“A rapper’s flow is like . . .” He chews his full bottom lip, jiggling it back and forth, as if the action might loosen his thoughts. “It’s like the rhythmic current of the song. Think of it as a relationship between the music and the rapper’s phrasing or rhythmic vocabulary, so to speak. You make choices about how many phrases you place in a measure. Maybe you want an urgent feeling, so you squeeze a lot of phrasing into a measure. Maybe you want a laid-back feel, and you leave space; you hesitate. Come in later than the listener expects.”
