Above: Royce the five nine talks about “flow” vs. “subject matter” in the craft of emceeing. He thinks flow is more important, and I’m inclined to agree.
Flow is the part of hip-hop that I find the most non-fans don’t get. They can tell you why the positive message of a Jurassic 5 song is great (“it’s like poetry!”), but they don’t understand this core principle of emceeing.
Flow is all the parts of what a rapper does that aren’t the content of the lyrics. It is the style, the aesthetic experience. It’s why I think Missy Elliott (whose lyrics generally amount to: “I’m having fun! You should too!”) is every bit as great an emcee as the much denser, more “contentful” Talib Kweli. The former is a part of the music, sometimes following, sometimes soloing. The latter often seems like he’s having a fight with tbe song.
I think that it goes back to the idea that hip-hop is poetry set to music. It isn’t. It’s music made with words. A rapper doesn’t use (much) melody, but that doesn’t make him a poet any more than it makes him a novelist or a writer of technical manuals. At the core of hip-hop is the aesthetics of the rapper’s voice. Lyrical content counts, too, but not as much as style, tone, timbre, rhythm. The rapper is making music every bit as much as the producer who made the beat is – his instrument is his voice.