Rap isn't poetry, not least because it involves music and often other elements that aren't words. But the way poets in English use things like rhyme and meter, and the ways these conventions both do and don't apply to rap we try to lay out the rules for rap, in order to understand the techniques that artists like Jay-Z and Kanye employ.
I try to stay true to my style, and I understand the foundation of my style and where it came from. But at the same time, you take that experience and learn different ways to write, different ways to turn on that creative energy.
Rhyme to kill, rhyme to murder, rhyme to stomp,
Rhyme to ill, rhyme to romp,
Rhyme to smack, rhyme to shock, rhyme to roll,
Rhyme to destroy anything, toy boy.
On the microphone:
I'm Poppa Large, big shot on the East Coast.
Not all women write the same. But I don't understand why the model is that you're supposed to write like a man, and that means you're a real writer.
I don't understand anything technical about music at all. I don't understand any of it, why you can't put these sounds together with those sounds. I only know what sounds good.
I probably write the same story a hundred different ways. I suppose right now I am looking for the 101st different way to write that same story. And the 102nd, and 103rd and 111th and 133rd.
I don't understand why I do what I do. I don't understand why I act anymore. But I do know that I love it, and that I find it really interesting and satisfying to enter into other worlds and explore different ways of thinking.
Rap has so many possibilities that need to be explored. There are different factions of rap, but some are in a rut. Rap doesn't have to be about boosting egos and grabbing your crotch and dissing women. There's a way to make political and social issues interesting and entertaining to the young rap audience.
If there would be a recipe for a poem, these would be the ingredients: word sounds, rhythm, description, feeling, memory, rhyme, and imagination. They can be put together a thousand different ways, a thousand, thousand...more.
Every song on '10 Day' is a completely different sound - the cadence, the flow, even the production - because I like so many different types of music and because my taste is so refined. 'Acid Rap' is another tape where every song sounds different.
That's my life. But I don't glorify violence, and I hate jail. The rap game saved me, man: I've got three children, and I wouldn't even think of putting my hand in somebody's pocket or doing something stupid now.
I don't understand why some people will only accept a guitar if it has an instantly recognizable guitar sound. Finding ways to use the same guitar people have been using for 50 years to make sounds that no one has heard before is truly what gets me off.
I like the idea of having many different ways to express myself. There is a part of me as an artist and a creator who would like to express myself in many different ways. But then at the same time I know I have limited hours in the day, and I can only do so much successfully.
We have to go into every game with the same mentality as we have for Liverpool. It can be different playing against Burnley to Liverpool. I understand for the fans it's different but, for us, it can't be because the result we want is the same and nothing else.
There is no one kind of thing that we 'perceive' but many different kinds, the number being reducible if at all by scientific investigation and not by philosophy: pens are in many ways though not in all ways unlike rainbows, which are in many ways though not in all ways unlike after-images, which in turn are in many ways but not in all ways unlike pictures on the cinema-screen--and so on.
Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.