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“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.”
“And the choices a rapper makes, how well the current of that music and his phrasing, his rhythmic vocabulary, work together, that’s his flow.
That’s when you know a flow is exceptional. When it seems effortless.”
“There’s just bigger issues that actually affect our lives, our futures, our children, and that’s what we want to talk about.”
“When other people are as outraged and as curious about those problems as Black people are,” he says, “then maybe we can solve them together.”
We both gave each other space to be misunderstood, because we really wanted to understand.
