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Current Musicology 107 (Fall 2020) 
©2020 Duinker. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons-Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND). 
 

93 

 
Ben Duinker 

 
Introduction 

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson—record producer, drummer for The Roots, and 
bandleader for The Tonight Show—remembers exactly where he was the day 
“Rapper’s Delight” (Sugarhill Gang, 1979) first received radio play.1 In his 
memoir Mo’ Meta Blues (2013), Thompson recalls wondering whether he should 
remain in front of the radio to listen, or race for a cassette tape to record as much 
of the song as he could. He opted to grab the cassette, recalling that “[the song] 
sounded like it might go on for another five or six minutes” (23). Thompson’s 
gamble paid off: the song did go on for a while longer, and he was able to record 
some of it. The original 12” single of “Rapper’s Delight” runs for an astounding 
14 minutes and 36 seconds, making it one of the longest songs to ever chart on 
the Billboard Hot 100.  

While few have been anywhere close to as long as “Rapper’s Delight,” 
charting hip-hop songs have used a variety of formal sequences, some of which 
substantially differ from the verse-chorus paradigm that has pervaded various 
popular music genres since the 1960s. Salt-n-Pepa’s 1987 hit “Push It” peaked at 
number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100. This song features lengthy ad-lib vocal 
sections and instrumentals while squeezing in two verses almost as an 
afterthought. More recently, Kanye West and Jay-Z’s collaboration on “Otis” 
(2011) earned them a Grammy Award and substantial chart success; this song is 
strophic (it lacks chorus sections), a formal paradigm that has all but disappeared 
from popular music.2 “Rapper’s Delight” was released in hip-hop music’s 
nascency—no formal “norms” existed yet, at least not in the recorded medium. 
“Push It” emerged during the genre’s so-called Golden Age, when 
experimentation was generating a flourishing stylistic diversity in hip hop. And 
“Otis” came out when hip-hop music was on its way to becoming synonymous 
with mainstream popular music: inter-generic permeability was becoming—and 
remains today—the norm.3 Over time, the formal structure of hip-hop music has 
become consolidated in the verse-chorus image of mainstream popular music. 
But how did hip hop’s formal conventions evolve—from “Rapper’s Delight” to 



 

 
 

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the present day—and what can this evolution tell us about the mainstreaming of 
this genre? 

This paper explores the evolution of song form in North American 
recorded hip-hop music, tracing the genre’s origins as a live musical practice, 
through its commercial ascent in the 1980s and 1990s, to its ubiquity in—and 
dominance of—mainstream popular music in the twenty-first century. I conduct 
an analytical study of form across 160 hip-hop songs (see the appendix) released 
since 1979 to support the three main contributions of this paper. First, I offer a 
taxonomy of song section types, investigating how texture, timbre, lyrics, and 
singing function as the main agents of formal sectionality in hip hop. I codify 
two principal section types, verse and hook (similar, but not identical to a chorus 
section), and two looser-defined section types, instrumental, and loose-vocal, 
using song examples to illustrate each section type and to discuss these sections’ 
musical function and/or origins in live performance practice. 

Second, I present three formal paradigms that are built up from these four 
section types, proposing that the form of many, if not most, hip-hop songs can 
be described using one of these paradigms. I classify these as verse-hook, strophic, 
and long verse. I evaluate how the paradigms reflect live hip-hop performance 
practice (including battling, hyping, and the cypher) and its antecedents: the live 
hip-hop performances of 1970s New York (which gave rise to hip-hop music) 
and the African American oral tradition of toasting (long, recited poems). In 
doing so, I propose a viewpoint that considers hip-hop form through the cultural 
underpinnings of this genre, rather than in the image of song forms used in other 
popular music genres. 

Finally, I investigate how a gradual shift in focus toward verse-hook songs 
can be understood in relation to hip-hop music’s ongoing mainstreaming. I 
propose three metrics to gauge this shift in focus: the emergence of hooks as a 
distinct section type, the rise in popularity of sung hook sections (including by 
guest artists), and the specific characteristics of hook sections: their quantity, 
their point of first arrival in a song, and their proportion of the song’s total 
duration. Viewing hip-hop music’s development through the lens of song form 
thus represents both its roots in African American vernacular culture and 
assimilation into mainstream popular culture; following blues, R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, 
soul, and other genres in traversing this path. 

Hip hop’s crossover has been discussed from a variety of perspectives. 
Nelson George (1988) and Mark Anthony Neal (2005) have written about the 
schism that occurred in the 1980s whereby some Black artists became massively 
successful through their new appeal to white mainstream audiences (such as 



 

 
 

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Michael Jackson or Lionel Richie) while alienating their earlier—mostly Black—
fanbase. Amy Coddington (2018) has explored the role of radio producers as 
tastemakers in cultivating a divide between the pop-rap of MC Hammer and 
Vanilla Ice and the underground music of A Tribe Called Quest and other 
Golden-Age artists. Murray Forman (2002), Roni Sarig (2007), and I (2019) have 
each investigated the vanishing idea of space and place in hip-hop music as it has 
become increasingly mainstreamed. And numerous others, among them Jeff 
Chang (2005) and Loren Kajikawa (2015), have noted the increasing 
consumption of hip-hop music by white audiences.4 My aim is to build on this 
discussion of hip-hop’s mainstreaming by focusing on song form; more 
specifically, the ever-expanding role of the hook section in hip-hop music. The 
hook’s increasing prevalence, its earlier placement in song forms, and its 
incorporation of singing all evince hip hop’s subsumption by mainstream pop 
music. 

 
Song Sections and their Functions 
 
Hip hop is like most other popular music in that its formal sections are ordered 
in a song to imbue it with variety, contrast, and some degree of trajectory. I 
characterize song sections in hip hop by whether they participate in the core 
sequence of a song, or function as framing areas to this core. The core sequence 
of a song normally involves verses and hooks, but may also include instrumental 
or bridge-like sections. Framing areas normally involve sections with looser 
organized vocals (such as ad-hoc “hype” vocals) or instrumental sections. The 
main difference between the core sequence and its framing areas concerns the 
tightness of sectional organization: core sequences are normally the more tightly 
organized of the two.5 

Research on form in popular music has grown substantially since 2000, 
but almost none of it explicitly deals with hip-hop music.6 Corpus studies by Jay 
Summach (2012) and Jeffrey Ensign (2015) study song form in a broader array 
of popular music—using Billboard charts as corpus sources—but such charts 
have traditionally excluded hip-hop music.7 Scholarship on form in popular 
music has expanded to include specific formal paradigms (Spicer 2004, Osborn 
2013), artist-specific research (Covach 2006, Stephan-Robinson 2009), song 
sections (Attas 2015, Summach 2011), and genres such as EDM (electronic dance 
music) (Iler 2011, Osborn 2019, and Barna 2020). Research on form in EDM sets 
important precedents for the present study. First, EDM songs are composed to 
create and moderate the flow of energy on the dance floor; the formal design of 



 

 
 

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this music does not always lend itself well to the context of radio play.8 EDM’s 
practical function as a dance-oriented music resonates strongly with early hip-
hop music, whose main context of dissemination was at dance-infused 
gatherings. Second, EDM song forms rely more on musical parameters such as 
texture and timbre, and less on melody and harmony. This again suggests 
parallels with hip-hop music, which has traditionally foregrounded aspects of 
texture, rhythm, and timbre.9 

The above scholarship provides a blueprint for how a bottom-up (rather 
than top-down) study of form in hip hop might look: a taxonomy and 
description of song section types according to their internal characteristics, an 
examination into how these sections function in a complete song, and whether 
any formal paradigms arise. Nearly all hip-hop songs feature some combination 
of verses, hooks, and instrumental sections, and share similarities with formal 
paradigms used in other popular music. Although I define these section types 
according to their internal musical and lyrical characteristics, their functionality 
or “effect” they express to the listener (after Doll 2017, 8–9) in songs can vary.10 
In general, verse and hook sections conform to specific musical and lyrical 
criteria and express consistent functionality within a song, while instrumental 
and loose-vocal sections are less standardized in their content and 
functionality.11 

 
Verse 
 
Verses have been a constant fixture in recorded hip-hop music since its 
inception; they facilitate the song’s main narrative arc (if one exists) or provide 
commentary on the song’s thematic topics. As in popular music, hip-hop verses 
are usually “lyrically variant but musically invariant” (Ensign 2015, 27), meaning 
that each successive verse utilizes new lyrics and flow rhythms over the same 
beat. Michael Berry (2018) writes that the 16-measure verse has become the 
standard length in hip-hop music.12 The ubiquity of even-numbered verse 
lengths is unsurprising: since rhymes normally punctuate the ends of measures 
and rhymes are often patterned in couplets, it follows that the mensural length 
of most verses will be a multiple of two.13 Although even-numbered verse lengths 
may be common, my data suggests that they also vary widely in length. 

Berry also notes that the beat layer (what he calls “the music”) typically 
remains unchanged across a verse, often repeating a looped sequence that may 
be one, two, or four measures in length (and occasionally longer).14 
Exceptionally, the beat layer’s texture can also gradually change or intensify 



 

 
 

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through the course of a verse. It may also contrast the musical texture of the hook 
section, drawing another similarity to other genres of popular music. Example 1 
demonstrates some of these characteristics in the beat for “Hard Piano” (Pusha 
T, 2018), where textural elements are periodically introduced and removed. The 
piano/drum sample from “High as Apple Pie – Slice II” (Charles Wright and the 
Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, 1970) is supplemented first by a drum machine, 
and then by a synthesizer-generated chord progression. 

 

 

Example 1: “Hard Piano” (Pusha T, 2018). The excerpts above detail the different textural 
layers that are introduced during the introduction and first verse of the song. 

Hip-hop verses are forums for MCs to orate, narrate, display musical and 
lyrical dexterity, and connect with listeners. Their varied length, quantity, and 
rhythmic and lyrical content may reflect a number of a priori factors: how they 
were composed and recorded in-studio, how a live-based performance practice 
influenced their construction, or what demands (often commercially driven) 
were imposed by record labels or other industry actors. Consider, for example, 
“Roxanne’s Revenge” (Roxanne Shanté, 1984) and “NY State of Mind” (Nas, 
1994). Both songs feature exceptionally long verses, which may signal looser 
organization than in songs with consistent 16-measure verses. But these long, 
irregular verses make more sense when considered in the context of how they 
were recorded. Shanté allegedly recorded “Roxanne’s Revenge” completely 



 

 
 

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freestyle (unrehearsed and uncomposed) and in a single take; a herculean feat 
for any MC, much less a 13 (!) year old with no prior recording experience.15 “NY 
State of Mind” features two long verses of different lengths; but these were also 
recorded in a single take.16 The spontaneity that permeated the recording of these 
verses arguably influenced their length: in Shanté’s case, the long duration, and 
in Nas’s case, the variance in duration between verses. 

 
Hook 
 
Hook sections in hip-hop music are somewhat analogous to choruses in other 
popular music genres: their lyrics usually remain fixed over the course of the 
song, quote or hint at the song’s title, and often contrast the function of the verse 
lyrics. Hook sections normally comprise a single, self-contained section, but two-
part hooks are occasionally used, such as in “Money Ain’t a Thang” (Jermaine 
Dupri ft. Jay-Z, 1997), where the first part of the hook begins on the lyrics “In 
the Ferrari” and the second part on “Y’all wanna floss with us.”17 If the verse 
involves narrative, the hook might comment on that narrative. In protest-based 
songs, the verse may describe an issue while the hook incites a call to action.18 
Hook lyrics can be rapped or sung, and, until recently, the hook was normally 
the sole location for singing in hip-hop songs.19  

I prefer to call these sections hooks (instead of choruses) because, while 
their functional role may parallel choruses in popular music, they fulfill this role 
in different ways.20 I agree with Paul Edwards’s statement that hip-hop hooks are 
“designed to ‘hook’ the listeners” (2009, 187) and propose that they do so 
through a level of lyrical repetition and fragmentation not normally seen in 
popular music—an extreme example would be “Gucci Gang” (Lil’ Pump, 2017), 
where the title lyric is rapped no fewer than 20 times in each hook. Furthermore, 
hip-hop hooks do not rely on many of Temperley’s features of chorus sections 
(2018, 160), especially those concerning melodic and harmonic parameters as 
well as formal ordering. Instead, hip-hop hooks—when defined against 
characteristics of verses—are built on subtle textural shifts, the presence of 
singing, sampled or instrumental riffs in the beat layer, and the aforementioned 
fragmentation. While some songs feature sung hooks that sound remarkably 
similar to a standard pop chorus—such as “Juicy” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1994)—
others feature incessant repetition of title lyrics, such as “93 Til’ Infinity” (Souls 
of Mischief, 1993). Still others have hardly any lyrics at all, and an instrumental 
motif assumes central importance, such as in “Grindin’” (Clipse, 2002).  



 

 
 

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In my taxonomy I call on several criteria for defining hook sections. First, 
a hook section contains intelligible vocals—either sampled, rapped, or sung. 
Second, these vocals usually reference the title of the song or are repeated and 
fragmented.21 Third, the hook section remains musically and lyrically invariant 
throughout the song, usually (but by no means always) alternating with verses. 
Another criterion of hook sections involves their textural distinction (I stop 
short of conflating this with intensification or thickening) from the verses.22 
While many of these stylistic features are also ubiquitous in pop choruses, the 
near-total lack of melodic and harmonic differentiation between verses and 
hooks in hip-hop music, combined with the greater emphasis on fewer, more 
repeated lyrics, warrants a separate definition of the hip-hop hook that 
distinguishes it from the pop chorus.23 

 
Instrumental 
 
Beyond verses and hooks, other song sections in hip-hop music are less 
consistent in their content and functionality. While it might seem 
straightforward to define instrumental sections by virtue of them lacking live-
performed vocals, their texture and musical content occasionally position them 
well to function as hook sections. In this sense then, category and function 
diverge for instrumental sections. These sections involve only the beat layer; no 
live-performed vocals are present. The beat layer comprises a combination of 
instruments, computer-produced sounds, scratching or other turntable-
generated sounds, and samples. Samples may involve vocals, and paradoxically, 
instrumental sections may actually contain vocals by virtue of their participation 
in the beat layer. But these vocals are unintelligible: they may be short fragments, 
scat singing, or other brief utterances. If the vocal samples involve intelligible 
lyrics, it is more likely they are imbuing the section with a hook-like quality, and 
could thus be interpreted as hook sections.  

Amanda Sewell writes that “lyric [vocal] samples have many different uses 
and applications in sample-based music: layered against newly-rapped lyrics in 
an adjunct function, scratched into a track’s introduction or an interlude 
between verses, or substituted into a rapped lyric” (2013, 54).24 Vocal samples in 
an “interlude between verses” quite often contribute appreciably to the song’s 
lyrics, either by referencing the song’s title or commenting on the song’s 
narrative or theme in some way. Vocal samples may thus participate in 
establishing the hook-like quality in a song section, especially when the vocal 
samples reference the song title, such as in “Watch Me Now” (Ultramagnetic 



 

 
 

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MCs, 1988) or “Hold It, Now Hit It” (Beastie Boys, 1986). By contrast, 
unintelligible vocal samples carry less potential to imbue such hook-like 
qualities. In “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” (Nas, 1994), verses alternate with sections that 
feature a denser beat-layer texture, a sampled saxophone riff, and sampled female 
scat vocals. These sections are almost hook-like, but for their lack of intelligible 
vocals I classify them as instrumental. These three songs expose an inconsistency 
with how instrumental sections function: when they are positioned between 
verses, their internal content—especially vocal samples—may cause them to 
express hook-like qualities of varying strength and salience.  
 The opening thirty seconds of “Watch me Now” illustrate this blurry 
boundary by juxtaposing different types of vocal samples. The first 18 seconds 
contain numerous whoops and cries originally performed by James Brown; some 
of his signature vocal gestures.25 But these vocal samples are unintelligible as 
lyrics, and thus help define this introduction as an instrumental section (0:00–
0:18). Immediately following this section, the “Watch me Now” sample (from 
“It’s Just Begun” by The Jimmy Castor Bunch [1972]), imbuing the section with 
hook-like qualities, helping define 0:19–0:27 as a hook (indeed, it is the “Watch 
me Now” section that returns after each verse). By attending to the varied 
intelligibility and narrative function that vocal samples may exhibit, I thus 
interpret them as alternately contributing to instrumental or hook sections. The 
looser-knit nature of instrumental sections and their variegated placement 
within song forms suggests a wider array of functional purposes for them, 
including dancing, repose from the vocals of the verses and hooks, and a space 
to showcase the musical contributions of DJs and beat producers. Indeed, hip 
hop’s earliest musical manifestations showcased beats, along with their creators; 
rapping came later. 
 
Looser-Organized Vocal Sections 
 
Live-recorded vocals in hip-hop music are not restricted to verses and hooks: 
looser-organized sections may contain ad-hoc, ametric vocals, skits, or may 
simply involve rapping or singing in a section that does not function like a verse 
or hook. Many songs feature ad-hoc vocals that characterize sections in their 
framing areas, but less often within the core sequence. These ad-hoc vocals 
occasionally function as “hype” vocals: ametric vocals that usually serve the 
rhetorical purpose of enhancing anticipation of the song’s main lyrical content. 
A prominent example of hype vocals in hip-hop music can be found in the music 
of Public Enemy, where group member Flava Flav effectively functions as a “hype 



 

 
 

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man.”26 Other ad-hoc vocals might be less hype-based and more about 
connecting directly with listeners or other artists. These may include “shout out” 
sections (normally at the end of songs) or more introspective lyrics performed in 
an ametric fashion, such as when Anderson .Paak discusses his personal finances 
(0:50) in “CUT EM IN” (2020). Ad-hoc vocals are noticeably more common in 
hip-hop music than they are in other popular genres. They are so common, in 
fact, that this type of vocal also appears within and throughout verses and hooks 
(a notable example being producer Sean Combs’s frequent vocal injections in the 
rapped performances of Notorious B.I.G.). This prevalence likely has much to 
do with hip hop’s origins as a live musical genre centered around the DJ (who is 
now commonly referred to as the producer). The outdoor hip-hop parties of 
1970s and early 1980s Bronx and Queens featured the DJ as performer; any 
vocalizing was usually done by the DJ, or in deference to them.27 This vocalizing 
was not the main focus and was ad-hoc or spontaneous in nature. As hip hop 
established a tradition of recorded musical output, the hype/ad-hoc vocals 
remained a central part of some artists’ personal styles.28 As can be seen from the 
aforementioned types of looser vocal practices in hip-hop music, loose vocal 
sections are highly variegated and serve a variety of different musical functions. 
 I have established flexible descriptions of four main types of song section 
in hip-hop music. This framework allows for a systematic encoding of song 
forms across a large corpus of repertoire. These encodings in turn reveal several 
prevailing formal paradigms in hip-hop music. The next section explores these 
paradigms, proposing some possible locations and trajectories for their 
development. 
 
Formal Paradigms 
 
To better understand how sections combine to create whole songs in hip hop, I 
draw on a recent corpus study where I analyzed 160 songs released between 1979 
and 2017 (Duinker 2020). This corpus was generated from two source lists: 
Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs,” and the Grammy Award category 
for Best Rap Song. While my main analytical goal was to investigate aspects of 
rhythm and meter, I also annotated each song’s form by section type and 
duration. Example 2 displays my annotation method for the song “Hate It or 
Love It” (The Game ft. 50 Cent, 2005). “Hate It or Love It” begins with a nine-
second ad-lib vocal section followed by a series of verses and hooks performed 
by the song’s two MCs, The Game and 50 Cent. From 2:53 until the song’s 
conclusion, the beat layer continues with no vocals from either MC—there is, 



 

 
 

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however, a female vocal sample embedded in the beat layer that does not 
contribute appreciably to the song’s lyrics. I have thus encoded this final section 
“instrumental.” The annotation of “Hate It or Love It” reveals a commonality in 
hip-hop form: hook sections are typically the same durational length across an 
entire song, while verses are more likely to vary in length. 

Formal Region Section Type Elapsed Time Duration (s) Notes 
framing area voc 0:00 9 50 Cent (hype vocals) 
core sequence vs1 0:09 28 50 Cent 

hk 0:37 21  
vs2 0:58 37 The Game 
hk 1:35 20  
vs3 1:55 38 50 Cent and The Game 
hk 2:33 20  

framing area inst 2:53 33 includes fadeout 

Example 2: Formal annotation for “Hate It or Love It” (The Game ft. 50 Cent, 2005). Section-
type abbreviations are used as follows throughout this paper: voc = loose vocal section, hk = 
hook, vs = verse, and inst = instrumental. All sectional durations documented here should be 
interpreted +/- one second: durations were calculated from real-time elapsed time 
measurements, meaning slight inaccuracies in the order of one second were common. 

The song’s form is straightforward: “Hate It or Love It” features discrete 
framing areas and a tangible core sequence of verses and hooks. But many other 
songs exhibit more irregular forms. Consider the original 12” release of “Push It” 
(Salt-n-Pepa, 1987), whose form is annotated in Example 3. The song’s first verse 
appears at 1:31—this is quite late for a first verse—and besides a few other verses 
and hooks, the remainder of the song is loosely organized: the entire duration 
leading up to the first verse, for example, is an amalgam of instrumental passages, 
hype vocals, and chanting. No clear sectionality emerges here, yet no one section 
type (of my four) is clearly established. I have therefore chosen to denote this a 
hybrid of instrumental and looser vocal section types (hence “inst/voc” in the 
annotation). Such hybrid sections appear to be common in framing areas, but 
their outsized presence as in “Push It” (the framing areas make up 60% of the 
song’s duration) is rare. As a party-oriented song, “Push It” features these 
extended loose sections primarily to aid the song’s danceability.29 “Push It” thus 
reveals the importance of considering performance context and function of 
songs when evaluating the sectionality of their forms.  

 
 
 



 

 
 

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Formal Region Section Type Elapsed Time Duration (s) Notes 
framing area inst / voc 0:00 91 features hype vocals 
core sequence vs1 1:31 16  

hk 1:47 13  
inst / voc 2:00 27  
vs2 2:47 12  
hk  2:59 16  

framing area inst / voc 3:15 77 includes fadeout 

Example 3: Formal annotation for “Push It” (Salt-N-Pepa, 1987). The “inst/voc” sections are 
so named for their hybridity—they integrate aspects of instrumental and loose vocal section 
types—and are notable in their comparatively long duration. 

The remainder of this section is organized around three prevailing formal 
paradigms: strophic form, verse-hook form, and long-verse form. 
 
Strophic Form 

 
Strophic-form songs generally feature a core sequence comprising multiple 
verses that either proceed in immediate succession or are interspersed by 
instrumental interludes. Such interludes typically lack hook-like qualities. 
Example 4 provides a general schema for strophic forms in hip hop. Notable in 
strophic-form songs is the near-total absence of hook sections; in this way, 

Example 4: General schema for strophic-form songs. These songs typically include a core 
sequence that is bounded by framing areas. The core sequence may include a succession of 
verses (upper diagram), or a succession of verses interspersed by instrumental sections (lower 
diagram). 

Core SequenceFraming Area Framing Area

VerseIntro OutroVerseVerse

Core SequenceFraming Area Framing Area

VerseIntro OutroVerseVerseInstrumental Instrumental



 

 
 

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strophic form is quite similar to Covach’s “simple verse form” (2004, 73).30 The 
long single version of “Rapper’s Delight” (Sugarhill Gang, 1979) constitutes a 
textbook example of strophic form. An instrumental section begins and 
concludes the song, framing the core sequence of four verses rapped in 
immediate succession.31 “King of Rock” (Run-DMC, 1985) follows a slightly 
different trajectory. With no introductory framing area, the first verse begins 
immediately at the song’s outset. The eight verses of this song are always followed 
by instrumental sections of varying lengths, laden with rock guitar soloing; the 
alternation of these sections makes “King of Rock” a strophic-form song. 

While parallels can be drawn between the strophic-form hip-hop songs 
and the “simple verse” and “AAA” forms used to describe other popular music, 
I hesitate to use such parallels as a defining characteristic of strophic hip-hop 
songs. I prefer instead to contextualize strophic form in the tradition of live hip-
hop performance. An important aspect of hip hop’s performance tradition is the 
cypher: an informal group-performance context where various MCs take turns 
freestyling either atop a DJ-produced or beatboxed beat, or a cappella.32 Michael 
Newman describes cyphers as involving “improvised round-robin rapping” 
(2005, 401), while H. Samy Alim qualifies them as “highly competitive lyrical 
circles of rappers” (2006, 6). James Braxton Peterson (2014) and Roderick 
Pullum (2019) have suggested that the term “cypher” emerged into common hip-
hop parlance through the influence of the Five-Percent Nation.33 

Though cyphers typically have no set requirements regarding the number 
of MCs participating or the length of their verses, the general form they follow 
involves the introduction of a beat followed by a succession of freestyle verses, 
rapped by different MCs. The musical and lyrical foci of cyphers are intertextual 
references, unifying chains of rhymes, and communication between MCs in the 
cypher (such as calling one another by name to spit the next verse, or through 
put downs). Hooks generally play no important role in cyphers. While the cypher 
is a less formal, live performance practice, its analogy in recorded hip-hop music 
can be seen through the “posse cut,” which is a song that features different 
rappers (usually associated with one another, occasionally through a common 
record label) on each verse. Several well-known posse cuts appear in the corpus, 
“Scenario,” “The Symphony” (Marley Marl et al., 1989), “Flava In Ya Ear 
(Remix)” (Craig Mack et al., 1995), and “Fuckin’ Problems”  (A$AP Rocky et al., 
2013) among them.34 “The Symphony” represents perhaps the truest 
resemblance to a cypher of these posse cuts: a brief intro featuring Marley Marl 
is followed by successive verses rapped by Masta Ace, Craig G., Kool G Rap, and 



 

 
 

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Big Daddy Kane, respectively, each MC concluding his verse by naming the next 
MC who is due up to rap. 

By drawing parallels between cyphers, posse cuts, and strophic form, I aim 
to show that, in live hip-hop performance practice, the lyrical, structural, and 
musical focus of the song is often centered around the verse. Verses are what 
cyphers and rap battles (another chief format for freestyling) are made of. Verses 
figure prominently in strophic hip-hop songs. And verses are the platform across 
which a collection of MCs come together to contribute to posse cuts. The verse—
however it is structured—is the main conduit of communication and exchange 
in hip-hop performance, and its centrality to the cypher, posse cut, and strophic-
form song traces a through-line between these practices. 
 
Verse-Hook Form 
 
Verse-hook form chiefly involves what its name suggests: verses and hooks. The 
general schema of verse-hook form is detailed in Example 5. Like the verse-
chorus paradigm referenced by Covach (2004), Temperley (2018), Ensign 
(2015), and others, verse-hook songs in hip hop feature a core sequence of 
alternating verse and hook sections. This sequence occasionally includes 
instrumental or loose-vocal sections, but my corpus data suggests that such 
interventions are uncommon. Rarer still are verse-hook songs where multiple 
verses or multiple hooks (these could perhaps also be characterized as two-part 
hooks) occur in immediate succession.  

Example 5: General schema for verse-hook songs. The chief variable in these songs involves 
the ordering of verses and hooks, as shown between the two formal trajectories above. 

Core SequenceFraming Area Framing Area

VerseIntro OutroVerseHook

Core SequenceFraming Area Framing Area

VerseHook

Hook

VerseHookIntro Outro



 

 
 

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Three songs encapsulate these various affordances of verse-hook form. In 
Example 6a, the formal sequence of “99 Problems” (Jay-Z, 2003) constitutes a 
textbook example of a verse-hook form. A brief a cappella rapped introduction 
previews the hook lyrics, before the core formal sequence runs through three 
verses, each followed by a hook.35 The song concludes with an instrumental 
section—repeated iterations of the basic beat loop—complemented by various 
hype vocals.  

By contrast, “Lose Control” (Missy Elliott, 2005), shown in Example 6b, 
features loose-vocal framing sections (mainly featuring hype vocals by Fatman 
Scoop) and a core sequence that contains two pairs of verses and hooks. Loose 
vocal sections occur after the first hook and again after the second verse. The first 
of these features guest artist Ciara in a rapped/sung performance: more metric 
than hype vocals normally are, but less tightly organized than Elliott’s verses and 
hooks. The second loose vocal section features a repeated chant-like 
performance by Elliott and Fatman Scoop.36  

Finally, the radio edit of “Ladies First” (Queen Latifah ft. Monie Love, 
1989) as detailed in Example 6c involves a verse-hook core form (with no 
framing sections) that features a changing number of verses between each hook. 
The four hook sections in this song appear at the opening, after verse 2, verse 4, 
and verse 7, respectively. This means the song’s eight verses appear in groups of 
two, two, and three. While “Ladies First” and “Lose Control” depart from the 
schema shown in Example 5, the general alternation of verses and hooks in their 
core sequences identify these songs as verse-hook forms.  

Formal Region Section Type Elapsed Time Duration (s) Notes 
framing area hk 0:00 6 features hook lyrics 
core sequence vs1 0:06 40  

hk 0:46 11 shorter than other hook 
sections in the song 

vs2 0:57 62  
hk 1:59 20  
vs3 2:19 52  
hk 3:11 21  

framing area inst / voc 3:32 23 hype vocals 

Example 6a: Formal annotation for “99 Problems” (Jay-Z, 2003). This song features discrete 
framing areas and a balanced core sequence of three verses and three hook sections. Within 
the core sequence, the first hook section is notably shorter than the following two. 



 

 
 

107 

 

Formal Region Section Type Elapsed Time Duration (s) Notes 
framing area voc 0:00 18 hype vocals 
core sequence vs1 0:18 32  

hk 0:50 14  
voc 1:04 17 rapped / sung 
vs2 1:21 30  
voc 1:51 16 chanting  
hk 2:07 13  

framing area voc 2:20 87 chanting 

Example 6b: Formal annotation for “Lose Control” (Missy Elliot ft. Fatman Scoop and Ciara, 
2005). A number of different loose-vocal sections feature in both the framing areas and core 
sequence. 

Formal Region Section Type Elapsed Time Duration (s) Notes 
core sequence hk 0:00 22 short instrumental tag 

at end 
vs1 0:22 14  
vs2 0:36 18  
hk 0:54 4  
vs3 0:58 18  
vs4 1:16 18  
hk 1:34 16  
vs5 1:51 18  
vs6 2:09 35  
vs7 2:44 18  
hk 3:02 20  
vs8 3:22 20  

(framing area) inst 3:42 8 quick fade out 

Example 6c: Formal annotation for the radio edit of “Ladies First” (Queen Latifah ft. Monie 
Love, 1989). This version of song, while verse-hook in composition, avoids an introductory 
framing section and features differing numbers of verses between each hook. Its core sequence 
also begins with a hook and concludes with a verse, a formal ordering not common in rock/pop 
music (Temperley 2018) but quite prevalent in hip-hop music. 

Example 5 also indicates that the core sequence of verse-hook songs may 
begin with either a verse or a hook. This flexibility departs from the formal 
conventions of rock-pop music, where a song’s first verse is likelier to occur 
before its first chorus.37 Temperley (2018) has classified the ordered pairing of 
verses and choruses as “verse-chorus units,” or VCUs, generating a more 
efficient way to encode the form of many pop songs. While it is tempting to apply 



 

 
 

108 

the VCU concept to hip-hop music, perhaps with the alternate acronym VHU 
(verse-hook unit), the directionality embedded in the VCU concept implies that 
the verse normally comes first.38 This assumes that the verse points toward the 
hook/chorus, which can be achieved through harmonic, textural, melodic, 
lyrical, or other means. Such explicit directionality between verses and hooks (in 
that order) is by no means paradigmatic in hip-hop music.39 “Hypnotize” (The 
Notorious B.I.G., 1997) exemplifies the non-teleological relationship between 
verse and hook, the form of which is detailed in Example 7. While the song’s core 
sequence is indeed ordered verse-hook (and not the other way around), a 
number of lyrical and textural features mask any sense of buildup or 
directionality from each verse into its following hook. First, the beat’s texture 
does not change between these two section types. The basic beat loop is quite 
sparse, consisting only of a two-measure loop performed by bass and drums. A 
momentary guitar flourish marks each eight-measure hypermetric unit, 
providing some structural waypoints amid the decidedly complex metric 
patterning of The Notorious B.I.G.’s (henceforth Biggie) flow.  

 
The first verse is 18 measures long, meaning the hypermetric guitar 

flourish occurs for a third time, in m.17. Instead of marking the beginning of a 
new, unfolding, eight-measure hypermetric unit, this flourish punctuates the last 
two measures of the verse, after which the hook arrives with no hypermetric 

Example 7: Basic beat loop and formal annotation for “Hypnotize” (The Notorious B.I.G., 
1997). The first and second verses each run for 18 measures. As shown for the first verse, this 
mensural length creates a misalignment with the hypermetric structure jointly generated by 
iterations of the 2-measure beat loop (small x) and guitar flourishes (capital X), which repeat 
after 8 measures. 

Measure 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 
Guitar Flourish X        X        X   
Beat Loop x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x  x   
Song Section  verse 1 

                   
Measure 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26           
Guitar Flourish       X            
Beat Loop x  x  x  x            
Song Section  hook           

 



 

 
 

109 

markers. Biggie’s flow performance also contributes to the anticlimactic 
conclusion of the verse. In the first verse in particular, his flow patterns and 
choice of lyrics create a dense, complex web of possible groupings, depending on 
whether rhythm, meter, lyrical syntax, or subject matter is considered.40 This 
lyrical complexity makes it difficult to anticipate closure at the end of the verse. 
As a consequence, when Biggie raps “Packin, askin’ ‘who want it?’ / You got it, 
nigga, flaunt it, that Brooklyn bullshit, we on it” at the beginning of m.17, not 
only has the guitar flourish made this passage sound like an initiating gesture in 
a new eight-measure unit, but the flow gives no solid indication of conclusion. It 
simply ends; a string of rhyme chains, backward and forward lyrical references, 
and segues in subject matter, all quietly and unmarkedly yield to the hook 
section. 
 
Long-Verse and Other Forms 
 
Strophic and verse-hook songs constitute the vast majority of the corpus. Of the 
160 songs represented, 123 (77%) are verse-hook while a further 24 (15%) are 
strophic. The remaining 13 (8%) either feature a single long verse (long-verse 
form) or follow a formal path distinct from the paradigms discussed here. 
“Roxanne’s Revenge” (Roxanne Shante, 1984), “Paid in Full” (Eric B. & Rakim, 
1987), “Children’s Story” (Slick Rick, 1988), and “Brooklyn Zoo” (Ol’ Dirty 
Bastard, 1995) are all examples of long-verse forms. Each begins with an 
introductory framing area, contains a core sequence of one long verse, and 
concludes with either a hook-like section, ad-hoc vocals, or instrumental section. 
The long-verse form draws to mind an earlier type of Black American vernacular 
oral tradition: the toast. Toasts were long poems that were delivered in an 
informal style.41 These long poems usually featured some sort of trickster figure 
(i.e. Shine or the signifyin[g] monkey) surmounting odds that are stacked against 
them; hustling their way through the narrative.42 Classic examples of toasting set 
to music include Gil-Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” 
(Pieces of a Man, 1970), and Rudy Ray Moore’s “The Signifyin’ Monkey” (This 
Pussy Belongs to Me, 1971); indeed, both these performers have been cited as 
stylistic precursors to hip-hop music.43 Philadelphia-based Schooly D’s version 
of the toast The Signifyin’ Monkey (“The Signifyin’ Rapper,” 1988) is perhaps the 
truest example of a toast being performed in a hip-hop setting in that it literally 
adapts a toast (but does not exclusively feature metric rapping), and “Children’s 
Story” (Slick Rick, 1988) is an example of how the toast concept has been fully 
adapted into a rapped performance. “Children’s Story” flips the toast convention 



 

 
 

110 

on its head, instead purveying a cautionary tale where the hustling protagonist 
does not come out on top; indeed, he ends up dead. Long-verse songs follow a 
number of narrative arcs that relate back to toasts: the verses in “Roxanne’s 
Revenge” and “Brooklyn Zoo” are both diss-laden and self-aggrandizing.44 While 
tropes of put-down and self-aggrandization are certainly ubiquitous to hip-hop 
lyrics in general, when they pervade a long-verse song’s lyrics, two key elements 
of toasting are reflected in a hip-hop performance. 

Section Type Elapsed Time Duration (s) Notes 
voc 0:00 10 hype vocals 
inst 0:10 8 introduction of beat layer 
hk? 0:18 12 unclear section type 
inst 0:30 17  
vs1? 0:47 39 unclear section type 
inst 1:28 17  
voc 1:43 17  
inst 2:00 17  
hk 2:17 12  
inst 2:29 17  
voc 2:46 17  
inst 3:03 34  
hk 3:37 13  
inst 3:50 90  
voc 5:20 17  
vs2 5:37 38  
inst 6:15 90  

Example 8: Formal annotation for “The Breaks” (Kurtis Blow, 1980). The varied sectional 
ordering of this song, as well as its divergent section lengths (notably the two 90-second 
instrumental sections toward the end) render it difficult to classify as “verse-hook” or 
“strophic.” Identification of framing areas and the core sequence is complicated by the 
sectional ordering. One might interpret the core sequence as beginning at 0:18, but quantity of 
instrumental and loose-vocal sections weakens its ability to function as such, with standard 
alternations between verses and hooks or instrumentals. 

In the corpus, songs with formal sequences classified as “other” were 
very few, although they warrant mention on the grounds of their functional 
purpose. Two notable “other” songs include “The Breaks” (Kurtis Blow, 1980) 
and “Push It” (Salt-N-Pepa, 1986); these both fall into the Adam Krims’s genre 
of “party rap,” which he describes as being “designed for moving a crowd, 
making them dance, or perhaps creating or continuing a ‘groove’ and a mood” 
(2000, 55). Listening to either of these songs with this description in mind 



 

 
 

111 

makes the “party rap” designation seem obvious for both of these songs, and 
also suggests why such songs rely less on a tightly organized structure of verses 
and hooks. As shown in Example 8, the formal patterning of “The Breaks” 
looks something like verse-hook, but includes a number of instrumental breaks, 
two of which are each 90 seconds long. These extended looser sections reveal 
the primary function of the song: a medium for dancing. Rather than suggest 
that dance-functioning music cannot contain verses and choruses, I use these 
examples to illustrate that instrumental sections can (and often do) figure just 
as prominently as verses or hooks in party-, or dance-oriented hip-hop songs. 
 
Form and the Mainstreaming of Hip Hop 
 
The mainstreaming of hip-hop music has been discussed in context of the radio’s 
role as tastemaker (Coddington 2018), the influence of Billboard chart 
categorizations (Harrison and Arthur 2011), and the appropriation of Black 
musical traditions and culture (Neal 2005 and George 1988). Coddington argues 
that top-40 radio station producers, in order to reach their targeted 
demographics, preferred to play hip-hop records that mainstream audiences 
could understand and tolerate. The stripped down, aggressive style of artists like 
Run-DMC, Public Enemy, and LL Cool J did not fulfill this role, as did the 
comparative musical tameness of artists like MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, and Milli 
Vanilli. Coddington aptly observes the growing rift between pop rap and 
underground, politically charged rap music that emerged in the late 1980s. She 
also notes, however, that the sound world of pop rap eventually permeated hip-
hop music, such that an artist like The Notorious B.I.G. could juxtapose lyrics 
about his hard-edged, drug-selling upbringing with a slickly produced beat that 
bore closer resemblance to M.C. Hammer than Public Enemy.  

This mainstreaming of hip-hop music in the 1980s and 1990s thus appears 
to have been a multi-step phenomenon. Firstly, a less controversial, softer brand 
of hip-hop music was marketed to a wide demographic. Such marketing 
bypassed the more confrontational and political arm of hip-hop music, whose 
artists such as Public Enemy and N.W.A. were experiencing their own, smaller 
commercial breakthrough. Secondly, more accessible musical styles were 
combined with confrontational, profanity-laden, and uncompromising lyrics, 
creating an uneasy balance between radio-ready musical accessibility and 
provocative lyrical subject matter less well-suited for mass-market radio play—
this combination can be seen in the artists on the Death Row (Dr. Dre, Snoop 



 

 
 

112 

Dogg, and Tupac Shakur), and the Bad Boy (The Notorious B.I.G. and Lil’ Kim) 
labels. This two-phase process eventuated a number of successfully charting 
singles by artists such as Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.—a marker of 
mainstream success for this new hybrid of pop-rap beats and hardcore lyrics.45 
 How does this process of mainstreaming relate to evolving trends in song 
form? To conclude this paper, I present a number of statistic-driven observations 
regarding song forms and their evolving usage in hip hop. Each involves the hook 
section in some way: a gradual increase in prevalence of verse-hook songs, an 
increase in sung hooks, hooks appearing sooner in songs’ formal sequence, and 
the proportion of a song’s total length taken up by hooks. In contrast to the verse, 
the hook evolved from an infrequently used formal section to a central feature of 
nearly every hip-hop song today. 
 
The Emergence of the (Sung) Hook 
 
When “Rapper’s Delight” was released in 1979, it had an immediate and long-
lasting impact.46 The idea that rapping—as opposed to singing—could be 
featured in a radio-worthy song was novel, and this song would play an outsized 
role carving out a space in the recording industry for hip-hop music. Musically 
speaking, “Rapper’s Delight” was not particularly groundbreaking.47 The song’s 
beat was a recorded interpolation of the song “Good Times” (1979), released 
earlier that year by the R&B/disco band Chic.48 But while “Good Times” contains 
an identifiable chorus section, “Rapper’s Delight” does not. Instead, “Rapper’s 
Delight” features a string of rapped verses in its core sequence, with instrumental 
sections serving its framing areas.49 While some of the song’s lyrics have hook-
like qualities (such as the opening lyrics by Wonder Mike, “I said-a hip hop, 
hippie to the hippie ...,” and Big Bank Hank’s “Hotel, motel …” line), these lyrics 
do not form autonomous song sections—they appear within longer verses 
performed by those MCs.  

“Rapper’s Delight” thus qualifies as a strophic song. Indeed, many other 
old-school hip-hop songs (those released in the late 1970s and early 1980s) are 
strophic.50 As documented in the appendix, 15 of the 40 corpus songs released 
between 1979–1989 are strophic, while another 15 are verse-hook (the remaining 
10 are either long-verse form or do not easily fit any one of the three paradigms). 
The contrast between this balance of types and the rest of the corpus is stark: 
after 1989, across the remaining 120 corpus songs, only 13 are not verse-hook, 
and perhaps most striking is that 10 of these 13 appear before 1996. As far as this 
corpus is able to explain general trends in hip-hop form, then, verse-hook form 



 

 
 

113 

had firmly, and indeed almost exclusively, become the standard paradigm used 
in hip-hop music by the mid 1990s. 
 Popular songs that are expected to do well on the charts are often released 
in two versions: a single version (sometimes called the “radio edit”), and an 
album version. “Rapper’s Delight” was released in five versions, each with a 
different duration, none of which featured a hook section.51 By contrast, the two 
versions of Queen Latifah’s Afrocentric feminist anthem “Ladies First” (1989) 
follow markedly differing formal sequences. The album version of this song 
features no hook sections, but the radio edit of the song does (the forms are 
compared in Example 9); the famous music video for “Ladies First” corresponds 
to the radio edit version. 

Album Version Radio Edit 
Section Type (Elapsed Time) Duration(s) Section Type (Elapsed Time) Duration(s) 
inst (0:00) 18 hk (0:00) 22 
vs1 (0:18) 13 vs1 (0:22) 14 
vs2 (0:31) 18 vs2 (0:36) 18 
inst (0:49) 5 hk (0:54) 4 
vs3 (0:54) 18 vs3 (0:58) 18 
vs4 (1:12) 18 vs4 (1:16) 18 
inst (1:30) 36 hk (1:34) 16 
vs5 (2:06) 18 vs5 (1:51) 18 
vs6 (2:24) 36 vs6 (2:09) 35 
vs7 (3:00) 17 vs7 (2:44) 18 
inst (3:17) 42 hk (3:02) 20 
  vs8 (3:22) 20 
  inst (3:42) 8 

Example 9: Comparison of formal sequences in the album version and radio edit of “Ladies 
First” (Queen Latifah ft. Monie Love, 1989). Accounting for the one-second discrepancies, 
corresponding verses are the same length in each version. An eighth verse and four hook 
sections are added in the radio edit, and all instrumental sections (save for a short fadeout) are 
removed.  

As Tricia Rose (1994) and Robin Roberts (1994) attest in their analyses of 
this video, the hook section figures prominently in the song’s advocation of 
community among women MCs, and in a more general sense, of solidarity in the 
Black feminist movement.52 The challenging lyrics of the verses, aggressively 
rapped (by Latifah and guest MC Monie Love) over a hard-sounding beat, 
contrast the gentler-sounding hook, which involves singing and a shift to the 
major mode.53 The addition of the hook section in this radio edit dramatically 



 

 
 

114 

alters the course, message, and ethos of “Ladies First,” while making it more 
musically palatable for radio and television play. 
 
The Sung Hook 
 
The mere presence of a hook does not fully explain its role as mainstreaming 
agent; its musical content is equally important to consider. Hook sections in all 
23 verse-hook song in the corpus released before 1993 either feature rapping, 
sampled vocals (either sung or rapped), or, more rarely, vocals sung by the MC(s) 
themselves. Examples of these scenarios include, respectively, Melle Mel rapping 
all the hooks in “The Message” (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 1982), 
sampled vocals in the hook sections of “Slow Down” (Brand Nubian, 1990), and 
the earnest singing by Biz Markie in the hooks of his song “Just a Friend” 
(1989).54 Beginning in the mid-1990s, hip-hop songs started consistently 
featuring hooks sung by guest artists: David Ruffin Jr. on “Gin and Juice” (Snoop 
Dogg, 1993), members of the girl group Total on “Juicy” and “Hypnotize” (The 
Notorious B.I.G. 1994 and 1997), Roger Troutman on “California Love” (Tupac 
Shakur and Dr. Dre, 1995), and Reggie Green and Sweet Franklin on “Dear 
Mama” (Tupac Shakur, 1995). The juxtaposition of hardcore rap lyrics centered 
around crime, drugs, and material wealth with smooth, R&B-style vocals has 
been identified by Coddington as central to the commercial success enjoyed by 
Puff Daddy and The Notorious B.I.G., and by Krims as a defining feature of don 
rap, his term that describes the merging of reality rap (gangsta rap) and mack 
rap, which Krims situates as central to the “mack” or “pimp” personas adopted 
by certain MCs and groups (2000, 62–63). This occasionally tension-laden 
juxtaposition was immensely successful from a commercial standpoint.55 
“Hypnotize” and “California Love” both reached number one on the Billboard 
Hot 100, “Dear Mama” and “Gin and Juice” broke the top 10 on the same chart, 
and these four songs as well as “Juicy” each reached number one on the Billboard 
Hot Rap Songs chart. 
 Sung hooks—whether recorded by guest artists or the song’s MC(s)—
have remained a fixture in verse-hook songs since the 1990s. But while sung 
hooks usually form one of the most memorable parts of a hip-hop song, the 
identity of their singers has not always driven this memorability or contributed 
to the song’s commercial appeal. Think of the well-known “Biggie Biggie Biggie, 
can’t you see?” hook from “Hypnotize” (The Notorious B.I.G., 1997)—itself an 
interpolation of “La Di Da Di” (Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, 1985). Even though 
nearly everyone who listened to top-40 radio or watched MTV in the 1990s will 



 

 
 

115 

know how this hook goes, very few will likely know who sung it (Pamela Long 
from the group Total). These optics have changed dramatically in songs released 
in the past two decades. Faith Evans was already a well-known artist when she 
sung the hook on “Missing You” (Puff Daddy and Faith Evans, 1997), a song 
dedicated to her late ex-husband Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.), 
but her involvement with Sean Combs and Bad Boy Records arguably raised her 
profile more than she did theirs.56 Guest hooks sung by artists such as Justin 
Timberlake, Alicia Keys, and Rihanna—all of whom have garnered wide, 
mainstream appeal in their careers—were undoubtedly a commercial boon for 
the hip-hop songs on which they appeared.57 This combination of rapping and 
singing in the hip-hop industry has led to a specific Grammy award for “Best 
Rap/Sung Collaboration” (now called “Best Melodic Rap Performance”).  

By referencing the guest hook paradigm in hip-hop music, I do not mean 
to imply that the aforementioned songs would have failed commercially without 
their guest features, but rather that the presence of guest pop artists opened up 
an avenue toward massive mainstream appeal which would have otherwise been 
difficult to attain. While Jay-Z, for example, was already a successful artist and 
entrepreneur by the early 2000s (culminating with his critically praised 2003 
“retirement album” The Black Album), 11 of his 14 top-five appearances on the 
Billboard Hot 100 chart—including all four of his number ones—and 13 of his 
22 Grammy awards have been earned through rap/sung collaborations.58 The 
collaboration-driven fusion of pop and hip hop has been furthered still by hybrid 
artists who both rap and sing, such as Drake, Mac Miller, Travis Scott, Young 
Thug, and Nicki Minaj. Though Justin Bieber is not generally considered a hip-
hop artist, his 2020 album Changes is replete with soft-sounding trap beats atop 
which his breathy vocals recall the sound world of Drake and his longtime 
collaborator Noah “40” Shebib. 
 
Formal Ordering and Balance 
 
The final section of this paper investigates sectional ordering and balance in hip-
hop songs. Of the 123 corpus songs that were classified as verse-hook, 47% 
featured a verse first, while 53% featured a hook first. This balance between 
hook-first and verse-first songs becomes skewed when considered over time. 
Example 10 plots all the verse-hook songs in the corpus in six time periods, each 
selected for their relatively even distribution of songs (17 < n < 24 for each time 
period).59 While the 19 verse-hook songs released between 1982–1990 show a 
relatively even balance of verse-initiating and hook-initiating forms, more recent 



 

 
 

116 

songs appear to favor a hook-first form. In fact, just one of the 19 verse-hook 
songs released after 2011 had a verse appear before a hook. 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Example 10: Leading section type in verse-hook songs. The time periods were selected to suit 
two criteria. First, that all songs in a particular year would be included in the same period. 
Second, that the periods be populated as evenly as possible, given the first criterion. 

What do these observations tell us about the mainstreaming of hip-hop? 
They suggest—again—that hip-hop song forms are evolving to gradually 
foreground the hook at the expense of the verse. The significance of formal 
ordering can be examined through music consumption patterns and habits. 
Hubert Léveillé Gauvin’s 2018 study on musical form and the theory of attention 
economy tested several hypotheses on a corpus of popular songs released 
between 1986 and 2015. For each song, he determined how much time passed 
before the first vocal entry, and before the first mention of the title lyrics. His 
hypothesis was that, due to the way music is consumed via streaming services 
with seemingly infinite choice at listeners’ fingertips, recent songs have been 
written in order to better immediately capture listeners’ attention.60 The working 
assumption here is that because of an abundance of choice, listeners are less likely 
to listen to an entire song, instead switching songs after a limited amount of 
time.61 Léveillé Gauvin’s research showed that the average elapsed time before 
first vocal entry and title lyric decreased by year, meaning these features are 

1982–1990 1991–1997 1998–2003 2004–2007 2008–2011 2012–2017

Verse First 58% 89% 52% 28% 26% 5%

Hook First 42% 11% 48% 72% 74% 95%

N = 19 19 21 18 23 19

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Leading Section Type in Verse-Hook Songs

Verse First Hook First



 

 
 

117 

heard, on average, sooner, in more recent charting pop music. Assuming that 
hip-hop hooks normally feature title lyrics, we can apply Léveillé Gauvin’s 
hypothesis to a determination of how soon hook sections appear in hip-hop 
songs.62 Example 11 plots this statistic over time, and the results here echo 
Léveillé Gauvin’s findings: hook sections generally appear sooner in recent songs 
than they do in older songs. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Example 11: Elapsed time until the arrival of the first hook section in 122 songs identified as 
verse-hook in the corpus. 

We can also observe the hook’s rising importance by measuring how 
much of a song’s total duration they occupy. Example 12a plots total song 
duration in seconds for all songs in the corpus. As can be seen, apart from 
several long-duration outliers in the years prior to 1990, most songs tend to fall 
in a bandwidth of 3:00 (180 s) to 5:30 (330 s) for duration; this has not changed 
substantially over time. This observation is important to consider in light of 
Example 12b, which plots the proportion of total song duration taken up by 
hooks. The trendline here shows that the durational percentage of hooks is 
steadily rising. The charts featured in Examples 10–12 demonstrate that hooks 
are both arriving sooner and occupying an increasingly large share of the song’s 
duration.  

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

19
82

19
88

19
90

19
90

19
92

19
94

19
95

19
98

19
99

20
00

20
02

20
02

20
03

20
05

20
05

20
06

20
07

20
08

20
08

20
09

20
10

20
11

20
11

20
12

20
14

20
15

20
16

El
ap

se
d 

Ti
m

e 
(s

)

Song Release Year

Time Until First Hook



 

 
 

118 

 
Example 12a: Song duration in seconds for all 160 songs in the corpus. 

 

 

Example 12b: Proportion of song duration filled by hooks for all 160 songs in the corpus. 

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

500

550

600

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020

So
ng

 D
ur

at
io

n 
(s

)

Release Year

Song Duration

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020

Release Year

Proportion of Total Song Duration as Hooks



 

 
 

119 

Conclusion 
 
Song form is a musical parameter from which much can be learned about genre 
and style, performance practice, and in a broader sense, genre crossover. Since 
formal terminology is often used without being contextually defined, it becomes 
easy to forget how this terminology has been shaped by style, performance 
practice, and commerciality, and how it shapes our own reifying discourse of 
genre. 

 In the first section of this paper, I identified four section types in recorded 
hip hop, partly to invite further research on this topic, but also to foreground the 
subtle characteristics that distinguish hip hop’s formal sections from those in 
other genres of popular music. I believe this foregrounding to be important 
because it calls attention to the pitfalls of defining formal features in hip hop 
using a terminology that has already been heavily theorized for rock/pop music. 
By using the term “chorus” to define hooks in hip hop, for example, we risk 
casting these sections in the image of popular music, which, at least initially, bore 
little influence over the formal construction of hip-hop music. A more 
appropriate argument—albeit one I have not taken here—would be that what 
once constituted a hook section in early hip hop has evolved into a pop-worthy 
chorus section in more recent rap-sung collaborations.63 

With these discussions of section types established, I then investigated 
how section types form complete songs. While verse-hook songs appear to be 
the most common formal paradigm in hip-hop music, they were not common 
in hip hop’s earliest years, when long-verse and strophic songs were more 
prevalent. I stressed that long-verse and strophic forms appear closely related to 
oral traditions of African American culture commonly cited as predecessors to 
hip-hop music in general and rapping in particular. Toasts—long, epic poems 
common in twentieth-century Black American culture—were often performed 
in a manner similar to rapping (albeit more rhythmically free), complete with 
rhyming couplets and phrases of similar length. The lyrical organization of toasts 
foreshadowed the hip-hop verse: their performances essentially involved proto-
rapping, and their forms gave rise to the long-verse form in recorded hip hop. In 
a similar vein, strophic songs and posse cuts can be understood as a reflection of 
the cypher, a perennial locus of energy in collaborative and combative rapping. 

Finally, I have argued that the mainstreaming of hip-hop music can be 
seen (among other ways) through a gradual shift in formal focus from the verse 
to the hook. Hooks first became more prevalent through the emergence of the 
verse-hook paradigm and their profile was further raised through guest sung 



 

 
 

120 

vocals by established pop stars. Their leading position in songs’ formal sequences 
has also increased their importance, with more and more songs presenting the 
hook section earlier in the song (and occasionally right at the beginning). By 
focusing on hook sections, I risk overstating their role in the mainstreaming 
process and assuming a defined generic boundary exists between hip-hop and 
pop music where one simply does not exist. Indeed, merely invoking the term 
“crossover” implies that there is some border that a song, album, artist, or 
musical community traverses.64 In reality, the threshold between hip hop and 
pop is porous and incompletely defined, perhaps more so today than ever before. 
But this permeable boundary between hip hop and pop is precisely what makes 
the hook—a section type that pervades nearly all pop music in some way or 
another—so appealing as an agent of mainstreaming in hip hop. Just like 
Temperley’s observation that choruses slowly became standard in 1960s 
rock/pop music, hooks have slowly but surely infiltrated hip-hop music—a genre 
that once had very few of them, and now hardly exists without them. 
 A sense of irony can be gleaned, then, from the lyrics at the end of each 
verse of “Morris” (2014) by the Raleigh-based MC/producer Mez. Mez finishes 
each verse with the refrain lyrics: “Not too many know Morris [x2] / those that 
do know here be him and say that he needs a grave and a florist, chorus.” The 
lyric “chorus” appears almost as an afterthought; the rhyme couplet “Morris / 
florist” has already been realized, and “chorus” arrives on the final off-beat of the 
measure. Following this utterance, a sparse instrumental section emerges—
certainly not a hook (or chorus for that matter). In fact, the texture in this 
instrumental is sparser than the verse texture.65 In this light, Mez’s signaling of a 
chorus, however passing, invokes the expectation that one might occur—an 
expectation conditioned through the increasing prevalence of hook sections in 
hip hop—and also questions the very definition of “chorus” in hip-hop music. 
Mez thus reminds us that section types are fluid, constantly evolving, and unique 
in each musical genre in which they participate. Section types function as a venue 
in which we can view the tension between the musical mainstream and genres—
like hip hop—that have historically been peripheral to this mainstream, yet are 
now quite thoroughly a part of it. 
 
 
 
 
 



 

 
 

121 

 
Notes 

1 Thompson writes “all the Black kids in Philadelphia who were listening to the radio that day 
have the same story. It [the song] stopped us in our tracks” (2013, 23). 
2 Temperley (2018) suggests that since the 1960s, the verse-chorus paradigm has supplanted 
strophic form (similar to his simple verse and AABA forms) as the standard song form 
preferred in rock music. 
3 Jenkins (2017) provides numerous examples of the inter-generic bleed between mainstream 
pop, hip hop, country, EDM, and other genres. 
4 Kajikawa: “Like professional sports, rap is a cultural arena in which the most prominent actors 
are black even though the majority of its spectators are not” (2015, 9). Chang: “The Black Thing 
you once couldn’t understand became the ‘G’ Thang you could buy into” (2005, 420–21). 
5 By using tight as the operative criterion, I follow Caplin’s notion of tight-knit and loose-knit 
ideas (1998, 17). 
6 Writings by Stephenson (2002), Covach (2004), Everett (2008), and de Clercq (2012) 
enumerate types of song sections, their possible orderings, and formal paradigms that arise 
from these orderings, but the repertoire these scholars focus upon is primarily what is broadly 
classified as the poorly-defined genre of pop/rock (Biamonte 2017 makes special effort to 
define pop/rock as “the constellation of genres and styles that has arisen around Anglophone 
pop and rock music in the latter half of the twentieth century, including rhythm and blues and 
heavy metal as well as genres with ‘pop’ or ‘rock’ in their names, but not country, hip-hop, 
industrial, or electronic dance music” (89)).  Quite often, corpus-driven studies that are 
dedicated to analyzing song form—such as Summach (2012), de Clercq (2012), and Ensign 
(2015)—use music that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 or a similarly general-scope chart. 
Especially before the mid 1990s, but also to some degree more recently, hip-hop music has 
been underrepresented on these general-scope charts, and as such has not garnered close 
attention in corpus studies on form. For his part, Summach acknowledges this gap, writing 
that “Walser 1995, Krims 2000, Manabe 2006, and Butler 2006, for example, all describe formal 
procedures in rap and electronic dance music that differ substantially from those that prevail 
in pre-1990s Top-20 music. Further study would clarify the extent to which the absorption of 
rap and dance into the mainstream after 1992 was eased by, or led to, hybridized formal 
conventions” (2012, 14).  
7 Summach’s corpus study involved Billboard-charting songs released up until 1989, meaning 
he almost certainly would not have encountered hip-hop music. While Ensign’s study focused 
on charting songs after 1989, he encountered more hip-hop music, yet still only comprising a 
small portion of his total corpus (he does not specify how much). 
8 Barna (2020) highlights this fact in her discussion of the “dance chorus”; a section type 
developed in EDM, though now frequently incorporated in mainstream pop music. 



 

 
 

122 

 
9 Peres’s dissertation (2016) focuses on how recording production techniques contribute to the 
proliferation of rhythmic, timbral, and textural elements as drivers of song form in recent pop 
music. 
10 Doll’s theoretical framework is predicated on the listening experience, so he chooses to 
describe harmony in terms of the effects it creates to the ear, rather than conceiving of harmony 
in terms of “harmonic objects” (2017, 9). 
11 While this point may appear to undermine the utility of using these four section types to 
classify song forms, as I do here, instrumental and loose-vocal sections are rarely the chief 
determinant of a song’s formal type. There are only a handful of songs in my corpus where 
instrumental sections might be interpreted to express hook-like qualities and thus change the 
definition of the song’s formal type. Of the 24 songs identified as strophic in the corpus, no 
more than five or so—to my ear—present instrumental sections that are staunchly hook-like; 
“Mind Playing Tricks on Me” (Geto Boys, 1991) represents one possible candidate, where the 
instrumental sections between each verse feature a guitar riff that expresses a hook-like 
aesthetic. 
12 I define measures in hip-hop music by the near-ubiquitous underlying backbeat pattern of 
the drums in the song’s beat layer. That is to say, one measure equals one iteration of a 4/4 
backbeat pattern. By contrast, de Clercq (2016) defends the practice of determining measure 
length, and by extension song tempo, using absolute time as a determinant, citing perceptual 
studies that have shown a two-second timespan to be the ideal duration for experiential 
measures in subjects listening to popular songs. While de Clercq’s findings are compelling, two 
factors led me to part from them in my approach. First, his chosen repertoire is pop and rock 
music. In general, these styles contain much more variance in phrase length of vocal lines, 
harmonic rhythm of accompaniment, and rhythmic variation of drum patterns than is found 
in hip-hop music. Second, the perceptual studies de Clercq cites mainly focus on tapping 
experiments. I posit that a more reliable indicator of tempo and measure perception would 
include a more embodied response to the aural stimuli, such as dancing. While I know of no 
studies that do this with respect to hip-hop music, I hypothesize that the results would show a 
more faithful correspondence to backbeat patterns as determinants of tempo and measure. 
13 Duinker (2021) unpacks rhyme structure in hip-hop flow in detail, relating it to phrase length 
and ultimately metric structure in hip-hop music. Central to this discussion is the assumption 
that rhymes typically occur at the end of measures and function as phrase-ending devices. 
14 See Berry 2018, 3. Duinker (2021) describes the variance in loop length in hip-hop beats, 
providing examples of 2-, 4-, and 8-measure beat loops. 
15 I use the term “allegedly” here because I can locate no concrete support for this claim beyond 
what has been written on online blogs and genius.com, a user-annotated lyrics site. It is clear, 
however, from listening to Shanté’s original recording of “Roxanne’s Revenge,” that an element 
of spontaneity obtains, notably through her abnormal and often unpredictable breathing 
patterns. This observation lends support to the claim that “Roxanne’s Revenge” was recorded 
in a single take, with no prior planning on breathing points. 
16 In an interview with the website Complex (Cho 2011), DJ Premier, the producer of “NY State 
of Mind,” describes how Nas wrote his lyrics for the song in-studio and recorded them in a 



 

 
 

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single take, without having worked out his flow rhythms aloud prior to recording. Premier 
notes especially Nas’s utterance at the beginning of the track “I don’t know how to start this 
shit” as evidence of the spontaneity in this recording session. 
17 I interpret this song as containing two hooks by virtue of the length of repeated lyrics 
comprising the double-hook section (longer than is typical in hip-hop music), and the textural 
shift that occurs partway through these lyrics (which to my ear denotes a sectional break). 
18 Many of Public Enemy’s hook lyrics fit this description, notably “Bring the Noise” (It Takes 
a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 1988), and “Fight the Power” (Fear of a Black Planet, 
1990). 
19 Current and recently active MCs such as Drake, Young Thug, Mac Miller, and Chance the 
Rapper have extensively used singing (usually autotuned) in verses. 
20 Berry (2018) and Edwards (2009) use the terms hook and chorus interchangeably, while most 
other authors use one term or the other with no explanation. 
21 These repeated lyrics are quite often repeated iterations of a refrain that concluded the 
previous verse. In contrast to Temperley’s approach for rock music (2018, 153–154), I allow 
for refrain lyrics to be part of the verse or hook, depending on context. 
22 Examples abound in hip-hop music where the sections interspersing verses (be they hook or 
instrumental sections) are less texturally dense than the verses. Several recent examples include 
“Norf Norf” (Vince Staples, 2015), “Morris” (King Mez, 2014), “Talk About It” (Dr. Dre ft. 
King Mez, 2015), and “Panda” (Desiigner, 2016). 
23 By “melodic and harmonic differentiation,” I mean the following. First, the harmonic 
content of a hip-hop beat changes between verse and hook very rarely. Second, since hip-hop 
verses do not normally contain singing, there is scant potential for the melodic profiles of 
verses and hooks to be compared; the only observation that can be made in this regard is often 
the presence or absence of singing. It should be noted, however, that very recent hip-hop music 
is bucking both of these trends: the harmonic language of beats is becoming more sophisticated 
and more verses involve singing. 
24 Though not referring explicitly to instrumental sections as defined here, Sewell’s use of the 
terms “introduction” and “interlude” raise a different question regarding instrumental 
sections; where in the song’s chronology they typically occur. Instrumental sections as I have 
defined them here are free of any chronological information. I do not classify hip-hop song 
sections with regards to their ordering, mainly because the notion of a cohesive, autonomous 
song, with a distinct and predictable teleology, is antithetical to the geneses of hip-hop music, 
and only plays a marginal role even in recent, commercial hip-hop music. As a consequence, I 
define instrumental sections through their lack of performed vocals (by MCs appearing on the 
track) and/or vocal samples that appreciably contribute to the song’s lyrical or narrative 
structure. 
25 The main sample in this instrumental section comes from “Get Up Offa That Thing” (James 
Brown, 1976). 



 

 
 

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26 “Hype” vocals refer to the vocals that appear in a song’s intro or outro sections, which are 
usually more ad-lib sounding, ametric, and usually set up the content of the song or introduce 
(occasionally self-introduce) the MC or MCs who will rap the verses and/or hooks. This 
practice of hyping can be traced back to The Kidd Creole, member of Grandmaster Flash and 
the Furious Five (see Jay Quan, 2002). 
27 Patrin (2020, 33) notes that by the early 1980s, the focus in live hip-hop performance had 
squarely shifted to the MC. 
28 Rapped/sung song sections that evade description as verses or hooks are comparatively rare, 
but have become more common of late. Many of these sections function somewhat similar to 
bridges in popular music, in that they provide contrast to the verses and hooks. Ensign (2015, 
29–30) provides a summary of prevailing definitions of bridge sections, all of which invoke a 
sense of contrast from verses and choruses. 
29 Though Krims (2000) does not mention “Push It” in his discussion on party rap (one of his 
four rap genres), the musical and lyrical attributes of this song place it squarely in that genre. 
Indeed, the video released for “Push It” confirms its function as a party-oriented song. 
30 Ensign (2015) uses the term “AAA strophic form.” I prefer “strophic form” over both this 
and “simple verse form” because the latter implies, to me, a static conception of verse, and the 
former implies a specific quantity of verses present (hardly a consistent statistic in hip-hop 
music). 
31 I interpret all the rapping in this song as verse-like, and not hook-like, though the lyric 
annotate website Genius.com provides a formal annotation of the song that includes hook 
sections (which the site calls choruses). In general, the formal annotations (and indeed also the 
lyric annotations) on Genius.com should be scrutinized, as it is an open-source website with 
user-generated data. That said, it is an invaluable starting point for any analytical study of hip-
hop music. 
32 Pullum (2019) writes that “in the early days of hip-hop, it was used when a group of rappers, 
typically standing in a circle, would take turns exchanging verses for competition, practice or 
sheer entertainment.” 
33 See Peterson (2014, 83–85). 
34 “Flava In Ya Ear” and “Fuckin’ Problems” are not strophic songs, however. 
35 Although this initial hook section is short, the memorability of these lyrics causes imbue it 
with more hook-like than framing/introductory qualities. 
36 Despite the repeated, rhythmicized lyrics, this section does not function as a hook; it is not 
only less memorable than the hook sections in this song, it also occurs over the stripped-down 
beat texture common to the song’s verses. It thus functions as a bridge between the second 
verse and the final hook. 
37 I know of no empirical data that supports this claim, and examples of chorus-initiating songs 
certainly exist (especially in recent mainstream pop music), but Covach’s “verse-chorus pair” 
(2004) and Temperley’s “verse-chorus unit” (2018) implicitly suggest a verse-chorus ordering, 



 

 
 

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rather than the inverse. Temperley’s chart documenting sectional chorus features (2018, 160) 
suggests that they typically follow verses. 
38 I recognize the irony in my using the term “verse-hook form” for this paradigm while 
simultaneously jettisoning the term “verse-hook unit” because of the ordered relationship it 
implies. Any alternatives I could think of were just as problematic. “Hook-verse form” would 
imply directionality as well. Similarly, “hook form” misses the mark because some strophic and 
long-verse songs contain hooks as well, but not in the paired relationship with verses as found 
in verse-hook songs. Bungert (2019) notes the ambivalence of formal ordering that can occur 
in hip-hop music in his analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta” (2015). 
39 Naturally, there are exceptions to my position here. Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” (2002) 
provides a good example of how energy can be built and accumulated through the course of a 
verse, reaching a local climax and dissipating in the hook section. In the case of “Lose Yourself,” 
that energy is inherent in the song’s lyrics; the narrative arc traced by these lyrics arguably 
requires the type of energy build that both Eminem’s vocal performance and Dr. Dre’s beat 
production give to the song. 
40 See Duinker (2021) for a detailed analysis of the complexity of Biggie’s flow performance in 
“Hypnotize.” 
41 These toasts are distinct from the Jamaican sound-system cultural tradition of toasting, 
which involved deejays chanting over tracks played on large portable “sound systems”—large 
speaker arrays set up outdoors, usually on the back of a vehicle. While African American toasts 
draw parallels with long-verse hip-hop songs, Jamaican toasting has a more direct influence on 
the very practice of rapping itself. 
42 In the toast “Shine and the sinking of the Titanic,” the protagonist uses his position below 
deck to learn quickly of the Titanic’s impending sinking and thus enables himself to escape. In 
the “Signifyin’ Monkey,” the monkey-trickster figure is able to dupe both the lion and the 
elephant, tricking them into fighting each other rather than going after him (in some versions 
of this toast, the Monkey’s trickery catches up with it). 
43 Both men have been described as “The Godfather of Rap”: see O’Hagan (2012) and Baker 
(2002). 
44 Alim’s discussion of narrative sequencing (2006, 93–101) draws parallels between Slick 
Rick’s highly narrative rapping style and toasting. Rickford and Rickford (2000) and 
Smitherman (1977) also connect the toast to vocal delivery in hip-hop music. 
45 In Complex's summary of every rap single to top the Billboard Hot 100, the authors (Turner 
et al., 2018) suggest a shift occurred in what type of rap songs were charting following the 
success of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” (1995). After this point, singles by The Notorious 
B.I.G., Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Puff Daddy, Tupac Shakur, and Dr. Dre began topping the 
charts. 
46 Thompson’s own reflection on first hearing “Rapper’s Delight” cogently sums up the song’s 
impact: “Within a week [following its release] everyone had heard ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ and the 
world was different forever” (2013, 24). 



 

 
 

126 

 
47 By featuring rapping over an interpolated R&B/disco song, “Rapper’s Delight” participated 
in the ongoing trend of repurposing breakbeats and other musical elements from the R&B, 
disco, and funk genres. 
48 Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, the main songwriters in Chic, were eventually credited 
as songwriters on “Rapper’s Delight” (Patrin, 2020). “Rapper’s Delight” preserves the highly 
repetitive beat from “Good Times,” recorded by session musicians hired by producer Sylvia 
Robinson. 
49 This formal summary holds true for all released versions of “Rapper’s Delight”: the single, 
the album version, the long single version, and the two 12” versions (short and long). While 
the quantity and length of verse and instrumental sections changes across these releases, no 
hook sections appear in any version. 
50 I understand the term “old-school” to account for all hip-hop music released before 1986. 
Bradley and DuBois (2010) define the old-school period as 1978–1984, while Perry (2004, 58) 
points out that the term “old school” as referencing this period of time was already in use in 
rap lyrics as early as 1988. 
51 “Rapper’s Delight” was released as a single in two different lengths, as a 12” in two different 
lengths, and on the Sugarhill Gang’s self-titled debut album in 1980. 
52 Rose writes that “taken together, the video and lyrics for ‘Ladies First’ are a statement for 
black female unity, independence, and power” (1994, 164–165). Roberts (1994) cites “Ladies 
First” as evidence supporting Rose’s claims that “women rappers are vocal and respected 
members of the hip-hop community” (1991, 109). 
53 In the music video, the imagery also contrasts sharply between verses and hooks. 
54 The singing in the hook sections of “Slow Down” is mostly sampled from the song “What I 
Am” (Edie Brickell and New Bohemians, 1988). 
55 Krims reflects on the tension between hardcore lyrical subjects, which evoke affiliations of 
tough, urban masculinity and authenticity, with the perceived softness of R&B influences in 
1990s don rap, giving the example of the parodically used female-sung hook in Ice Cube’s 
“Giving Up the Nappy dugout” (1991). See Krims 2000, 85–86. 
56 Evans had already released her self-titled debut album in 1995, but her subsequent three 
albums (Keep the Faith, 1998; Faithfully, 2001; and the First Lady, 2005) all surpassed her 
original album in chart performance, and “Missing You” remains by far her most successful 
single. 
57 See for example “Dead and Gone” (T.I. ft. Justin Timberlake, 2008), “Empire State of Mind” 
(Jay-Z ft. Alicia Keys, 2009), “Love the Way You Lie” (Eminem ft. Rihanna, 2010), and “All of 
the Lights” (Kanye West ft. Rihanna et al., 2010). The reverse setup, where MCs provide a guest 
verse on a pop song also prevails in recent years: notable examples include “Crazy in Love” 
(Beyonce ft. Jay-Z, 2003) “American Boy” (Estelle ft. Kanye West, 2008), “Baby” (Justin Bieber 
ft. Ludacris, 2010), and “Bon Appetit” (Katy Perry ft. Migos, 2017). 
58 Rihanna and Jay-Z have a particularly interesting relationship in that Jay-Z was instrumental 
in launching Rihanna’s career (well documented by Seabrook 2015) while Rihanna was pivotal 
in developing Jay-Z’s commercial and critical accolades. Rihanna is not the only pop artist who 



 

 
 

127 

 
rose to fame with the help of the hip-hop genre: the then relatively unknown Bruno Mars 
gained widespread exposure early in his career for his hook performance on “Nothing on You” 
(BoB, 2010). 
59 In developing a corpus from pre-formed song lists, I encountered an imbalance of songs per 
year. This factor should be taken into account when interpreting Example 10. 
60 Léveillé Gauvin predicted that, over time: song titles would become short, song tempi would 
increase, the time before first vocal entry in songs would become shorter, and the title lyrics 
would be referenced sooner. 
61 Léveillé Gauvin cites Lamere’s study (2014) that reveals the extent to which listeners use the 
skip button in Spotify: only 51% percent of listens involved songs played in their entirety. 
62 This assumption is accurate; only 15 of the 122 corpus songs identified as verse-hook do not 
feature the title lyrics in their hook sections. 
63 To be sure, terms like instrumental, verse, and chorus are sufficiently general that they can be 
used for most any pop genre, but careful consideration of their defining features in each genre 
is warranted in order to understand how they function in different generic contexts. 
64 See Brackett 1994, 777. 
65 Sparser textures in hook sections can also be found in “Blessings” (Big Sean ft. Kanye West 
and Drake, 2015) and “Blue Suede” (Vince Staples, 2014). 

 
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Appendix 

Year Artist Title 
Formal 
Paradigm 

1979 Sugarhill Gang “Rapper’s Delight” S (strophic) 
1980 Funky 4 + 1 “That’s the Joint” S 
1980 Kurtis Blow “The Breaks” other 
1981 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 

Five 
“The Adventures of 
Grandmaster Flash on the 
Wheels of Steel” 

other 

1982 Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic 
Force 

“Planet Rock” other 

1982 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 
Five 

“The Message” VH (verse-hook) 

1983 Grandmaster and Melle Mel “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” other 
1983 Rammellzee and K-Rob “Beat Bop” S 



 

 
 

131 

 
(Year) (Artist) (Title) (Paradigm) 
1983 Run-DMC “Sucker MCs” S 
1984 Roxanne Shanté “Roxanne’s Revenge” LV (long verse) 
1984 U.T.F.O. “Roxanne, Roxanne” VH 
1985 Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick “La-Di-Da-Di” LV 
1985 Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew “The Show” S 
1985 LL Cool J “Rock the Bells” S 
1985 Run-DMC “King of Rock” S 
1985 Schoolly D “P.S.K. What Does It 

Mean?” 
VH 

1986 Beastie Boys “Hold It, Now Hit It” VH 
1986 Beastie Boys “Paul Revere” S 
1986 MC Shan “The Bridge” VH 
1986 Run-DMC “Peter Piper” S 
1987 Boogie Down Productions “South Bronx” VH 
1987 Eric B. & Rakim “I Know You Got Soul” S 
1987 Eric B. & Rakim “Paid in Full” LV 
1987 Ice-T “6 ’n the Mornin’” S 
1987 Salt-N-Pepa “Push It” other 
1987 Too $hort “Freaky Tales” VH 
1988 Audio Two “Top Billin’” VH 
1988 Big Daddy Kane “Ain't No Half-Steppin’” VH 
1988 EPMD “Strictly Business” S 
1988 L’Trimm “Cars With the Boom” VH 
1988 Marley Marl et al. “The Symphony” S 
1988 N.W.A. “Fuck tha Police” VH 
1988 N.W.A. “Straight Outta Compton” S 
1988 Public Enemy “Bring the Noise” VH 
1988 Public Enemy “Rebel Without a Pause” other 
1988 Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock “It Takes Two” VH 
1988 Slick Rick “Children’s Story” LV 
1988 Ultramagnetic MCs “Ego Trippin’” S 
1989 Biz Markie “Just a Friend” VH 
1989 De La Soul “Me Myself and I” VH 
1990 A Tribe Called Quest “Can I Kick It?” VH 
1990 Brand Nubian “Slow Down” VH 
1990 Digital Underground “The Humpty Dance” VH 
1990 LL Cool J “Mama Said Knock You 

Out” 
VH 

1990 Public Enemy “Fight the Power” VH 



 

 
 

132 

 
(Year) (Artist) (Title) (Paradigm) 
1991 A Tribe Called Quest ft. Leaders of the 

New School 
“Scenario” S 

1991 Black Sheep “The Choice Is Yours 
(Revisited)” 

VH 

1991 Cypress Hill “How I Could Just Kill a 
Man” 

VH 

1991 Geto Boys “Mind Playing Tricks on 
Me” 

S 

1991 Naughty by Nature “O.P.P.” VH 
1992 Dr. Dre ft. Snoop Dogg “Deep Cover” VH 
1992 Dr. Dre ft. Snoop Dogg “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” VH 
1992 Ice Cube “It Was a Good Day” S 
1992 Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth “They Reminisce Over You 

(T.R.O.Y.)” 
S 

1992 Sir Mix-A-Lot “Baby Got Back” S 
1992 The Pharcyde “Passin’ Me By” VH 
1993 Snoop Dogg “Gin and Juice” VH 
1993 Souls of Mischief “93 ‘til Infinity” VH 
1993 Wu-Tang Clan “Protect Ya Neck” S 
1993 Wu-Tang Clan “C.R.E.A.M.” VH 
1994 Craig Mack et al. “Flava in Ya Ear (Remix)” VH 
1994 Gang Starr “Mass Appeal” S 
1994 Nas “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” S 
1994 Nas “N.Y. State of Mind” S 
1994 The Notorious B.I.G. “Big Poppa” VH 
1994 The Notorious B.I.G. “Juicy” VH 
1995 Mobb Deep “Shook Ones (Part II)” VH 
1995 Ol' Dirty Bastard “Brooklyn Zoo” LV 
1995 Raekwon ft. Ghostface Killah, Method 

Man, and Cappadonna 
“Ice Cream” VH 

1995 Tupac Shakur “Dear Mama” VH 
1995 Tupac Shakur ft. Dr. Dre and Roger 

Troutman 
“California Love” VH 

1996 Bone Thugs-N-Harmony “Tha Crossroads” VH 
1997 Missy Elliott “The Rain (Supa Dupa 

Fly)” 
VH 

1997 The Notorious B.I.G. “Hypnotize” VH 
1998 Jermaine Dupri ft. Jay-Z “Money Ain’t a Thang” VH 
1998 Lauryn Hill “Lost Ones” VH 
1998 Outkast “Rosa Parks” VH 
1999 B.G. ft. Big Tymers and Hot Boys “Bling Bling” VH 
1999 Eminem “My Name Is” VH 



 

 
 

133 

 
(Year) (Artist) (Title) (Paradigm) 
1999 Jay-Z ft. UGK “Big Pimpin’” VH 
2000 Dead Prez “Hip-Hop” VH 
2000 Eminem ft. Dido “Stan” VH 
2000 M.O.P. “Ante Up (Robbing-Hoodz 

Theory)” 
VH 

2000 Outkast “Ms. Jackson” VH 
2000 Outkast “B.O.B.” VH 
2001 Missy Elliott “Get Ur Freak On” VH 
2002 Clipse “Grindin’” VH 
2002 Eminem “Lose Yourself” VH 
2002 Jay-Z ft. Pharrell “Excuse Me Miss” VH 
2002 Lil’ Jon and the East Side Boyz “Get Low” VH 
2002 Missy Elliott “Work It” VH 
2002 Snoop Dogg ft. Pharrell Williams “Beautiful” VH 
2003 50 Cent “In Da Club” VH 
2003 Black Eyed Peas “Hey Mama” VH 
2003 Black Eyed Peas “Let’s Get it Started” VH 
2003 Jay-Z “99 Problems” VH 
2004 Kanye West “Jesus Walks” VH 
2004 Snoop Dogg ft. Pharrell Williams “Drop it Like It’s Hot” VH 
2005 50 Cent “Candy Shop” VH 
2005 Black Eyed Peas “Don't Phunk With My 

Heart” 
VH 

2005 Chamillionaire ft. Krayzie Bone “Ridin’” VH 
2005 Kanye West ft. Jay-Z “Diamonds from Sierra 

Leone” 
VH 

2005 Missy Elliott ft. Ciara and Fatman 
Scoop 

“Lose Control” VH 

2005 The Game ft. 50 Cent “Hate It Or Love It” VH 
2006 Ludacris ft. Pharrell Williams “Money Maker” VH 
2006 Lupe Fiasco “Kick, Push” VH 
2006 T.I. “What You Know” VH 
2006 Yung Joc “It’s Goin’ Down” VH 
2007 50 Cent “Ayo Technology” VH 
2007 Kanye West “Can' Tell Me Nothing” VH 
2007 Kanye West ft. T-Pain “Good Life” VH 
2007 Lupe Fiasco “Superstar” VH 
2007 Souljia Boy “Crank That” VH 
2007 T.I. “Big Things Poppin’” VH 
2008 Flo Rida “Low” VH 
2008 Lil' Wayne “Lollipop” VH 



 

 
 

134 

 
(Year) (Artist) (Title) (Paradigm) 
2008 Snoop Dogg “Sexual Eruption” VH 
2008 T.I. ft. Justin Timberlake “Dead and Gone” VH 
2008 T.I., Jay-Z, Lil’ Wayne, and Kanye 

West 
“Swagga Like Us” VH 

2009 Drake “Best I Ever Had” VH 
2009 Jay-Z ft. Rihanna and Kanye West “Run This Town” VH 
2009 Jay-Z “D.O.A. (Death of 

Autotune)” 
VH 

2009 Jay-Z “On to the Next One” VH 
2009 Jay-Z ft. Alicia Keys “Empire State of Mind” VH 
2009 Kid Cudi “Day ‘n’ Nite” VH 
2010 B.o.B. ft. Bruno Mars “Nothin’ On You” VH 
2010 Eminem “Not Afraid” VH 
2010 Eminem ft. Rihanna “Love the Way You Lie” VH 
2010 Kanye West, Rihanna, Kid Cudi and 

Fergie 
“All of the Lights” VH 

2011 Chris Brown ft. Busta Rhymes and Lil’ 
Wayne 

“Look at Me Now” VH 

2011 Dr Dre ft. Eminem and Skylar Grey “I Need a Doctor” VH 
2011 Drake “The Motto” VH 
2011 Jay-Z and Kanye West “Otis” S 
2011 Jay-Z and Kanye West “Niggas in Paris” VH 
2011 Lupe Fiasco “The Show Goes On” VH 
2011 Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa “Young Wild and Free” VH 
2011 Wale “Lotus Flower Bomb” VH 
2011 Wiz Khalifa “Black and Yellow” VH 
2012 Kanye West ft. Big Sean, Pusha T, and 

2 Chainz 
“Mercy” VH 

2012 Macklemore and Ryan Lewis “Thrift Shop” VH 
2012 Nas “Daughters” VH 
2013 A$AP Rocky ft. 2 Chainz, Drake, and 

Kendrick Lamar 
“Fuckin’ Problems” VH 

2013 Drake “Started From the Bottom” VH 
2013 Jay-Z “Holy Grail” VH 
2013 Kanye West “New Slaves” other 
2013 Kanye West “Bound 2” VH 
2014 Common and John Legend “Glory” VH 
2014 Drake “0 to 100” LV 
2014 Nicki Minaj “Anaconda” VH 
2014 Wiz Khalifa “We Dem Boyz” VH 
2015 Drake “Energy” VH 



 

 
 

135 

 
(Year) (Artist) (Title) (Paradigm) 
2015 Fetty Wap “Trap Queen” VH 
2015 Kanye West “All Day” VH 
2015 Kendrick Lamar “I (album version)” VH 
2015 Kendrick Lamar “Alright” VH 
2016 Chance the Rapper ft. Lil’ Wayne and 

2 Chainz 
“No Problem” VH 

2016 Drake “Hotline Bling” VH 
2016 Kanye West “Ultralight Beam” VH 
2016 Kanye West ft. Rihanna “Famous” VH 
2017 Fat Joe and Remi Ma “All the Way Up” VH