M2M Day 322: A tour of my apartment via freestyle rap
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For September, my goal is to continuously freestyle rap for three minutes.
Over the past week, I’ve almost exclusively practiced freestyling with the help of a random word generator.
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).
However, since my freestyles have been structured around lists of random words, their narrative arcs have been less than inspiring. In particular, I haven’t at all practiced carrying a story or punchlines through from one couplet/stanza to the next.
I’ve been purely focused on the art of rhyme, and not on the art of storytelling.
From an interest perspective, I’m more fascinated by rhymes versus stories (as I mentioned on Day 3 of the month), but I also don’t think I should completely neglect the fact that freestyle rapping is a wonderful means of storytelling and creative expression.
So today, I untethered myself from the random word generator, and practiced freestyling more cohesive raps.
In particular, I turned on a long instrumental, and then just walked through my apartment, effectively freestyling a tour of each room. In this format, I not only needed to successfully land rhymes, but I also need to select what I wanted to rhyme about (which isn’t something I’ve had to do while using random words).
This was a very fun exercise that forced my brain to operate in new territory — not only in the context of freestyling, but I also observed things about my apartment that I’ve never consciously noticed before.
It’s interesting how interpreting the world in a new way (i.e. through freestyle rapping) actually helped me experience my world in a new way.
I guess that’s the whole point of learning new skills in the first place…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.