Switched on Pop - The Art of Flow (with DJ Jazzy Jeff) ICYMI

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

In hip-hop, what draws us to an artist is not just the content of their lyrics but how they deliver them. Along with tapping your foot to the rhythm, understanding something called “flow” is essential to understanding hip-hop as a whole. In this episode of Switched On Pop, we interview genre icon DJ Jazzy Jeff on the concept of flow: what it is, how it applies to all music – not just hip-hop – and how any rapper’s flow can be analyzed under his guidelines. Taking his word for it, we put our magnifying glasses on to look at the bars of our favorite rappers, from Megan thee Stallion to Babytron. Songs Discussed: The Notorious B.I.G. - Big Poppa Mary J. Blige - Family Affair A Tribe Called Quest - The Hop Danger Mouse, Black Thought - Aquamarine BabyTron - Crocs & Wock’  RXKNephew - Take Three JID - Better Days (feat. Johnta Austin) Megan Thee Stallion - Not Nice Megan Thee Stallion - Cocky Af Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com.

It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm producer Rianna Cruz. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. When people talk about their favorite rappers, one of the words that I hear thrown around a lot is the idea of flow. And while I have a vague sense of what it means as somebody that listens to a lot of hip-hop, it's a concept that I want to explore more deeply.

The idea that it's not the lyrics, but rather how a rapper, spits their bars. This is a cool way to think about hip-hop, Brianna, because I feel like usually we zero in on the hardest hitting disses in a track, the most clever instances of wordplay. But part of what draws us to an artist is not just the content of their lyrics, like you were saying, but it's actually the way they deliver them. the rhythm, the pace, the cadence, the flow. And yet we don't really have like a definition.

You can't look in the Harvard musical dictionary under F and find flow next to, you know, I don't know, Forte and Fortissimo. Flugelhorn. Between Fortissimo and Flugelhorn lies the elusive flow. This feels like a cool opportunity to do some. listening, think about what flow means, and hopefully get some insight from a practitioner themselves as to the meaning and the sort of cultural history of flow. Right. So to answer this question of what is flow, I wanted to go to one of the practitioners, somebody who's been in the game since nearly the very beginning.

How you doing? I am DJ Jazzy Jeff. Whoa. How'd you get Jazzy Jeff? Oracle status right here. Worked my magic. So the very first thing I asked DJ Jazzy Jeff is what is flow in his eyes? Flow is cadence. Flow is rhythm. Like from a producer's point of view,

you can make a beat that is straight up. You can make a beat that swings that has a little bit of a swing to it. You can change that swing and increments. So you can swing it really, really heavy. You can swing it slightly. That's pretty much what flow is from a lyrical point of view.

It's, you know, how well is your cadence? How well is your time signature on whatever you're on? You know, it can be Acapella, but if it's to a beat, do you ride the beat the way the beat is? Do you counteract and ride the beat in a different time signature Are you one with the beat? Flow is something that not a lot of people understand, but you feel it. Flow is more about feeling than hearing.

I guess then would you say you're not really listening for something? You're just kind of feeling it in your body? Yes, yes. Because I think the average person who doesn't do music receives music for how it makes them feel. I realized at a very young age that there were certain things in, music that would give me goosebumps. There were certain things that would raise the hairs on the back of my neck. There were certain things that I would frown and almost want to cry, and I don't understand why. And I think as I've gotten older, I started dissecting what those things were. I feel music

more than I listen to it. That has always been one of my secret weapons that knowing this, And like I said, the average person not knowing their feeling, I know how to string records together to give you that feeling, like over and over and over. Like, it's funny that you're saying this, that has pretty much been one of my secret weapons forever, that I approach music from a feeling perspective. I know how this record makes me feel.

And if it makes me feel like that, it makes someone else feel like that because I know I'm not the only person. because I know that I can put together six records in a row that give you that feeling, that you're wondering like, oh my gosh, like, why am I feeling like this? I am feeling so great. To you, what represents the golden age of hip hop and specifically flow? Oh, man.

I would absolutely have to say the 90s. The early 80s to the late 80s was the discovery period of us realizing that hip hop was going to be here. And I think people had to understand that hip hop is not a musical art form. Hip hop is a lyrical art form over any kind of music. So I think once that clicked was when you started getting the tribe called Quest heavily jazz influence. That's when to meadow, I'm going to make you move whether woman or fellow. You, I got the medals in the war field of respect. Like an ill-porn. Don't make your body. That's when to me it turned into, oh man, hip hop can pretty much be whatever you wanted to be based off of the music you're trying to go after. And I think once people understood that and you start digging for some of these jazz records that are solely made off a feel, the flow started to come into play.

That is kind of like, okay, I know how this sample is. I know how this beat is. How can I complement this? And that's when you really, really started to get the discovery, especially, you know, pretty much from 1989 to about 1997, it was, you know, so much hip hop that was out there that Flo became the thing. Do you think flow is something that could be found in anything or is it something very specific to hip-hop and the genres that are inspired by hip-hop?

100% found in anything. One of the reasons why the hip-hop community loves Mary J. Blige so much Mary J. Blige's flow is like a rapper. Mary J. Blige knows how to sing with the flow of Biggie. And you get deeper and deeper help you reach the climax that your man can make. Call him tell him you be home real late and sing the break. And you fall into her cadence before you understand what she's saying or how well she's singing. It's just like, oh my God, she is so locked into this.

Like on like family affair. Yeah, that's it. Like she, she nailed that. Yeah. She nailed that. She could have rap those lyrics. I mean, it is kind of rap, you know. It's like, it's like, let's get it crunk of.

Exactly. Yeah, I totally got it. There are rappers that are friends of mine that I hate the way that they rap because their flow is always counteracting. And I think I am somebody that my natural rhythm wants. you to lock in to the drums. Biggie was amazing at his flow. And I realized that there are people that like Biggie because his cadence married to every beat he's ever been on. You know, I You know, please

Lyricly C, B-I-G, beef flossing Jig on the cover of fortune Five-D-O You know, I got the phone number You man

You know, I got the dough You take the flow down Is that Black You know, His lyrics are just absolutely

mind-blowing Some people have fans because it's kind of like the beat is great but when you have that person that it's just like

you can sit in that pocket and sometimes it's not quite on beat. Sometimes you're a little bit laid back off of the beat that it almost feels like you're going to fall off but you never fall off. That those are the tricks that you can play with people's natural body clock

that makes all the difference in the world. Wow, DJ, Jazzy, Jeff. It really stood out to me this ending point about flow can exist everywhere. It can maybe exist in your cadence of speech. It can definitely exist in how you say. but it is certainly intertwined with having an immaculate sense of rhythm, almost creating your own rhythm along with a song.

One of the big takeaways for me is I like how someone who's been in the game as long as Jazzy Jeff has this like kind of bird's eye perspective. I really like what he said about the body clock because every person's body clock is unique. So by extension, every person's flow is going to be unique in some way. Of course, certain flows can bite other flows, so to speak. But you always can bring something to the table. Yeah, you're a natural method of speech. Right.

Like, I definitely, if I could, rap would be singing mumble rap because I speak way too quickly and I mumble all the time. Wow, there's a genre for me. A little pop. A little chuck. But yeah, there's certain things in that conversation that we can hone in on. He brings up Biggie's flow as something that everybody loves, which makes sense because he's one of the most popular rappers of all time. Take Bigg Papa, for example.

Biggie does exactly what DJ Jazzy Jeff talks about. He delivers a flow that feels so natural and easy while also being locked into the drums and keeping up with the rhythm. There's a real push and pull here where you have this underlying slow, steady beat, and Biggie is able to move energy forward or pull it back by the intensity of his rhyme scheme. So if he's just doing end rhymes, you're like, okay, boom, hanging in with the beat. But then he starts doing interior rhymes and intensifying the rhymes and almost feels like the song is moving faster even though it's staying at the same tempo. It's also the way he attacks certain words to all the

ladies in the place with style and grace. It's like he's like putting these accents on certain words that bring you deeper into his flow. It's like, who knows if he's doing that intentionally or not, but man, it is so effective. So, of course, Biggie is at the top of the pantheon of famous rappers. But with the pearls of knowledge we gathered from DJ Jazzy Jeff, we should look at some of our favorite rappers of 2022 and how they use flow in their work. And there's rhythm. But above all, it's something that's primarily felt.

So I thought this could be a great opportunity to try to use this framework to understand the flows of some of the rappers that the Switched-on-Pop team has been listening to over the past few months. Nice. Let's do it. Well, something that stood out to me this year is Black Thought on his collab album with Danger Mouse, cheat codes. Let's listen to the track, Aquamarine. Whoa. That is one of my favorite bragging lines ever, where he says, my words should be studied up in Berkeley and Juilliard, all my bars is as hard as solid gold bullion. And I took him at his word.

I was like, all right, man, if you really think we should study it, like we're at Berkeley and Juilliard studying music and conservatory, let's look closely at these bars. Can we check out just the first opening lines of the verse? here. We go from liver to Libra from cold water to free from the treaty side of Geneva the biology teacher. We can study those lines at a molecular

level because the way that he embeds rhymes into every word develops its own rhythm onto itself. We can think about Black Thoughts flow as its own percussion instrument in this song.

So I took each rhyme and assigned it to a different sound on a drum kit. Nerd. Sorry, it's something going around. Fair, fair, fair, fair, fair. First, we're going to listen to E sounds, as in we go from Lira to Libra. Every time you hear an E sound, I layer it with a kick drum. Every time you get an O or O, like, go cold, world war, you're going to get a tom.

Every time you hear F from fever, you're going to hear a deep 808. And every time you get an ah, as in lira, Libra, you're going to hear a snare. Put them all together and Black Thoughts Flow becomes its own drum set. You can study those bars in Juilliard. That's so cool, Charlie. Thanks. Not me, Black Thought. Bars of Bouillon.

Brava. It's so artful, and to me that demonstrates how intentionally craft it is. Black thought is a master of the form, and he's showing us so effortlessly in the confines of this track. Well, that's what's amazing is here we're not even talking about the content of the lyric, just looking at the syllable, the rhyme, the accents, where things land, how they interact with the rhythm, and those things on their own are spectacular in the same way that you can hum along to a chorus because the hook, the melody is amazing. You don't even need the words. you can almost drum along to how he's rapping.

That's the flow. And then he maps on lyrics that you got to sit down and study and read 17 times and go open up a dictionary and read Wikipedia and go down a wormhole to be able to figure out the beautiful construction of his thought. I love listening to this vocal drum kit that Charlie's created here because I think it goes back to one of Jazzy Jeff's like core points. You're not necessarily thinking about. this when you're listening to black thoughts flow you're probably if anything just trying to keep up

with the verbal dexterity that's on display absolutely but then when you take away the meaning of any of those words and just think about the sound of them just think about the rhymes and the rhythm you realize the flow itself like beyond any of the textual meaning stands on its own it's funky it's kind of addictive, honestly, to listen to. It's also probably what makes it listenable when you're not tuned into the lyric. Or when you're listening to hip hop in another language, whether it's Korean or French. It's like, it's not something we'll necessarily get to talk about today, but it makes me think, like, flow is kind of universal, right? You don't need to even know the language to be able to bop your head to someone's flow. For sure. Well, clearly Black thought is somebody

that's been in the game for decades and has demonstrated a mastery of the beat and upform. On the other side of the spectrum, I would love to take this opportunity to talk about my favorite rapper, BabyTron. Here's the track Crocs and Walk.

Honey ball and all blues on me, bitch, think I'm cripped. In the deep, gray, white, don't think I'm friends. G-O-A-T, shit, bitch, I think I'm him. Gotta beat 10 plus with me to think I'm kin. What is that beat? Baby who? Baby Tron. Baby Tron.

Wild. I have found myself grow incredibly accustomed to his rap style. The way that he wraps, the beats that he wraps on, he uses these 80s and 90s freestyle songs on his beats. And his rapping is sort of off the cuff. But I find that to be the appeal. I like him because it honestly sounds very juvenile. It appeals to me. Do you self-identify as juvenile, Rihanna?

Yeah, you know. I'm looking at his Wikipedia page right now. He has a song called Blah, Blah, Blah, blah, blah. What she shares in common with Ira Gershwin, right? Blah, blah, blah. Wow, Chuck, bring it back to Tin Pan Alley. Yes, Ira and George Gershwin have the song, blah, blah, blah. So maybe not so juvenile after all.

Ira Gershwin, Babytron, Kesha and 303. This is wild to listen to, Rihanna. I find it really disorienting in a not unpleasant way, to be clear. But we heard earlier from Jazzy Jeff. Some flows are like one with the beat, he said, I think. This is the opposite of that to me. Tough. This is Babytron is not one with the beat.

No. He and the beat are like barely on speaking terms, honestly. He and the beat are estranged. Something went down between Babytron and the beat, and he is all over the place. Red beam all on dog nose, he a big clown. Unkey moving through the bows. This is fifth pound. Thousand-dollar sneak size.

Take your ass to drip time. Hit man, Mr. Henshaw, you better get down. You better try and run and flee. You better tuck in duck. I bet you know, frankly to some people, I bet they listen to this and they're like, this guy doesn't know what he's doing would be a reaction. I'm going to let you finish, Nate. I'm going to let you finish.

I'm just doing exactly what Babytron is doing, which is stepping on on the beat before it even finished its thought. Well, I think he knows exactly what he's done. I think this is very studied. I think it's hard to do this to be so not on the beat in such a consistent way. I think that's hard to do. And it's so cool to listen to because you can hear he's like recording different parts of this, I think, and then splicing them together. You can hear these moments when his voice almost overlaps because they're like clearly separate recordings that were put next to each other.

And I feel like usually you do that in order so that you can be perfectly on the beat. But he's doing it so he could just be further off in outer space. I don't know. This is in Babytron land. Right. This is some seismic stuff. As an experiment, I wanted to put a click track behind Crocs and Walk to see how truly far off Babytron is from the beat. So I got the Glock jump.

Mirries of the swoosies or the purples out on rock cuss. Through the beam on the Glock because it comes in hand. Shot his legs off. He took the bag and tried a running man. $100 out of place. Serry meal bitch, my stomach fence. I was young as hell loving pay if you wasn't love with Ken. I was young as hell master before Halloween.

So yeah, Nate, like you said, it feels almost intentional. Like he is making a point to be off of the beat. But what he's doing is what Jazzy Jeff was talking about. Like this is his natural body clock. I mean, presumably. And when you listen to it, it retunes your own body clock. It puts you in a different time. It creates a new TikTok for you. And by that, I mean literally like the TikTok of a clock, okay, just to be clear. Yeah, gotcha, got you. I mean, it's reflective of like a new wave of rappers in the underground from the

past few years. Like another rapper I really like is RXK nephew. And he just kind of rambles on the beat. Like it's very, very off the cuff. And it's kind of just like, he's kind of just like, he. he's talking and the beat is there and whether or not he's on the beat is his prerogative. So that's take three off of the album, Crack Therapy of So that's Take Three off of the album, Crack Therapy 3. And that's just one of the hundreds and hundreds of songs that RXK Nephew has put out. He's put out over 400 songs last year in 2021 alone. So he's a man that's very prolific that just kind of like talks and extols all of his inner thoughts onto the beat.

Yeah, DJ Josie Jeff said that a flow is often felt. And the feeling that I get from this off-rhythm, frantic style flow is anxiety. Well, that's interesting, Charles. I wonder if the fans of these rappers have the same. reaction. Do you have a sense of that, Rihanna? Do people listen to this to feel anxious? I don't know. I mean, I can listen to an album like cheat codes and understand that it's a mastery of the art form, but I can listen to artists like Baby Tron and RXK Nephew and like it because it's fun and it's silly and, you know, like I don't listen to it and feel anxious. I listen to it and

feel this sort of train of thought, sort of stream of consciousness style of rapping, which I think reflects anxieties, but isn't an inherently anxious type of flow. See, this is interesting. It's almost like for certain listeners, this flow represents a kind of liberation, a liberation from the gridded linearity of the beat. Whereas maybe for you and I, Charles, that prospect is anxiety-inducing. That's partially true. You know, I'm definitely coming with my expectations. I think here are just youthful anxiety.

Anytime that we're rushing, rushing for me is like, something's going on. I need to get it all out. I can't even, I don't fully have control of what I'm trying to say and I can't keep it in the beat. Oh, like, that's what I get from it. It doesn't make me feel anxious. I'm feeling the feelings of like anxiety is in the work. And it might be fun.

feel youthful because it just like it connects with that feeling that is relatable. The Babytron discourse has been a wild digression from the artful intentionality of black thought. Yeah. But why don't we bring it back to a more sort of traditional flow and JID's better days? Purpose. I prayin that we see some better days between worse ones. Nothing's ever perfect, but I made it so my mom's ain't working. All for murking instrumentals.

And there's no coincidence when I was little. I was very sensitive. Never was talking. Don't even try to tickle them. Me and my brothers insisting them slept in the same room. Suffer the same affliction. See the reflection of a... When I listen to this J.I.D. flow, there's actually maybe something in common with the Babytron sound

because it's a little disorienting. But I think it's produced in a different way because J.I.D's flow is very onbeat, very in the pocket. I think what's so unique and unusual about the flow is the way he creates these long phrases that extend over multiple measures that don't really necessarily correspond to the underlying groove and beat, but dance across it so you don't really understand

where the different phrases begin and end. It's almost just like this unending wave of lyricism, just like continually, crashing against your eardrums. You know, often in Lj, Ljord, your parents used to treat me like their third son. I'm the first one bucking on any person trying to make you feel hurt or something. You my brother, I'll murder something for you throw that dirty gun into the chat of hoochie. You Louis I be Gucci. We was webby and boozy with the low fade. Rush my half a day, still ain't have no way. You know, often in hip hop, really in like phrasing a melody in general, you're really going to put the emphasis at the very beginning of a measure, what's usually called the downbeat. So if you're in 4-4 like this song, you have a measure that goes one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. If you take a classic hip-hop track like Slick Rick's Children's Story, for instance, it starts right on the downbeat.

Once upon a time not long ago when the people wore pajamas and live life slow. Once upon a time not long ago, when people wore pajamas and live life slow, It's like very in the pocket, very on the beat. You expect, you know, the very first line of your flow to land on that first downbeat. It just kind of makes sense. It sounds natural. J.D. is upsetting those expectations. When we listen to the first two lines of his final verse here, when he says, I got protection.

Papa had the right prediction. Said I was destined to be whatever I envision. He puts it. the emphasis to me in what is like the most unlikely place of all, which is the very last syllable of those lines. It's like, if you show me those lyrics, I was like, well, that's the last place I would ever put the emphasis is on literally the very last syllable of the line. That is so weird and unusual. But what it does is it turns the end of the end. It's of the line into the beginning of the next line, which in turn, when you're listening to it,

you're like, okay, wait, where does this stop and where does it end? I don't even know anymore because he's literally flipping my expectations directly on their head. It's a subtle effect, but I made it so my mom's ain't working, all for murking instrumentals, and there's no coincidence when I was little, I was very sensitive, never was talking. I'm not even try to tickle them. It's a subtle effect, but to me it's like totally transformative. The word flow and the metaphor of water feels very appropriate here because it just seems like a stream of thought moving against the beat and you don't know if that thought is complete at the end of the bar or many bars later or somewhere in the middle.

In the case of hip hop, I always lock into the flow. And Charlie, what you said about the flow sort of reflecting water and like a wave, it washes over me and I find myself getting caught in it before I even register what I'm listening to. It's not necessarily what they're saying, like Jazzy Jeff said, but how it's being said. I feel like with Black Thought, BabyTron, J.I.D., we've gotten a really diverse approach to flow. I would love to throw one other rapper into the mix who every time I listen to them, I kind of have to pick my jaw up off the floor in terms of the way they use.

flow and that artist is Megan the stallion. Okay, that clean version is pretty hilarious, but I pray you put who do me wrong what they deserve to be. I guess my skin not light enough. My die leg not white enough or maybe I'm just not shaped the way that make you give a, but fuck it because I'm black. Okay. That clean version is pretty hilarious, but on this track, not nice, there's so much to talk

about. I mean, there's Megan's themes of empowerment and defiance. There's the way she kind of dips into her personal life more than she ever has. on a record there's the explicitness of the language and the imagery she uses which is something that I feel like maybe the first thing that most people comment on but the thing that people like hardly ever talk about with Megan is the power of her flow and this track works because it's constantly switching up the rhythm constantly switching up the flow keeping you on your toes you I feel like you never know

what to expect in a given verse. Just when she locks into a rhythm, she changes it on you. She's so confident in her flow. My favorite Megan's song is cocky A-F, and the flow reflects that. It's full of swagger. And there I say, like, gum shit, you know.

She hits every beat directly while keeping you locked into this like stank face listening mode. Cucky is everything by me popping got face. I got body. You name it. I got it. You want to be me. You want to eat it. Listening to that, it's like her flow backs up the sentiment of those lyrics.

Like she's talking about how she's cocky and her flow has that cockiness. It lands hard. It emphasizes the key words. I feel like one of the things that we're missing here is that. She also has her own Sonic calling card in her flow, which is such a smart thing as a rapper. Is it when she goes, ah? Oh, yeah. Ah.

Yeah. Ah. Right. If Jay Z's got hook. She's got a. And she uses it everywhere. It ends up being a rhythmic filler when she needs some space. It's the thing that you know it's her.

And with her rhythmic dexterity, which is almost like a second line drummer, playing along to a beat, then switching it up, trying triplets, going to 16th, slowing it down, speeding it back up. All those things, I think, contribute to what makes her one of the most fantastic rappers right now. Hearing that, Charlie takes me back to something jazzy Jeff said that we've, I think, returned to again and again, the idea of flow being as much about feel as it is about anything else. And it makes me think of another iconic Megan the Stallion song, Body. because the chorus of this song is about as anti-lirical as you can get in the sense that it's literally just one word repeated over and over again and yet when you listen to it it is the hyfiest thing you've ever heard because of Megan's flow because the way she takes that word and stretches it out and gives it this internal rhythm and you could listen to her just wrap that single word for hours probably because it's it flows. so well.

So I guess in all of these artists, without sounding reductive, of course, what makes a rapper unique is their flow? And the flow more often than not is what makes a rapper. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, engineer by Brandon McFarland, edited by Julie Myers, illustrations by Iris Gottlie, community management by Abby Barr, our executive producers of Hanna Rosen and Ashok Kurwa. Remember for the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture.

Listen to more episodes of Switched on Pop anywhere you get podcasts, and always our website, www.switchedonpop.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Switched on Pop, and we want to hear from you. Who has your favorite flow?

What flows have you been rocking with this year? Hit us up and let us know. We'll be back again next Tuesday, and until then, thanks for listening.