Iambic Tetrameter in poetry is the simplest form of rhyme scheme. It's also the mainstay of rap; you may have noticed the similarity of rap lines to the poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in which the second and fourth line rhyme in each stanza. That is what rap has become in the last two decades: an urban competition for power and glory where four or five overdressed baggy-pants gangsters with toques skip as they come out on stage and take turns bending down to a camera making identical hand moves and spitting into their microphones to a drum machine. Anyone who’s been under stage lights will attest to the fact that the heat is unbearable under your clothes, made worse by the strain of playing. A lot of rock musicians like Robert Plant and Keith Richards wear an open vest. The second drummer for April Wine went shirtless with suspenders. Any clothing on the upper body becomes soaked with sweat, but rappers’ clothes are part of the pose. So is the angry lower lip and dangerous-looking scowl. You won’t see them with beaming smiles like Ray Charles or James Brown. Rap is convenient as a way to cultivate a tough-guy image that it may never go away. Most pop music styles fade out after the crowds find fresh new concepts, but the rap phenomenon goes on because of the infinite number of young people who see this as a way to escape the surroundings of poverty without going through the unpleasant necessities of work or education. In the current form we see rap’s followers take a step backward; a violent obscene attempt to bring back racial hatred as the young people define themselves as being on the other side of the social fence that the previous four generations worked so hard to knock down. The majority of black people are satisfied that they have integration, civil rights, and a chance to be private citizens who have a chance to focus on something other than skin color. No one should forget the crimes of the past, but pushing on to a better future is the path to take - parents know this better than anyone; their efforts to reach the middle class were too painful to see it all erased by overfed youngsters trying to act as avengers using society as a scapegoat for perceived injustices without even knowing how rap started.

The beginnings of dirges, work songs, the Blues, and Black American Folk music appeared when slaves in the cotton fields would establish a call-and-answer rhythm to ease their anguish over the backbreaking work forced on them twelve hours a day, seven days a week in the heat of the Deep South. After the emancipation, a sharecropping system allowed for more privacy and availability to instruments like guitars, squeezeboxes, and banjos. In addition, many were enthusiastic and talented singers with amazing vocal range and quality. People in the following generation started to have the freedom to play for money like their counterparts in the North who came to the forefront in Big Band and Jazz music during Prohibition. The music was exciting enough to be featured in movies and on the radio, but segregation still cast a pall over the atmosphere of freedom that is the essence of music.

Motivation ensures that things get done and that first efforts are followed up by additions, revisions, and expansions. Songwriters can get caught in the trap of falling in love with the first draft, deeming it eternally great and unchangeable. When the song is listened to objectively later, there may be silly lyrics that don't relate to each other, or else the chords and melody are lazy and sound like every other three-chord wonder. Blues and country music are often plagued by the restrictive nature of the basic chord pattern, except when there are skilled instrumentalists involved who can fill in the gaps with other elements such as adding several minor chords, key changes, inversions, major seventh chords, and changing the number of beats in a bar. When a country song uses three chords, there are only several melody options, and they've all been used thousands of times before with the same resolve to the end of the verses and choruses. The resolve to these songs invariably end up at the root note of the key signature. That limits the melody possibilities for a unique work.

If technical terms baffle those not schooled in reading score, rest assured that getting a good song structure doesn't require tremendous knowledge or training. Keep a book of chords at hand, and possibly a rhyming dictionary for reference if you are at a loss for words. Those people who are writing songs are assumed to be clever by definition; they are already armed with influences, favorite styles, and the desire to create original material. If you are at a computer, there are many free sites on the Web that supply everything from scales to a digital metronome. For the purpose of this article, the assumption will be that the songwriter is using a guitar or piano to compose the song.

Where will the seed be found? I will use some examples from my own experience. At first, the obvious first theme is to express your love for someone real or imagined, or to pine over a lost love. Ballads are easy to write and perform, and that was my logical starting point. The songs were slow and sappy – littered with exaggerated emotions that got magnified from what the feelings were originally. I discovered lush major diminished chords that dominated the sound and allowed for a good melody to be suggested, but the temptation to use too many minors or diminished chords can make the song overly-sleepy and amateurish. If you strum the same chords over and over you risk putting your listeners into a coma.

I was writing some mediocre songs many years ago in Boston, making notes as I rushed around, and then settling down in a coffee shop to start the first line. It doesn't matter if you start from the first word of the first line or if you work backwards, thinking about a rhyming word that would make the second line make sense to tell the story. My normal method of writing is this: latch onto a phrase from my thoughts, sit down and write two verses and a rough idea of how a chorus might start. Personally, I do the words first, and they give me a suggestion of a melody. The next step is to put everything aside until you can get to your instrument and work it out. Recall the bits of melody that the lyrics suggest, and find the key that matches your vocal range in that melody.