rapped from ten in the morning to midnight, every day. I was either in my house rapping or in someone’s studio rapping or in the park on the mic. No matter where I was, I was thinking about hip-hop and words and rhymes and rhyme patterns. I was making, like, two tapes a day. I wasn’t making songs—each tape was ten to fifteen minutes of straight rhyming with no song structure, no hooks, no choruses. I knew nothing about making songs, but I loved writing rhymes and recording and showing off how good I was. When a beat was going and I was rhyming in the pocket and everything was flowing, it was the best thing in the world. My dream was to make a tape and have somebody in the park play it on a big boom box.

But I was nervous that if I kept weaving Islam into the music, people wouldn’t get it. Was I trying to plant a tree in concrete? I looked at my rhymes and said to myself, You’re going over their head with that. I wanted to make them think, but I didn’t want to be so far out of their reach that they didn’t get it.

That led me to a new quandary. Should I write in a way that let everyone understand me, or should I write rhymes that let people know I was the best and risk going over their heads? A big internal argument about all this ensued for months. I started debating with myself about every word as if each choice were a monumental decision in my career. I became paralyzed and stopped writing for a few weeks. Finally I decided that I wouldn’t dumb my lyrics down one iota, because I enjoyed writing rhymes that people couldn’t fully understand at first. I loved making complicated puzzles that people had to solve. I liked sending listeners to the dictionary. I wanted to make people think about the rhymes, because if they have to really think about your work, it’ll stay with them longer. I wanted them to have to rewind my lyrics. Once that mind-set settled in, I felt free again.

I started paying close attention to every word or phrase that caught my ear. My mind looked at each word like a scientist examining an atom, considering it from every angle, seeing what I could get out of it. My process became much more complicated. If I was trying to write and the word “Mesopotamia” came up, first I’d try to see what words rhymed with it. Then I’d come up with concepts related to Mesopotamia and I’d start researching those, which led me to other words, like maybe “pyramid.” I’d dissect that and uncover all of its meanings and then select words that rhymed with it until another word popped out, and so on. I could easily go through forty or fifty words, just to write one verse.

I listened more closely to the jazz I loved. I felt like Dizzy Gillespie was who I’d be like if I was in the jazz world. He was very cerebral and thoughtful. He showed me that I had to expand my knowledge and become smarter in order to take my music to the next level. I had to try to know everything. Then I watched a documentary on the genius pianist Thelonious Monk and started trying to re-create his sounds and rhythms with my rhymes and flows. Ronnie and I also watched Miles Davis perform on TV. Miles got up onstage and started playing with his back to the audience. Ronnie had played with Miles. He said Miles was saying, “Kiss my ass.” I wanted to be like that. I started listening to legendary saxophonist John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things really closely, and when I got to the part where he plays two notes at once, I completely bugged out. I was dumbfounded because you can’t play two notes at the same time. I know how to play the sax and I can tell you that it was impossible.

What would Coltrane do? He became my musical North Star. Coltrane wouldn’t stay within the limitations of fours bars, he’d play past the end of the bar, so I tried to write lines that didn’t stop at the end of the bar. From his example, I wrote lines like this in “Move the Crowd”: “Standing by the speaker, suddenly I had this / fever. Was it me or either summer madness.” When I said “this” and took a pause, the listener’s mind would fill with anticipation and a little tension because I’d ended the line without concluding the thought. Before me, MCs finished the thought at the end of a line. Coltrane showed me another way.

I always believed that James Brown was the first rapper. The way he talked on his records with all that attitude and ego shaped the way a lot of performers approached the mic. The way he groaned and screamed and grunted showed me how to use every part of my voice to make myself stand out on a record. He showed me that I could communicate without using words. Those instinctive guttural sounds can really get under people’s skin. I didn’t understand half of what James was saying. It sounded so good, I’d listen anyway, which made me think it was okay if every person in the audience didn’t totally understand everything I said, as long as those people were moved by the music and the rhythm.

including Flavor Flav and Professor Griff, were from Roosevelt, the farthest west. Their first albums came out in 1987 (Yo! Bum Rush the Show) and 1988 (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) and were known for their political content, which many came to classify as “conscious rap” since the content extended the political messages of the Black Power Movement of the ’60s and ’70s and lifted up Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan. Often my own lyrics were grouped in with this category, as those of us who connected in any way with Islam were often lumped together. Chuck D was a little older than many of us and had already graduated from Adelphi University and was working as a DJ at a local radio station when Public Enemy came together.

A mere six miles from Wyandanch was Amityville, the birthplace of De La Soul, which formed in 1987 and whose debut album would come in 1989, 3 Feet High and Rising. Posdnuos, Trugoy, and Maseo had met in high school. Playful but not as comedic as Biz Markie, conscious but not as hardcore political as Public Enemy, they helped carve out a socially conscious brand of hip-hop that was deemed “positive” rap by critics who contrasted their approach to the more gritty street sound.

My Long Island contemporaries were rounded out by EPMD (Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith), artists who used their actual names as their stage name rather than monikers. The members of EPMD grew up about eight miles away from me in neighboring Brentwood. They combined party style with a smooth, laid-back flow (a smoothness that irked me because it reminded me too much of my own signature style). One of their songs is a ...

The range of major hop-hop artists that Long Island produced reflected the geographical and class diversity of Blacks in the mid to late 1980s. It also reflected the diversity of hip-hop, which had not yet become so heavily melded to the gangsta persona. You could still be perceived as middle class, working class, or college bound or college educated doing hip-hop during that transitional period. The hyper-policing culture alongside the crack cocaine explosion that produced the prison boom was just hitting its stride. Likewise, hip-hop was still being erroneously defined by mainstream media outlets as a strictly NYC phenomenon, despite the emergence of groups like the Geto Boys from Houston, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince from Philadelphia, Too Short and Digital Underground from the Bay Area, 2 Live Crew from Miami, and of course the various crews from Long Island. N.W.A’s emergence would change that forever. * * *

Suddenly it seemed really boring to rhyme only on the fourth beat. I thought, If I write the words in a different way, will that make the rhymes come out different? I drew three lines down the page, creating a grid with four cells. Then I wrote horizontally and vertically, rhyming words that were in the second cell and the fourth cell or rhyming the second cell in one line with the second cell in the following line. I first wrote the rhyming words, then filled in the connecting words. That’s how I came up with internal rhymes—when I found a new way to write, I found new possibilities.

I discovered that the beginning of a song was critical. I wanted to start by saying something memorable, with an opening line that would stick in your mind. But my tone was a big part of it too. I had to come in all smooth and calm, like I had everything under control. That would make people want to follow me. I took that easing-into-it approach with all the songs on Paid in Full. On the title track, I smoothed in with a soft tone in the first verse: “Thinkin’ of a master plan . . .” It was like I was lightly dabbing the canvas to start the painting. I wanted to reel the audience in with my confidence, so in the first moments of the song I tried to give them a sense of “I’m cool.”

One day my father was taking me to a game. I was sitting there kind of quiet, I guess. Wasn’t talking. Pops asked me if I had butterflies, and I didn’t really know what that meant. “You got butterflies?” he asked. “Huh?” “You nervous?” he probed further. “Yeah, a little bit.” Before the games I used to get butterflies, but I hadn’t known what they were. “That’s not nervousness, that’s consciousness,” he said. “You understand what you’re about to do is serious to you. You’re about to play a game, and you want to win the game. You’re not scared, are you?” “No, I’m not scared, Pop.” “Well, then that’s not nervousness, that’s consciousness.”

We got an offer from Island Records to do our second album for $450,000. “Hell no,” Eric said. He was the leader of the business side of the group. We’d sold over a million records. He said, “Our record is more profitable than Joshua Tree.” That was U2’s smash. Island said, yes, it was, but “it’s rap music.” “Isn’t rap money the same color as U2 money?”