The one thing Rakim will always regret about his rap career: “My process”
Rakim, through his use of internal rhyme and careful approach to songwriting, helped to transform the very nature of rap. But even though he was such a pivotal figure, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have regrets about his approach.
During the earlier days of rapping, the ability to improvise was a key skill. But with the rise of Rakim, another approach came to be more widely appreciated. Rakim didn’t rely on freestyling, but, rather, would sit down and write out his verses with care and deliberation. This allowed him to come up with the more intricate, literary rhymes for which he would become famous.
Rakim was a thoughtful rapper, and his approach was, broadly speaking, unusual for the time. He cared a lot about making his rhymes as good as they could be, and that took patience. He didn’t try to force it.
“I guess it’s my process,” he said during an appearance on What’s Good With Stretch & Bobbito in 2018. “Sometimes I would write rhymes and there’s a certain part of the rhyme that I would want to make a little better. I would leave it there ’til I can enhance whatever part or whatever bar that I wanted to.”
For a craft that relied so much on spontaneity, Rakim’s more deliberate, patient approach to rap marked him as different. He understood that not all good things come easily. Sometimes he just needed to wait it out until the right idea came.
“You write a rhyme, then you read it back, you be like, that part right there could’ve been a little better,” he reflected. “So you wait ’til the right feel come along, and when it’s time you can pop off. But until then, I hate rushing because I know what it would sound like if I had a little more time.”
This isn’t necessarily an easy skill to master, and it requires a healthy sense of self-assurance. “You got to get to a point where you’re confident in your work,” he noted. “Sometimes we got to remember that first instinct.”
But despite Rakim’s talent for writing rhymes, he admitted that he did hold some musical regrets. Sometimes even he would work too fast, which, in his mind, meant that his songs weren’t always as good as they could have been.
“I’m my worst critic, man,” he said. “There’s plenty of my songs that I wish I could have had more time with. One of the things that I always hated is that I wrote my rhymes in the studio. And I would read them from the book straight to the recording.”
By reciting his freshly written words directly from the page, rather than properly learning them off by heart, Rakim’s delivery in the studio wasn’t always as natural as it might otherwise have been. He thinks he should have taken more time.
“When I look back,” he said, “I would’ve memorised my song a little bit better so that I could say it with a little more feeling… I regret that to this day, man.”