All Day I Dream About Syllables…

jmj adidas

R.I.P. JMJ

Over twenty years ago RUN-DMC blazed the trail for corporate America’s use of rap music to identify and brand products purposefully. Name dropping luxury items has always been a staple of rap music’s canon, but never before had a corporation made the direct connection to openly recognize the influence. More often than not corporations design their lust for disenfranchised peoples dollars by saying that disenfranchised people aren’t allowed to own their products. This usually brings waves of poor people’s money towards that brand since poor folks want nothing more than to appear NOT poor (see DP’s sneaker collection).

Give Adidas all the credit for hiring Hustle Simmons’ amazing threesome to craft an homage to their footwear that has lasted the test of time. If only a crispy pair of leather Rod Lavers could stay this fresh for this long. What allows the RUN-DMC tribute to remain viable after all of these years is the song’s simple yet sturdy construction. This is where we decide to employ DP Dot Com’s patented rap-ology technology. Let’s study a few of the songs created as homages to different sneaker brands and see if we can determine if someone’s intelligence is directly connected to the footwear they consume.

Rap music is an artform that employs language to describe life in such a way that it resembles a painting, or better yet photography. It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Let’s use that benchmark to grade these songs. If all of the compositions were a thousand words long which one would be written by the college level student and which one would come from the da-dunn da-dunt?


RUN-DMC – ‘My Adidas’
My Adidas remains the gold standard for corporate-sponsored Christmas gift wrap. Succinct and to the point. You know exactly what these dudes are talking about and they don’t waste any words on bullshit. Yes, the brand name is repeated several times and it is a polysyllabic word in itself, but tell me the last time someone used the word “university” in a rap song?!?

TOTAL WORD COUNT – 420
TOTAL POLYSYLLABIC – 27


NELLY featuring the St. Lunatics – ‘Air Force 1’s’
NELLY and his crew of colorful weedcarriers craft a song that more than doubles up the length of the Def Jam classic, but even at over a thousand words their love for Air Force Ones is mostly at the level of elementary school poetry written in Crayola crayons.

TOTAL WORD COUNT – 1060
TOTAL POLYSYLLABIC – 13


SOULJA BOY – ‘(I Got Me Some) Bapes’
After 875 words and not one single polysyllabic word you can discern fairly easily that only retahds are wearing BAPE sneakers. Weep for the future.

TOTAL WORD COUNT – 875
TOTAL POLYSYLLABIC – 0

poly graph

22 Responses to “All Day I Dream About Syllables…”

  1. bfnh says:

    somebody needs to get that earl boykins guy to create a graph so people can visualize the importance of this post.

  2. rafi says:

    a zero count? superman is polysyllabic, isn’t it?

    i always enjoy these posts but it’s worth mentioning that good writing and using lots of big words are usually in direct opposition to each other.

    http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2007/10/this-may-be-old.html
    http://www.copyblogger.com/write-with-clarity/

  3. the_dallas says:

    ^ Done and done-er – (c)Rafi

  4. russ the bus says:

    although one of em rhymed “flip flop” with “flip flop”, nelly and the st lunatics, to their credit, never repeated a polysyllabic word. While run dmc said adidas 21 times and added 6 other words, nelly and co. came up with 12 (by my count) unique big boy words.

  5. the_dallas says:

    ^ Russ,
    Nelly and the Lunachicks also come in with over one thousand total words while the Run-DMC song is barely 400. So even if you only give credit to the word adidas one time when you stretch both songs to the 1000 word benchmark what do you get?

  6. Amadeo says:

    Damn on the marketing tip…how come they marketing a wine to the hood now. That’s what I get for ever letting BET linger on my set for any amount of time.

  7. russ the bus says:

    im just sayin its not as lopsided as it looks. it should be 16.67/1000 for run dmc, and 12.26/1000 for the st lunatics.
    run dmc still wins, and the cardinals and rams both still suck. no amount of verbiage is gonna change that.

  8. the_dallas says:

    ^ Raf,
    Too bad that meatwad didn’t superman that ho for this song.

    “good writing and using lots of big words are usually in direct opposition to each other”

    Is using less paintstrokes and less colors better for a painter? Is using a faster developing film better for a photographer?

    Now I agree that effective marketing requires less complexity in order to penetrate the consumer’s mind, but what about good art being used for commerce, as opposed to cheap art being used for disposable products.

    Will Soulja Boy sell a lot of Bape shoes to idiots?

    Hell yeah.

    Will fools be wearing Bapes twenty years from now?

    Prah’lee not.

  9. the_dallas says:

    ^ Russ,
    Thanks for that accurate breakdown. The graph above is based on every time Run-DMC uses a polysyllabic word even if that word is repeated. From a stylistic perspective someone(yourself included) might say that the Lunachicks applied more technique and I won’t argue with that, but the parameters for this drop only consider the overall word counts.

    Furthermore Nelly is fucking wacksauce.

  10. 40 says:

    My JMJ Memorial adidas are some of my most cherished in the collection…

  11. Chris says:

    Good post, Dallas.

    Polysyllabic words are not a necessary condition for good hip-hop, but a lack thereof certainly points to a “dumbing” and overall decline of the culture as you have pointed out. On a related note, cats need to bring back the polysyllabic rhyme scheme (see: that gully Kool G Rap flow or that crazy Pun shit re: Deep Cover ’98)

    Anyway, Chris Rock made a very apt quote about the situation in hip-hop:
    “Music kind of sucks. Nobody’s into being a musician. Everybody’s getting their mogul on. You’ve been so infiltrated by this corporate mentality that all the time you’d spend getting great songs together, you’re busy doing nine other things that have nothing to do with art. You know how shitty Stevie Wonder’s songs would have been if he had to run a fuckin’ clothing company and a cologne line? Rap sucks, for the most part. Not all rap, but as an art form it’s just not at its best moment.”

  12. russ the bus says:

    nelly is wack?
    but he’s so icy!

  13. What size ur sneakers punk…MY SIZE!!!!

  14. bfnh says:

    got busy at work so i couldn’t respond, but the graph is where it’s at.

    i, initially, had reservations about sendin’ props for the word “university,” because i’ve always had a problem w/how often DMC used a long E to rhyme his lines. but, that’s some other shit.

    the post clearly illustrates how the music, even when remarkably commercial, has been dumbed-the.fuck-down. it isn’t necessarily an indicator of quality, but i would posit that the lack of one poly (let alone a poly that rhymes) shows the utter lack of desire to elevate from one’s childish mindstate.

  15. cap says:

    What about Heavy D’s Nike?

  16. monique r. says:

    Maybe its just me…but I’ve always particularly hated white on white air force ones…I think I connect them directly with this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=dHITx_xRsQE because they get a few shots.

    I mean…I guess one could argue that soulja boy’s complete lack of polysyllabic words is conceptual?

  17. Redd says:

    numbers dont lie. nice graph DP.

  18. Juan Solo says:

    You know I stopped wearing Air Force 1’s after that Nelly shit.

  19. karamel says:

    Yo DP, you forgot the greatest ode to a sneaker;

    CLASSIC (remix) -kanye, Nas, KRS1 and Ra

  20. the_dallas says:

    karamel,
    How ill would you be if you gave us all the link to the lyric sheet for that song you mentioned along with a total word count and breakdown of all the polysyllabic words used in the song?

    As opposed to you just leaving a comment about what I didn’t do?

    That would make you like the realest commenter evar.

  21. russ the bus says:

    http://www.completealbumlyrics.com/lyric/131270/Kanye+West+-+Classic.html

    total word count: 660
    total Polysyllabic: 31

    put em on the chart at, 46.96/1000 on the dp scale.

    (25 excluding repetition of “everywhere” and “forever” (3x each) which puts em at 37.78/1000 after adjusting for unique word count, murking all other competition. air force one’s have been redeemed. im coppin a pair for my girl to where when she takes the GRE.)

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