Writer, reviewer and all round good egg Alan Shaw has agreed to take on a series of Fringe-related challenges for Entertainment Now. Here he learns to become a freestyle rapper – with MC Hammersmith.
YOU’RE going to freestyle rap” – one of the most terrifying sentences I’ve ever heard.
For a 50-something Scot with a morbid fear of singing in public – I’ve never karaoked and mime “Happy Birthday” at family parties – my first instinct was to run Eight Mile from this (Eminem fans will get that gag, it had to be explained to me).
Luckily the hip-hop hero that was going to teach me is West London’s leading freestyle gangsta rapper MC Hammersmith, who is returning to Edinburgh with another hour of improvised hip-hop comedy based on the audience’s suggestions.
MC Hammersmith isn’t your stereotypical rapper. A former public schoolboy with a Masters in Linguistics, “The Dr Dre of Fromage Frais” has spent years honing his hip-hop and improv craft and cleverly juxtaposes his awkward on-stage nerdiness with rap’s “guns, bitches’n’bling” reputation to hilarious effect.
And when he’s not winning improve awards, releasing albums or starring on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, he’s a lovely young chap called Will.
I say lovely, when he asked if I liked hip-hop and I said I enjoyed the LPs of the Beastie Boys and thought House Of Pain’s “Jump Around” was a banging tune, this was dismissed as, “Ah, the beginner’s guide to white hip-hop!”
Oh well.
“We’ll start with something very simple and fun,” grins Will who, when Covid hit, turned his skills to teaching hundreds of people how to freestyle over Zoom. “Don’t worry about rhyming, just tell me about your first job, morphing the words over a beat.”
Cue me slowly slapping my thigh and chuntering on about being a summer bank clerk who got into trouble for wearing white socks, before I completely lost the beat when “stock certificates” proved to have far too many syllables to rap comfortably.
“That was great! It’s called freefall. You had that one tiny stumble where what I call the monkey brain comes in but I still get that after however many years and all I do is celebrate it and say, ‘Hey, I messed up!’,” says Will, who was possibly more impressed with my suggested rap name, Tone Def.
“That was just tumbling downward with free association, you might rhyme, you might not. Getting rhymes in there takes years and years of practice.
“The other technique is ‘spiking’. Just like in volleyball, you set up a rhyme and then slam the punchline. What we’ll do now is combine the two.”
This is why the unlucky patrons of the Festival Theatre café were subsequently treated to the less-than-Shakespearean rap of, “How did I become an ASN teacher? I thought I’d be a bad-ass like Jack Reacher.”
To be fair, the bold MC did chuckle at that one.
A rapper’s delivery is technically termed their “flow”, and while mine was – according to the ever-polite Will – on the beat it was as slow as a week in the jail, unlike his own astonishingly fast flow.
“Thank you! At first I thought the best tactic would be to try and look like an awkward nerd who can’t do it, wear my normal clothes and speak like I normally do, and then go very fast but learning to rap fast took a lot of practice.
“Humour’s a huge part of hip-hop,” adds the man who studied improve at Chicago’s esteemed The Second City comedy troupe, home to legends such as Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Steve Carrell and Tina Fey.
“The classic example is Eminem. When he brought out Slim Shady it was gross but it was funny and it was weird, and he really popularised it in the mainstream.”
Asked how his Linguistics degree helps with his improve, Will says: “It helps with rhyming, also Biggie and Tupac never had phonetics degrees so…
“It helps me understand why things rhyme better than other words, the difference between a rhyme and a half-rhyme, why certain consonants work better.
“But when you’re improvising you don’t really have time to analyse it like that – what guides me more is repeated failure, the only creative successes we have are built on mountains of failure!”
Will has been diagnosed with prosopagnosia which means he cannot visualise images in his head and is “face blind”, meaning he can’t even recognise the teens he’s tried to ban from his gigs.
But he thinks this has actually helped his incredible verbal memory, explaining, “One way to put it would be that I have more bandwidth for words and rhymes.
“I can’t visualise images but I can hear the sounds and remember words really easily. I think your brain compensates so instead of an image it latches onto a verbal memory.
“It’s great because learning to freestyle is, amongst other things, a matter of sitting down and memorising thousands of words that rhyme with each other.”
Will’s personal rhyming dictionary is now 10,000-plus words long, which makes me think of Hannibal Lecter’s mental Memory Palace which explained the Chianti-enthusiast cannibal’s incredible powers of recall.
“Quite sinister!” laughs Will. “It’s not really similar and what I have started doing is on my phone generating images with AI that act as aide memoirs to learn various rhymes.
“Now, there’s nothing I can’t rhyme with at the moment. Obviously there are classic words people say can’t rhyme like ‘purple’ but if you really commit to it, with my accent I can get away with ‘circle’.”
I don’t think I could, and I’m not sure the members of the East Lothian & District Flower Arranging Society – who were having their annual get-together across from us in the foyer – were as pleased with my final rhyming couplet of “Daniel Craig looks like Gollum, John Noakes climbed up Nelson’s Column” as I was.
MC Hammersmith: The MC Stands for Middle Class, 13.15, Monkey Barrel, August 1 – 25
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/mc-hammersmith-the-mc-stands-for-middle-class
