Rahman Jamaal teaches freestyle rap, drawing on his experience in the film The Beat and his own learning process. He leads the audience through a 45-minute call-and-response exercise, exploring how timing and conceptual thinking shape improvisation.
Chapters
It's amazing because if you ever get a chance to see The Beat, there are clips on it on YouTube, and you can buy it for real cheap on Amazon. But the movie itself was pretty— had an interesting premise because it was all about the choices that you make in life. The character that I play basically was this young kid who was coming up in a rap group with his older brother, and he looked up to his brother as his mentor and guide, and his brother gets killed at the beginning of the film. And he's sort of left to decide, well, what do I do now? Do I keep going on my own without my mentor to be by my side, or do I kind of just give up on that and try to get a stable job as a police officer, ironically? And the film itself is kind of one of those split narratives. You see both paths that his life could have taken based off of his choice. And for me, going through that process of playing this character, And then having the film get accepted to Sundance in 2003, which was a big, big deal at the time. We were the youngest people to ever have a feature film accepted to the Sundance Film Festival that year. And kind of like step into this Hollywood world, this big aspiration that any kid, any rapper, anybody would just want to be, and kind of be this celebrity for you know, a short time, and then be faced with a choice that I knew was going to affect the direction of my life. Like, I went through in my real life the moment that my character went through in the movie, and I had to make a decision. Am I going to go for the fame and go for the money after I was just in this film talking about the authenticity of hip-hop and staying true to your roots and all this stuff. And it felt like I would be a hypocrite if I allowed myself to get pulled in that direction, because the truth is entertainment is a business, and artists in entertainment oftentimes become the products to make money for somebody else, and they don't have control of their own creative process. And I knew for myself that was the most important thing. So the choice I made was not to get lured into that. I finished school. And moved back up to the Bay Area, and somehow, not by my intention, but fell into— I was given an opportunity to write a curriculum for rap and get paid for it. I thought, okay, this is a really interesting challenge. I, at the time, at the time, I actually, I was really good as a writer, because I wrote that piece, you heard that, but actually the truth was, is I couldn't freestyle. I was more a perfectionist with my language. A funny thing happened when the film played at Sundance. People saw the character that I played freestyling, because in that movie, that piece I just did for you was a freestyle in the film. And they automatically assumed— they came up to me and they were like, yo, you are the best freestyler I've ever heard in my life. And I'm like, oh, well, thank you. But I'm like, OK, am I now in a position where people are going to think that expect me to be able to freestyle as well as this character that I played, if I don't have these skills, I'm going to be a big disappointment, not only to people who expect me to be able to do it, but also to myself. Like, you know, that's just like a rough thing to just be like, oh man, and not feel confident in doing that. So when I got this opportunity to write this curriculum, I went to a close friend of mine who freestyling was extremely natural for him. It's just like his second language. And I said, yo, is there a way that we could teach this, that you could teach this? I'll be your first student. I'll just, you know, open up my mind and try whatever I got to do to get this skill because this is something that I'm determined to learn how to do. And in this process, we were able to come up with a formula. Didn't happen right away. It was a lot of trial and error. But now I've been teaching this method for over 10 years, and it works wherever I go. It's my third time here, so it had to have worked at least twice for me to come back, right? So I'm going to take you through this process. And before we do, I kind of want to prepare our minds for this, because freestyling is something that can be really intimidating. You know, you're— and for me, and for a lot of people, when you're learning how to do this, the biggest obstacle you have to overcome is just allowing yourself to try something new. Okay? But I'm gonna break it down so it's gonna be very easy steps for you to do. Everyone can do— can everyone count to 4? Yes. Okay, everyone can freestyle if you can count to 4. I'm gonna just say that. So I'm just gonna ask you to trust me as we do a little call and answer type of thing. Say these things to yourself. You can learn a lot by listening. You'll learn faster by doing. Okay? And we're gonna do it as a group too, so no one's gonna be put on the spot. Yeah. All right, so real quick though, so we were talking about the future and 2017. Who can tell me what the 4th dimension is? Well, first off, we're on this shift, right, from past to future. We kind of live and learn in the 3rd dimension. What is the 3rd dimension? Time. Like space. Exactly, the space around us. When we're born, we have to learn about where is this place that we were born into, okay? And most of us have been educated solely in that realm, to learn about the things, about how to use the things around us. So then what would the 4th dimension be? If the 3rd dimension is space, 4th dimension is time. Very good. So this one is, is, is a little trickier, but, but also something that people who use it, people who understand how the 4th dimension of time works, are usually your most successful people. Because it's one thing to have an idea and another thing to be able to express that idea in space in the right way so that the space around you will start to resonate. At that idea, at that frequency. So the question then becomes, how do we move through the 4th dimension? It's different from moving through space. And how do we master the 4th dimension, moving through that? So if time— if we know that time is the 4th dimension, what would be the verb? How do you turn time into a verb? Time. Is time a verb? Can it be a verb? To time? To time something? It can be. It can be, right? So let's think of timing— let's think of time in terms of the verb, to time, or timing. So like I said, one of the things is it starts internal, but then it has to be expressed externally. So, and you guys have probably seen this before, this is just kind of like how to get things done. First off, start with an intention. My intention for this time that I have with you guys is for all of you to experience what it's like to freestyle and get something out of that. Maybe try something new that you haven't done before or learn something new that you didn't know before this— we get into this. My goal would be for everybody to experience that. And we got 45 minutes to do that. And now it's time to get to work. So.
