A Generative Theory of Early Hip-Hop Textsetting

Abstract

This paper develops a theory of textsetting in 1980s hip-hop, exemplified by Run-DMC’s album Raising Hell. The album is transcribed, annotated, and analyzed for rhythmic and metrical properties. Many of the textsetting (“flow”) features in this work conform to previous descriptions of hip-hop. I introduce a novel observation regarding local parallelism: features that occur in a given metrical position in one measure of music are more likely to occur in the same position in the following measure. This motivates a templatic theory of composite music-text objects: I adopt the Time-Span Reduction theory of event hierarchies from generative music theory.