Photo: Ravi Shekhar – (Unsplash License)

Cultural Blending

I love rap. Not because I think it’s the most musically complex genre on the planet, nor because of it’s utilization of the full range of orchestral offerings. Heck – it usually boils down to a lyricist hyped on passion and caffeine mixed over a trap beat. Nope.

Photo: Debashis Biswas – (Unsplash License)

I love rap because it’s simple. And yet? It takes some serious talent to gain an intuition to say something poetic while fitting the number of syllables into a measure. Not all rappers do this, I know that, but I love it when they do like NF’s Intro 2. I found a video with the lyrics so you can see where syllables fall in relation to the beat (I skipped most of the intro instrumental).

For India

Konnakkol: a lyrically based musical art form in which certain lyrical phrases are placed according to the number of syllables the melody calls for. It’s akin to writing rap with a much, much, much more limited dictionary. The next video also includes marching quads to give an idea on what the artists are doing. On to what it sounds like…

Adaptations

So after seeing the above video my first thought was “man…has anyone incorporated that into rap?” Surprisingly, I found one video of quality and so thought I’d share. Real quick…I don’t speak Hindi so if it’s super explicit – I’m sorry 🙂

Cool right!!?? Yeah. I thought so too.