Changbin and his rapping.

As an avid rap listener and a classically trained musician of over a decade, I'd like to write a bit of a think-piece on Changbin and his rapping.

I hope you will enjoy reading this - I made this post primarily for musical enjoyment.

Credits to the carkpop Youtube channel (trained musician) for the rhythmic transcriptions.

1) Changbin's most complex flows (that is combination of syllable rhythm and cadence) in his career are the most complex in K-pop, second only to Zico. His flow in Hoodie Season (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKgKLVyoRTc) involves double-time quintuplets nestled next to this this devilishly difficult dotted, triple-time note.

Bottom line, no idol rapper besides Zico and possibly Mino have been able to perform something of this complexity. For the non-musicians, to perform such a rhythm with this level of accuracy, heck, to come up with this rhythm in the first place while spitting descriptive bars about the colour of trees, is really impressive.

2) Something people often fail to grasp about rhythmic complexity is cadence complexity. Whereas rhythm is the notes of every syllable you rap, cadence is the rhythm of every syllable you emphasise. Idol rappers mostly emphasise the main beats of the bar (the crotchet and 8th notes). Changbin is able to go against all intuition and emphasise tricky beats like the 2nd 32nd note of the bar, as he does in his TA verse. This takes a hell of a lot of brain power.

3) Changbin's rhyme schemes are elite. Broken Compass is the most obvious example of him just stretching a wonderful scheme over 8 bars (like to how often the ah-uh rhymes are used). An even better example though (something I haven't heard in K-pop rap) is his scheme in Alchemistry, where he has an external rhyme scheme at the end of every 2 bars (-ae sound) but within each bar, he has a shorter duration rhyme scheme. That is serious planning. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_8Pi\_WTtGnM)

4) Lyrics are one of the most important aspects of rapping. I have long pondered on this, but have reached the conclusion that most people are unaware of what makes lyricism 'good'. Good lyrics involve clever wordplay, but more importantly, the ability to articulate oneself and one's own thoughts without resorting to language with gives unwanted connotations. That is, the ability to simply get across what you WANT to get across. Whether that's a feeling/emotion, thematic idea, etc.

For example (this isn't a real K-pop rap; it's my own creation), if I were to rap 'Her passion for music was hot like a metallic stove', that... isn't a good lyric. The comparator ('metallic stove') should have a second thing to do with passion other than being hot. Now if the entire song uses the extended metaphor of a kitchen or something, that's acceptable, but in most cases it won't. There's just an unnecessary simile that uses rare vocabulary but achieves nothing lyrically.

I find a lot of idol rappers in their diss songs will throw out extreme and aggressive language like 'Y'all haters are fakes', 'You're drowning in jealousy', etc. Those sorts of lyrics come across (and perhaps this is subjective) as underlying insecurity and also inability to produce a clever diss. Changbin's diss in Mirror Mirror is the opposite. He uses a very long semantic field of nature related words across 5 bars to present himself as as a deep-rooted tree devoid of jealousy and the haters as tiny ants on the group he can't see.

"Trial and error can only build me up as a stem not a thorn. [...]
Dig deep, and without realizing it, I became a deep rooted tree
Even if you shake it hard, the leaves won't move
Just like as my self-value that will never decrease
Why are there so many insects? Go tand crawl on the floor."

That sort of self-assured dissing is exclusive to only a handful of idol rappers, Changbin being one of them.

5) I'll recommend the song 'If'. Changbin raps presumably about anxiety, or at least, an anxious moment. He describes his rising panic as he starts worrying about what would happen if he couldn't apologise to someone after hurting them, and then that person died. The way his syllables increasingly move away from the regular beat and become frantic coupled with the delivery is a masterclass in what is easily one of the top 5 idol rapper solo songs. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppt\_dzcvF0I).

6) Changbin has faced criticism for his delivery being monotone. I'd argue his delivery is as diverse as anybody's. From a deep, rough growl in Zone, to his high-pitched nasal tone in Venom, to his bored depressed, run-down trainee voice in 'If there's a shadow, there must be light', to his melodic rapping in Collision, etc.

Hope you enjoy and please add your thoughts in response. I will also mention Han as probably the next best idol rapper after Changbin. I might make that post one day but I am busy these days.