Breaking down Canibus' style
Dec 16 '05
The Bottom Line This illustration essay breaks down Canibus' style and shows how he's different from other emcees.
This particular piece was written as an essay in my expository writing class at community college. We had to do a number of essays; among them was an illustration essay, where we had to explain something. I asked my teacher if it was okay if I could explain a musical style from an artist. He said it was okay, and that I needed to choose three aspects of the style to explain. Being that Canibus is my favorite emcee (which, if you read my reviews frequently, you already know by now), I decided to break his style down to show what made him different from all the other emcees. I got a 96 on this essay and I'm posting it here the way I turned it in, meaning there are a few comma splices and other errors. I hope you enjoy...
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Nick Napier
Mr. Hartman
Expository Writing
10/20/05
Breaking Down Canibus' Style
Canibus has to be one of the most peculiar emcees in Hip-Hop today. Throughout the span of his career, which started in 1996 and still goes on today, Canibus, or just Bis for short, is an emcee who is either liked or hated by the fans. Some fans like his skills with writing braggadocio raps, but others say he's one dimensional because that's mostly what he does. Whether you love him or hate him, Canibus is unique in the sense that there is nobody out there like him. He could be compared to other lyricists that specialize in battle rhymes, but as a whole, Bis is truly one of a kind. The thing that sets him apart from other rappers is his style. Every emcee's style is separate from anyone else's, in the way they structure their songs and the content in their songs, not to mention the audio component. To really appreciate Bis' style, you need to understand how he approaches these aspects.
When you talk about any kind of music artist, Hip-Hop or otherwise, the content of their music is usually the first thing you look to when you break down their style. What the artist says, the visuals he/she creates, the messages, these are the factors that determine how you look at the song and whether it's good or not. Skeptics can easily call Bis a one-dimensional artist because a large portion of his catalogue is made up of braggadocio songs that talk about how good of a battle emcee he is. But that's not the truth at all; Canibus is known for speaking on various subjects aside from battling, including violence in the rap industry ("What's Going On"), drama in society ("Drama A/T"), working at an office job that you don't like ("Shove this J.O.B."), and even government cover-ups of extraterrestrials ("Channel Zero"). He is especially known for his complex metaphors. In the song "Curriculum 101" from his 2002 album "Mic Club: The Curriculum", Canibus gives a descriptive observation of the rap industry and the way things work in it. Here's a few examples, he refers to the mainstream scene and the underground scene as "realms of Heaven and Hell" and refers to the constant beefs in Hip-Hop as "bovine leukemia cells". He goes on to explain how human beings love watching others fail in what they try to accomplish ("Its the optical stimuli of watching men cry") and tells us how he's above all the other emcees in the game ("Like a falcon up in the sky at ten thousand feet / lookin' down at you bitches lookin' at me"). Perhaps the best metaphor is when he uses the metaphor of Harry Houdini to refer to himself, talking about how he's been testing his own destiny throughout his entire career: "Try to visualize what Harry Houdini was feeling / handcuffed underwater without breathing / near death on a fatal quest for air / but why should anybody care? He put himself there / his career was based on facing his fears / to take destiny from the hand of the man upstairs / he didn't mind the cold stares he got from his peers / they couldn't tell him where he was going or how to get there / it's better to be prepared and fail than to be scared / and unsure of yourself and still get killed".
As important as the content is to an emcee's style, the structure is the blueprint and foundation for the content. The way an emcee crafts tracks depends on how listenable the song is. In the past few years, it seems as if Canibus is not a fan of hooks. Normally, a chorus, also known as a hook, is what catches your ear is at first; it's what draws you into the song. Bis has never really been known for his hooks, as they have been relatively simple, such as in "Channel Zero" (which is simply "Tune into channel zero!" repeated eight times). On his second album, "2000 B.C.", Canibus crafted what would be one of his most popular songs to date, "100 Bars". On this song, he rapped for almost five minutes, with no breaks or hook; it was simply one long verse that went on for 100 bars. Canibus would later epitomize this structure on his album "Mic Club: the Curriculum", where 10 of the 13 songs would feature one long verse (or Bis trading verses with a guest emcee) without any hooks at all. Even on the album, he touches on the fact choruses don't matter much to him. On the song "Cenior Studies 02", he says "I'll write about Huxley vs. Wilberforce, fuck writing a killer chorus". He also touches on his uselessness for choruses on the previously mentioned "Curriculum 101", when he says "With singularity on the chorus, I still sound enormous". On his fifth album "Rip the Jacker", Canibus continued the trend of not writing any choruses, but in a different light. When he recorded the album, Bis was preparing to go into the army so he recorded his vocals acapella. From there, the producer of the album, Stoupe, of the rap group Jedi Mind Tricks, would spend the winter crafting the perfect landscape for Bis for the album's release next year. Out of the 10 songs on RTJ, there was only one song Canibus had actually written a chorus for, and that was "Genabis". The next eight songs had choruses but they were comprised of various samples that Stoupe had chosen for the beats. The final song, "Poet Laureate II", has the same kind of format as the songs on "Mic Club": we find Bis rapping for over seven minutes straight with no hooks, breaks, or anything.
Although much of what an emcee does is based on the content and the structure it is presented in, it means much more when the words are actually spoken rather than just written down on paper. You can read the lyrics and see the content but the way it is audibly delivered is important as well. The components that make up the audio aspect are the artist's delivery, timing, and breath control. Canibus' voice is naturally raspy, which makes his songs very engaging to listen to. To match his aggressive voice, Bis has to approach every record with an aggressive attitude to prove himself. This goes for both writing it and recording it. In an interview conducted with Rapreviews.com in 2000, Bis said "I approach every record with the same aggression. For me, it's like this, and I've done it from the beginning. When I'm writing for a record, regardless of who's on it, I gotta make an impact." Bis has proved time and time again that he has tremendous breath control, in songs that contain only one long verse, such as the majority of material from "Mic Club: the Curriculum." Its been reported that when Bis goes into the studio, he records all his verses in one take, and will re-record them numerous times until he finds them satisfactory. Bis' grasp of breath control is especially seen on his freestyles, verses that come spontaneously off the top of the head; some of his freestyle go on for several minutes, such as one radio freestyle where he spit these lines over a fast beat: "I'm sharper than scissor tips, sharper than rings on RZA's fist, its ridiculous". He also has a tendency to force words to rhyme when you don't really notice, but it still works nicely in rhyme form. Such is the case with a freestyle he did on a UK radio show back in 2001, where he said "I'm as graceful as the left hand of Rembrandt / put some instrumentals on and ask my pen to dance, I'm such a gentleman! / Pull out chairs, open doors, never offend my fans / unless they offend me and I lose my temper, man!" As for his delivery, the best way to explain it is that he sets up what he's about to say well with what he says before, such as he does in the song "The C-Quel" from his second album, "2000 B.C": "Getting in my way is like jumping in front of a car / breaking the sound barrier – that means the car's in front of the horn / by the time you hear it blowing, it's too late to respond / by the time you feel it hit you, I'm gone".
Whether you view him as a great lyricist or one-dimensional, Canibus has all the necessary qualities needed to make a great emcee. First is the varied content, the subjects which can range from personal to analytical to thought-provoking; next, the unique structure in where he has no use for a catchy chorus; and finally, the unique delivery and breath control, the audio component that holds the content and structure together. All three of these aspects make up Canibus' style, and shows what separates him from other emcees.
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