Queens rapper Grafh freestyles on Bars On I-95. However, now, I'm not sure if this assessment was totally true: For the past week, I haven't practiced freestyling much tethered to a word list, and returning to it today (first, in the morning with , and then later with ), I found it to be more challenging than I remember.
Ironically, I use this set of rhymes as a flow maintainer, giving me time to think about where I want to take the freestyle. However, while I was freestyling today, I found my first bridge between two of these pockets, tasting #4 for Bars on I 95 the first time. In fact, in the past week or so, my brain became conditioned to search for rhymes almost all of the time, so there was definitely some casual practice” going on as well that wasn't counted as part of the eleven hours.



Tonight, I had a group of friends over to hang out, and eventually the conversation found its way to freestyle rapping. This is a fairly extreme example, but, the more and more I practice freestyling, the more I realize that basically any two words can rhyme with the right pronunciation.
It's the last day of September, which means it's time to look back and see just how much time I spent on this month's challenge. Basically, my taste is aggressively skewed towards rhyme complexity, wordplay, and sonic performance, which means I much prefer to develop my rhyme-driven freestyling abilities this month.

Plagued by only a few weak joints (the uninspired "We Ridin'" and a few so-so freestyles), "The Oracle Mixtape" is a perfect introduction of Grafh to those still unaware, as well as a tight new addition for his ever-growing following. Yesterday , I described the two styles of freestyle rapping: The punchline-driven approach and the rhyme-driven approach.
In other words, my goal this month is to close my Taste Gap”. Thus, especially at the beginning of the month, I plan to spend a significant amount of time writing rhymes, instead of freestyling them. The challenge of this style of freestyling is quickly crafting the perfect punchline while simultaneously rapping the setup.
Instead, this type of freestyle packs its punch sonically, built from a stack of complex rhymes. In other words, for a punchline to land hard, it needs to be thought of first, but rapped second, rhyming with the set-up that was thought of second, but rapped first.

Typically, to effectively deliver a punchline, the desired punchline (and specifically, the last word of punchline) is determined, then a rhyme for that last word is selected and used in the set-up. As a result, I've been exposed to a much wider range of words, allowing me to find broader patterns in the English language that I can exploit during my freestyles ( like this one ).
3. Finally, start rapping, incorporating each of the five words into the freestyle. While there are likely exceptions, the best freestyle rappers are usually prolific writers of rhymes. In particular, I picked a high-tempo beat (well, actually, it's fairly slow, but I rap it double time) and used my own site, , as the source of random words.

Grafh‘s been relatively quiet in the past few months but that's because he's been locking in. The rapper came through with Blow” ft Benny The Butcher at the top of the year and now, he returns with a little freestyle over an underrated Jay-Z track.Grafh tackles the It's Like That” instrumental on his latest freestyle.