Rap or Microtonal Melody?

When I first started hearing about 'rap' music, I was puzzled - why would the element of melody be removed from music, and why would anyone want to listen to that?

I didn't really hear much of it (partly by choice) until I spent a day doing grunt location cleanup work at a movie location with a young (white) kid who told me at the beginning of the day that he liked to listen to hard-core rap while he worked and (with a challenging expression on his face) he hoped that wasn't going to be a problem. I heard a good deal of it that day, and although I understood the rebellious energy and the power of the rhythm, I had a great deal of trouble understanding most of the lyrics. I could get little snatches here and there, but it went by so fast and contained so much street slang I was lost most of the time.

For a long time I avoided rap, because every time I ran into it the song just seemed to be a celebration of bling, violence and macho chauvanism. The first time I heard a rap I actually liked was Tony M.'s contribution to a Prince song called "Live 4 Love," which I listened to over and over. I realized that a good rap could use the accented syllables to pull the rhythm of the song a little off the beaten path, and how pleasant that could be. I started listening for rap tunes that successfully did that.

And then Eminem started hitting the radio. His songs combined the offbeat rhythms with insistent rhymes that cascaded over one another like a prizefighter demolishing a weak opponent, hit after hit, rhyme after rhyme, each one coming earlier than expected. Somehow in all that technical artistry were passionate stories, and all shouted at a pace that I could still grasp as it went by, and no verses full of filler about bitches and n*****s. Oh, and when he had to sing on key, he could sing on key. That made me wonder about the pitch of the rap portion of the songs, and I realized that he was deliberately selecting a note a quarter tone away from the scale of the instrumentation to cue the listener that the part he was 'singing' was the rap. It brought a tension that a straight melody couldn't, and completely justified the enterprise to my ear.

Then he sealed the deal with this: