He sound like a mosquito if it had access to a studio!”; “I played 645AR at your crib and all the mice in your walls started dancing”; “He sound like Future’s bed bugs”: not your standard rap fan comments, but the Bronx via Atlanta rapper-singer 645AR is … innovative. His lyrics may cover fierce street narratives and narcotic meanderings, but his vocal style is more Minnie Mouse than Migos. And he has fully committed to the bit: “the squeak”, as he’s happy to call it, is present throughout his discography to date and has earned him huge streaming numbers and an FKA twigs collaboration. He is not even the only squeak rapper; he has a predecessor in alien falsetto in Houston’s Voochie P.
Of course, this riles the “real hip-hop” Grandpa Simpsons, who still haven’t got over the slurring and Auto-Tune of Future, Young Thug and co. There are whole essays on Reddit fuming about “Elmo voices” and “drunk robots”. But this is what rap is: relentlessly in search of the next, newest thing, and in the process evolving not just language but the human voice. To try to make sense of this process and where “the squeak” has come from, we asked professional rap coach and “How to Rap” YouTuber Drew Morisey and voice analyst Dr Calbert Graham of the University of Cambridge Language Sciences Centre to listen to some of the most distinctive voices in 40 years of hip-hop history, and chart the way rap’s tone of voice has evolved over that time.
Funky 4 + 1
That’s the Joint (1980)
A classic posse cut, straight from hip-hop’s birthplace in the south Bronx and the first ever signed rap group
Drew Morisey I always ask: what is the context, and what is the technology used? And this is from DJ culture at discos and block parties. The delivery in the late 70s and 80s is a very announcer-like voice, very good for hosting a party: “Heyy, let’s have fun, everybody over here, everybody over there,” quite choreographed. The choice of intonation in that era was primarily dictated by the crowd’s interest in the music. It was party music, straight up.
Dr Calbert Graham There’s a very compelling rhythm that’s from disco, jazz and funk. The 1-2-3-4 ostinato of the accompaniment is steady, all the syncopation is in the vocal part. Overall it’s compelling, it’s genial. The language, articulation and use of phonetics to build a rhythm is kind of encouraging you along with it.
Beastie Boys
Time to Get Ill (1986)
In which Def Jam fully launched the notion of rap stars as rock groups
DM With Def Jam folks like Beastie Boys and Run DMC, the music consciously avoids melody in the beats: just one chord with these guitar stabs. It allows the vocals to carry the melody, the ups and downs, the divergence of voices. The shouted style really became the norm right through the 80s with rap becoming successful and more competitive.
CG The first impression is of shouting with abandon, but there’s an audible creak – a deeper tone at the back of the vocal tract – while one of them has a very audible nasal quality which penetrates through. They shift between nasal, falsetto and chest voice. The skill here is how the voices contrast with each other, how the different aspects of voice interact – it’s very playful.
Snoop Dogg
Gin & Juice (1994)
With the spotlight swinging from NYC to the west coast, a whole new level of funkiness arises
DM Dr Dre, production-wise, reintroduced melodic chord structures. It led a more subtly melodic voice like Snoop to sound good; he might not have sounded so dynamic on those Beastie Boys anti-melody-type beats. He uses lots of repetition to make it sing-songy and kind of seductive. There’s a whole world-building thing, he’s fulfilling a character which we in the community would already have known from books like Iceberg Slim, or as an archetype in the streets.
CG It’s a very soft and reflective delivery; early on there’s a teenager-like tone but then the rest of the track is lower in pitch using a full tenor chest voice. It’s conversational, but with these little pauses – “may I … kick a little … something for the … Gs, yeah …” there’s a sense of someone very much in control.
Busta Rhymes
Everything Remains Raw (1996)
Playing on his Jamaican heritage, Busta embodies the rapper as berserker
DM Busta is one who grew up with the culture of the cypher: close-up, competitive rapping. To control a room, just standing on a cafeteria table without a microphone, competing against guys who’d become Jay-Z and Biggie, you need to be the loudest, the most fantastical, the most performative – like Redman or DMX, too. The other thing here is the use of doubles: recording a second take of vocals where he backs up certain words, like his own hype man. This is again technology affecting how the voice sounds.
CG This reminds me so much of Jamaican dancehall, with its high vocal intensity. It’s incredibly complex, almost singing in style, with this breakneck speed. It’s so technical. The consonants are well articulated, the vowels are short, and this perhaps signals self-monitoring and thought to the style. Like dancehall, it’s imposing control on chaos.
Dizzee Rascal
I Luv U (2003)
The explosion of grime into the mainstream makes British accents confidently define rap styles for the first time
DM This is oddly conversational. His voice is squeaking “WHAT you TALKIN’ ’bout THIS for”. It’s not clean, it feels real. Also these very basic, computerised notes, like the Def Jam stuff, leave more space for vocal variation, so he can be very expressive. One thing I coach rappers in is that the simpler the beat, the more you can do fun things with your voice.
CG This one is really interesting with its frequent transition into falsetto voice with relative ease. The consonants are not particularly strong, and there’s no audible creak, which gives a surprising softness to it even though it’s angry. It would be interesting to study in detail how the British experience creates different tones from Americans.
Bone Crusher
Never Scared (2003)
The south takes over: at the peak of Atlanta crunk, Bone Crusher’s Hulk-like roar could be heard from coast to coast
DM Another technological shift: voices are layered on the chorus to make it sound like a large crowd is singing along, leading the audience to think: “I should sing along with this.” That was very common in this era of rap – Kanye, Nelly, Lil Jon, Ja Rule. And with crunk in general, again we go to the question of context and purpose: its home base in Atlanta is the strip club. “IT’S FRIIIDAY NIGHT, EVERYBODY: SHOTS!” So Lil Jon or Bone Crusher, their voices are gonna sound really good in strip club with ice shaking and money everywhere. It’s loud, it’s exciting.
CG This is super performative. A bass/baritone voice, with a very raspy timbre, projects an imposing physical presence. This is really a super-direct statement of power, strength and being in control; it’s very interesting to contrast that with Snoop who does the same thing in a completely different way.
Giggs
The Last Straw (2008)
The epitome of London “road rap”: Peckham’s finest calmly lays out his beef with MTV, 1Xtra and anyone else who might have crossed him
DM The lineage of the way Giggs is delivering on this song is like Cam’ron and Dipset and their street mixtapes. He’s starting from this almost bored tone. But saying such fierce things in this voice makes it more menacing. 50 Cent is another example: not his hits, but the street tracks of the 2000s; he delivers things in a very even, regular-man voice, while saying he’ll kill you.
CG It’s very conversational, very low in pitch – I’d suspect lower than his normal speaking voice – but the closest we’ve heard to normal speaking patterns. The combination of the pitch, the pace and well-articulated consonants give him this haunting, detached delivery. It’s really interesting to hear a black British voice that is so plainly cockney, too, with almost no Caribbean or other influence on the phrasing or tone.
Kanye West ft Nicki Minaj
Monster (2010)
Even next to the biggest egos on the planet, the Trinidad-born Minaj not only holds her own in her guest verse but dominates completely
DM If you want to understand Nicki’s interest in different accents, shifting high pitch to low, you want to look directly at Eminem’s first couple of albums; taking that use of characters and running with it. Lil Wayne is important here, too. In his mid-2000s mixtapes he’d change his voice every four bars, with the beat change. He has super control over it. A definite Caribbean influence here: Nicki is from Trinidad, Wayne is from New Orleans which has a huge Caribbean population.
CG This verse might be short but it’s so intense. The control in the switching of tones makes it very firm, compelling, domineering. There’s these very pronounced consonants, a bit of extra lengthening of tones; when she crescendos, her voice gets more creak and that’s all clearly very conscious.
Young MA
OOOUUU (2016)
The Jamaican/Puerto Rican/Brooklyn MC demonstrates her uncompromising deadpanning on this quadruple-platinum single
DM Hear the way she draws out words: “bro code”, “low blow”, “no-no” become the melody in the absence of an actual strong note. It’s something I overtly teach students: let the beat breathe, find places to stretch out words; that’s where you have fun with it. On records now, too, since the mid-2000s, we’re a long way from live performance defining the style; you can cut together multiple takes in the studio, and finesse and experiment with the emotion of your voice. It’s more like cutting together a movie than one take all the way through.
CG This is a deep voice, with what seems like a very narrow pitch range. The lengthening vowels and also a use of descending pitch are both simulating inebriation, and also a sense of gloom and detachment, but at the same time it’s smooth and controlled. You can hear Latin heritage strongly in the vowels and also in the softened consonants, sometimes to the point where Cs and Ts are not realised at all.
645AR
Pray (2020)
And so to the squeak: funky, hallucinatory and deeply weird
DM This is pretty extreme, but what’s happening in the world of rap, as with so much culture, is we’re becoming a decentralised content structure; a lot of niche fame as opposed to popular fame. You can be a rapper with only 100,000 fans, but still make a bag of money because of how social media works. This means it’s harder and harder to say “rap is like this”. You have your Drakes of the world, but for every one of them there’s someone unique who doesn’t have Top 20 hits but still makes a good living.
CG This sounds almost like a human synthesiser. Obviously he uses a lot of falsetto, the highest notes sound like they’re made by tensing the thyroid muscles so the vocal cords are shortened. I wouldn’t imagine a musician would say that’s the proper way of producing a falsetto, so it’s innovative! Hip-hop has always been about vocal creativity, and that’s what’s happening here: phonetically, he’s rapping. But he’s testing the boundaries of what constitutes rap … almost creating an entirely new form.
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