nblinks

One thing I've been trying to figure out is which languages lend themselves to rap, which don't -- this presumably would have a lot to do both with grammatical flexibility and with the sounds the language contains. For instance, pretty much all Portuguese rap I've heard sounds (to my ear) just awful. I think that's because so many words end on complex vowel sounds and swallowed consonents (-ao, -io, etc.) -- which is ironic, because I think it's that very feature that can make sung Portuguese so beautiful and versatile.

French and Spanish and, to a slightly lesser degree, Kiswahili, are all capable of producing (again to my ear) "cool-sounding" rap, but all the cool songs tend to sound kind of alike -- they fall into a certain patter, a vocal rhythm.

German and Swedish and (at least with Deux) Korean fare worse -- they've got the patter, but so often it gets too bouncy to be taken seriously.

English, of course, lands top of the heap. Is that just because I'm best positioned to appreciate the nuances? I'm not sure, though I suspect that the fact that, despite roots in African music, the genre was created and first defined mainly by native English speakers, so of course as style developed it was tailored to the strengths English offered.