Features of Flow in the Genre and the Artist

Following Leonard B. Meyer’s distinction between stylistic and critical analysis, the first part of this chapter undertakes a stylistic analysis of flow in rap music, drawing on the models of accent, rhyme, groove, and groovy listening presented in Chapters 3 and 4 to characterize flow in the genre as a whole, as evidenced by the corpus constructed in Chapter 2. Features of flow discussed include speed, tempo, phrasing, rhyme patterning, groove class usage, adherence to groove classes, and groove typicality. The second part of the chapter pivots to critical analysis, examining the meanings of virtuosic flow in the rapping of the emcee Black Thought of The Roots (aka Tariq Trotter). By contextualizing Black Thought within the genre, the chapter shows his flow to be a combination of complexity and comprehensibility.