Lucas Joseph Joseph 1

Professor Riordan

WRIT 2

23 April 2023

PERM: 4395034

Break Dance Not Bones!

The premise of writing lyrics to a rap song about breakdancing was a perfect way

for me to combine a number of my interests to make a unique and creative writing

project. I was lucky enough to find an article titled “Breakdance Injuries and Overuse

Syndromes in Amateurs and Professionals” which was published in the American

Journal of Sports Medicine with the purpose of filling in a gap of medical knowledge

regarding those injuries in breakdancers. The article had a clear intended audience of

academics in the field of orthopedics, so targeting an audience of old school rap fans

and breakers made the writing process very engaging. It took me a while to find the

idea, but I was sure I could create a compelling piece through my love for hip-hop

culture, skills in creative writing, and interestingly, a number of constraints. The idea of

making some sort of rap song felt very natural for mainly two reasons: First, because I

like to think I’m better than the average person at writing rhymes, and second, I figured

that the obvious overlaps between these two pillars of hip-hop would allow me to clearly

signal genre to my readers through personal knowledge and language used. Along with

these advantages, my passion for breaking encouraged me to take much diligence in

this project, as if I had a unique opportunity to share this passion with others.

My rap verse follows the narrative of someone going to a breaking competition

and handing out surveys to competitors to answer questions about their injuries,

mimicking an introduction and methods section in an academic article. The verse then
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reflects the results and discussion sections and makes references to their findings. The

original article did have some charts which gave in depth breakdowns of injuries by

different variables, but I stuck to only referencing what I saw as the key takeaways in

the article for brevity. One piece of feedback suggested that I include more numbers

and data from the research, and so I made an effort to creatively weave in the paper’s

findings within my verse.

Though this kind of writing is naturally incredibly different from most of the

academic writing I’ve done in school, it was surprising to look at writing rap verses

through the lens of content that we covered so far in this course. For example, in Mike

Bunn’s “How to Read Like A Writer”, the author asks students to carefully consider why

certain choices were made by an author to better understand the writing process(Bunn

72). With each line that I wrote, there were infinite different paths that I as the author

could have taken and it was up to me to choose the most appropriate one. Similar to

how the article mentions an author having to consider factors like convention of the

genre and choosing to reveal or hide details from the audience, I would have to balance

including important points from my original article to convey the same information while

maintaining a musical and rhythmic structure. The choice of using “per dancer” or “on

average” versus terms like “mean” or “capita” to describe frequency of injury in dancers

was carefully made to rhyme and have only a certain number of syllables, all while not

compromising the careful choices made by the original author.

This project also made me revisit content from Janet Boyd’s

“Murder!(Rhetorically Speaking)”, specifically the mention of jargon, which she

describes as the collection of words used within different groups and social settings.
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Boyd writes that one of the main purposes of jargon is to allow for precise

communication among a group(Boyd 89). As I translated the original article into rap,

words like “impingement syndrome” and “chronic skin lumps”, were replaced by rhymes

describing “gold medals all paid by joints that dislocate and heads that get scratched up,

scuffed and bruised”. While the former words have clear meanings within the original

text that allow medical practitioners to clearly understand each other, the genre of rap is

at its best when these words are replaced and rhythmically creative solutions are found

in their place. Similarly, “mane”, “BOTY”, and “b-girls” are all words that have clear

meanings in the world of breaking, that I would have to take the care of explaining in the

annotations section of my project, which I’ll explain in the following section.

Though I did have a good amount of fun in bringing this project to light, there

were also some challenges that I had to overcome, ranging from word choice, to the

entire structure of my piece. Originally, I pictured that I would only have time to write my

rap verses, as recording and editing a song requires a good amount of technical

know-how. This led to the problem of having rhythmically complex lyrics lose their

impact and having to condense complicated statistical information into short

combinations of four-bar verses. The best hip-hop that I’ve heard stays far away from

simple A-B-A-B rhyme schemes and often uses careful pauses to trick the listeners and

then blow their minds. If I wanted to make my lyrics more complicated, readers would

not be able to understand my intentions simply through reading my lyrics. During the

final revision stage of this project, I was able to record a version of my song to the beat

from Nas’s “Represent” as a way to complete the project. Recording provided its own

unique challenges, as I would have to inflect my speech to fit within the confines of a
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steady beat. Despite the difficulty, the project feels much more complete thanks to the

recording and my worries about the audience not feeling the impact of my lyrics was

mitigated since I was able to express them with my own voice.

Additionally, I was worried adhering to my expectations for high quality lyrics

would require some dumbing down of information from the original academic article.

With these constraints in mind, I was led to the idea of creating a mock Genius.com

page. In addition to hosting lyrics to all kinds of songs from popular to indie, Genius.com

allows users to comment and annotate lyrics with their interpretations of the songs.

These annotations have been reviewed by users and will include sources to make sure

the interpretation of the song most likely to be correct is featured. I figured that if I were

to make my final draft in the style of one of these pages, I could use the annotations to

clear up some of the concepts I was forced to cut short in the lyrics. I could also use

them to give meanings of breakdance terms. This would address one of the most

common pieces of feedback I received in class where my peers didn’t know what some

of the hip-hop and breaking related language meant. I also figured it would add a bit

more of a creative flair to the writing if I mimicked the site's layout instead of just having

my lyrics in plaintext on a PDF file.

I did receive some feedback as well from Eugene regarding the structure of the

song. It was brought to my attention that I could have segmented my piece into verses,

choruses, and bridges. While I understand the value of adding that sort of structure,

many of the songs in the rap genre that I like instead use sixteen line verses. I used a

single verse of roughly double that size just because it felt natural as I was writing my

lyrics.
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Overall, this project was a good exercise in writing that gave me a better

perspective on decision-making and genre. Just like developing your personal style in

dance, you first need to learn and understand the conventions of the artistic medium,

and then with that knowledge choose a direction or even bend the rules to create

something powerful.
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Works Cited

Boyd, Janet. “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking).” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,

Volume 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Anderson, South

Carolina, Parlor Press, 2011, pp. 87-101

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume

2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Anderson, South Carolina,

Parlor Press, 2011, pp. 71-86

Kauther, Max Daniel. “Breakdance Injuries and Overuse Syndromes in Amateurs and

Professionals.” The American Journal of Sports Medicine, vol. 37, no. 4, 2009,

pp. 797-802.