I don`t mind to rap music, apart from the occasional track by Eminem, Run DMC or the Beastie Boys, so fans of the genre will likely say that I can get nothing worthwhile to bring on the subject. However, I notice that rhyming is seen as a critical component of rapping, and that a rapper will boast of his or her power to make the most unexpected rhymes and will challenge fellow performers on this score.
This needs to be the case, given that the musical accompaniment is invariably trite and adds little or aught to the performance. This means, in effect, that the words should be capable to suffer alone, which is emphatically not true of about of the rap music I`ve heard. I will therefore confine my comments to those rap lyrics that do feature clever rhymes and interesting use of words. Take this example:We ain`t nothing but mammals. Well, some of us cannibals who cut other people open like cantaloupes But if we can hump dead animals and antelopes then there`s no cause that a man and another man can`t elope But if you look like I feel, I got the antidote Women wave your pantyhose, sing the chorus and it goes_
Eminem, The Real Slim Shady.
Overall, this call is an attempt on modern pop culture, but I`m interested solely in the rhyming involved. First, I notice that the first `rhyme` depends on the American pronunciation of `cantaloupe` (the British English pronunciation would rhyme this discussion with `scoop`). Then, after two nondescript rhymes, Eminem switches to assonance (elope_antidote), which the average rapper appears to consider is the like as rhyming. It isn`t. `Antidote_pantyhose` is a great bit of assonance, and a typically abrupt change of scene; the verse ends with another routine rhyme. The staccato imagery that Eminem`s best work conjures up reminds me of a song released 35 years earlier, and the promotional video that attended it. The call was Subterranean Homesick Blues, the singer was Bob Dylan, and the video showed him holding up the key words for the camera, each written in block capitals on a separate patch of paper.Look out kid They hold it all hid Better jump down a manhole Light yourself a candle Don`t wear sandals Try to avert the scandals Don`t wanna be a bum You better chew gum The pump don`t work `Have the vandals took the handles.Dylan rarely uses assonance in this song (`clean nose_plain clothes`, from the 2nd verse, is the only clear example). But, although Dylan`s is a more overtly political song, the sole significant difference that I can see between it and the Eminem track is the musical accompaniment. There is an illegitimate rhyme-`manhole_candle`-but the rhyming skills evident in these two extracts are broadly similar. The charge to mention is that in both cases the demand to rhyme creates a serial of non sequiturs: there is no obvious cause for a given line, other than that it ends with a rhyming word. And neither artist can take a taper to W.S. Gilbert, the man who supplied the language to Sir Arthur Sullivan`s music. It isn`t often appreciated nowadays, when a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta is likely to be regarded as mere light entertainment, that these deeds were intended as satires on the English middle class. Even The Mikado, ostensibly set in Japan, lampoons the manners and mores of this class. And the barbs are sharper and more to the point:And the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone Every century but this and every area but his own. W.S. Gilbert, I`ve Got a Short List.
However, Gilbert is seen at his better in I Am the Very Model of a New Major-General from The Pirates of Penzance. The low place to mention is the sheer comprehensiveness of teaching required to `get` all the references. Second, every verse in this call is a three-syllable rhyme, which requires considerable linguistic virtuosity. And Gilbert was not afraid to invent words if required:I`m very adept at integral and differential calculus, I love the scientific names of beings animalculous. I can quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus, In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous.The italicized words are pure invention, but there is no trouble in apprehending the intended meaning. That this call is partially about rhyming can be deduced from the end of each verse, where Gilbert deliberately backs the singer into a tree and challenges him to get a particularly problematic rhyme. It is worth quoting the unit of the last verse, which is sung at a much slower pace than the relief of the song, to see how this works. One can smell the inexorable build-up to the most difficult rhyme of all:In fact, when I love what is meant by `mamelon` and `ravelin`, When I can say at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin, When such affairs as sorties and surprises I`m more wary at, And when I know exactly what is meant by `commissariat`, When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery, When I love more of tactics than a novitiate in a nunnery, In short, when I`ve a handful of elemental strategy_Dylan would be more likely to use the word `strategy` than Eminem, although I can`t imagine either of them attempting to get a verse for it. This is Gilbert`s solution:You`ll say a better major-general has never sat a-gee.`Sat a-gee`, meaning `sat astride a horse`, which is imaginative if not wholly legitimate. And the musical accompaniment, as it is for both the Dylan and Eminem tracks, is bland and does not trespass upon the song. I can envisage such a patter song being sung to a hip hop beat, but I do not think that any modern rapper is able of performing, let alone writing, anything similar. For this reason, I say, without equivocation, step forward Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, nineteenth-century rapper extraordinaire. 
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