"I wake up in the morning and rhymes just fall out. Nah, I’m kidding.
What I love about rap is it’s like puzzles to me. Words are like puzzles and it’s about trying to see what word can go here and how many words can I make. Like, if I can take a rhyme, like I’m real into the craft of just like. MC’ing." - Eminem
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Master The Art of Freestyle Rap In 2 Weeks (FREESTYLE COURSE I MENTIONED): htr.freestylefortnight.com/rh...
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TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Eminem Teaches How To Freestyle Rap Quote 1
0:59 #1 Refine Your Rhymes
1:59 Eminem Teaches How To Freestyle Rap Quote 2
2:30 #2 Expand Your Vocabulary
2:51 Eminem Teaches How To Freestyle Rap Quote 3
3:32 Master The Art of Freestyle Rap In 2 Weeks or Less
4:34 #3 Study The Greats
4:35 Eminem Teaches How To Freestyle Rap Quote 4
6:01 #4 Never Be Unoriginal
6:03 Eminem Teaches How To Freestyle Rap Quote 5
7:33 #5 The "Mixed Methods" Approach
7:35 Eminem Teaches How To Freestyle Rap Quote 6
8:35 Bonus: Be Determined
8:52 Eminem Teaches How To Freestyle Rap Quote 7
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"What I love about rap is it’s like puzzles to me. Words are like puzzles and it’s about trying to see what word can go here and how many words can I make. Like, if I can take a rhyme, like I’m real into the craft of just like. MC’ing.
So, I’m like, how can i make the words at the end rhyme, but maybe take some in between and like sandwich them, make them rhyme inside of the phrase and then come back outside and try to rhyme with the word that I ended on the snare.” - Eminem Interview on The Art of Rap
In this clip from Ice T’s Art Of Rap documentary, the lauded Slim Shady hits upon one of the key factors that has helped to mold both his revered freestyle game and penmanship and that is the willingness to refine your writing.
Refine Your Rhymes
Although Eminem has pulled off obscene feats in an off the cuff fashion, such as sculpting the dizzying “Rap God” ‘off the dome’ in around six minutes, Em’s adeptness at contorting words at will may be a pleasure to behold, but it’s not a god-given talent.
Instead, it is something that has been honed over time, with Shady’s brain serving as a tireless assembly line of entendres, metaphors and intricate, multisyllabic experiments.
Where others take the path of least resistance, Shady looks at his rhymes from a bird’s eye view.
Meaning that when it’s time to step up to the plate and prove his skills, he’s already done the legwork and created a mental environment that’s conducive to turning out an exemplary 16 before he gets to the mic.
Plus, as he’s made clear, having a wider range of lyrical tricks means that you can retool any word to your will with the right manipulation of syllables.
“Yeah, it’s just in the enunciation. People always say that nothing rhymes with orange and that kinda pisses me off, because I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with orange.
If you’re taking the word at face value and just say orange, nothing’s gonna rhyme with it exactly.
But if you take it and make it more than one syllable, like -or-ange’, you could say like I put orange, four inch, door hinge in storage and ate porridge with George. You just need to figure out the science.” -Eminem on Anderson Cooper
Expand Your Vocabulary
Where some see limitations, Em is always seeking to expand his repertoire of tips and tricks and that blends neatly into the next element of Marshall’s approach that separated him from the pack from his days in the Rap Olympics all the way through to his current status as one of the greats and that is the desire to expand his vocabulary.
"Anderson Cooper- I heard that you used to read the dictionary
I want to be able to have these words at my disposal in my vocabulary at all times whenever I need to pull them out, somewhere they’ll be stored and locked away.” - Eminem on Anderson Cooper, 2:03
During his days on the underground circuit, Eminem commanded a fearsome reputation, leaving his fellow MC’s overmatched and outgunned.
“Everybody knew Eminem was the king of all that s**t”, reflected his D12 running mate, Bizarre. He was undefeated. He was like Floyd Mayweather in a rap battle.
Instead of being a matter of luck, Em’s prowess in the freestyle came down to the fact that he approached hip-hop with a scholarly eye, pursuing new words in the same manner that an honor roll student studies for his exams."