M2M Day 321: The magic of the word “it”
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For September, my goal is to continuously freestyle rap for three minutes.
Through practice, I’ve accidentally stumbled on a great freestyling trick using the word “it”. The best way to explain the trick is through a few examples…
Take the following list of words: options, threatened, passage, matrix, dependent.
Seemingly, as far as rhyming is concerned, these words have very little in common.
However, they do share one quality — they all end with the same vowel-sound (of the letter i). Because this vowel-sound is the same as the sound in the word “it”, these two-syllable and three-syllable rhymes can be reduced down to one-syllable and two-syllable rhymes respectively.
In other words, when I’m freestyling, I can greatly reduce the complexity of the rhyme I need to find, just by using the word “it” to rhyme with the last syllable of these kinds of words.
So, for example, here are some suggested lines for the five words above:
Options
Every time I’m on the mic, I straight-up rock it // For every word I have a rhyme, infinite options
Threatened
Every time I’m on the mic, I straight-up get it // For every word I spit, other MCs feel threatened
Passage
Every time I’m on the mic, a crowd, I amass it // Every word I spit cuts through like a passage
Matrix
Every time I’m on the mic, I straight-up take it // I bend these vowels back like I’m Neo from the matrix
Dependent
Every time I’m on the mic, my title, I defend it // I’m spitting straight from my brain, not at all dependent
You might be unconvinced that these soft rhymes work, so here’s a recording of the lines I wrote above. It doesn’t have the best audio quality, but it should get the job done…
Bonus tip: The words “this” and “in” also has the same vowel sound as the word “it”, so this same trick works with both of these words as well.
I most often use “it”, but sometimes “this” or “in” sounds better (based on the ending sound of “s” or “n”) or makes more sense in the line.
For example, I would probably choose to use “in” as the end rhyme for the word “threatened” from above (potential rhymes include “get in” and “let in”).
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
