Rap Music Analysis – Kendrick Lamar – Rigamortis, Pt. 2

*This article is a continuation of the first part of how to listen to “Rigamortis,” which you can read here. You can hear the Kendrick Lamar song here.

As I mentioned in the first article, these exact lines below — what I’ll call Refrain 1 — occur at 0:21, 0:59, 1:26, 1:36, 2:31, and 2:42, and last 4 bars:

However, there’s a mismatch here. Refrain 2 happens at 0:59, but the chorus (which, again, should mention both Refrain 1 and Refrain 2) happens only at 1:26 and 2:42. How is this possible?Just like what we see in part 1 of this article, the answer is in how Kendrick manipulates the musical material that he already has placed in the chorus. At 0:59, he raps only the first 2 bars of Refrain 2, so that “amen, he’s dead,” is repeated only once. Right after, at 1:01, he cuts right back into his proper verse rap by continuing the thread of semantic meaning from the refrain into the verse. He does this by extending the sentence of “amen, he’s dead” in explaining who it is exactly that’s telling him his rap adversaries are deceased.

The astute reader will also have noticed that a Refrain 1, at 1:42, was also left out in the cold. It doesn’t appear to be part of any chorus, or at the least, it appears to be an extra Refrain 1 on the end of a chorus. How is this to be interpreted?

Here, Kendrick once again demonstrates an unfailing lack of the means by which a rapper creates semantic and musical meaning. That’s because when he starts the completely new material of his second verse at 1:47, he continues a rhyme on the final vowel pattern of the last word of Refrain 1. He takes the word “rapper,” from Refrain 1, and rhymes it on “casper,” “nasa,” and so on.

[got me breathing with dragons] [i’ll /

crack the egg in your basket, you /

bastard] [i’m marilyn manson] [don’t /

ask for your favorite rapper] [i /

wrapped him and made him casper] [i /

captured the likes of nasa] / …

Not only are the rhymes from Refrain 1 continued into this new musical section, but they are also the same types of rhymes musically. That’s because they also all happen at the end of bars.

This strong similarity means that instead of interpreting the chorus at 1:26 as the real chorus that lasts 16 bars, and the ending chorus at 2:42 as a shortened chorus of only 12 bars, I interpret the real chorus as lasting 12 bars, and this addition of another Refrain 1 as an elision into the verse. Thus, the Refrain 1 at 1:42 is really part of both the verse and chorus. On the one hand, it’s material from the chorus that we’ve heard before, but on the other, it’s part of the verse because Kendrick goes on to rhyme off its words. Kendrick has blurred the lines between what a chorus is and what a verse is. And without an aid from the production, such as a distinct musical idea that separates the verse from the chorus, we’re left answering that this section is both.

Love,

Martin