Rap Freestyling: The Importance Of Lucid Intelligence In Rap Music

At a young age, I listened primarily to rap music. I was always attracted to the bumping bass in my speakers, the rapper’s loose lyrics and smooth cadence, and the mood the music gave me. Since then, I’ve explored artists across several rap subgenres, from Blu’s old-school style, to XXXTentacion’s rock fueled project, to A$AP Rocky’s electronic mixtape. Within my exploring, I’ve closely listen to freestyle battles on the radio and at rap jams, and I’ve always wondered how artists generate their lyrics on the fly so creatively.
Rap freestyling can be defined as impromptu, ad-lib-based music, or it can be defined as an artist’s ability to recall written lyrics over a not produced by their label. When performing in a freestyle battle, rappers

When performing, rappers draw on vocabulary knowledge and rhyming schemes. This allows them to construct a goal that eases their freestyling process. The actual process of combining these words to create humorous, clever, or insulting punchlines is where fluid intelligence is important, and the best freestyle rappers utilize their fluid intelligence under intense opponent pressure, audience noise, and humiliation. While these statements are true, how do freestyle rappers therefore strengthen their fluid intelligence? One theory could be that, when listening to recorded music, freestyle rappers quickly construe each bar - or semantic 4-count -they

This is the more controversial freestyle topic because it neglects the basis of a freestyle-rap. Nonetheless, memory recall can be deadly, and written bars can work with any instrumental. A typical freestyle battle has over 12 participants, so freestyle rappers need methods for accurately remembering their written bars. Since most punchlines contain two bars, chunking combined with maintenance rehearsal is an effective memory strategy for encoding lyrics. When rehearsing lyrics, these rappers are shifting between different contexts while retaining their bars in the working memory system. Whether rappers choose to create lyrics with fluid intelligence or rely on written lyrics, both cases are related to one idea: their working memory system is strong. Rappers’ fluid intelligence is highly correlated to their working memory capacity, and rehearsal strategies help these lyrics stay fresh in the mind. Can we, therefore, expect that extremely talented freestyle rappers such as MC Juice, Eminem, and Supernatural, have high intelligence levels? A safer claim would be that talented freestyle rappers have exceptional linguistic abilities that draw on general intelligence. With the hierarchy model, it thus becomes easier to explain how rappers know what words rhyme and what schemes are most effect. They have high levels of general intelligence about word structures, social events, and hip-hop styles;