Newer Definition
Since the early 1990s onwards, with the popularization of improvisational rapping from groups/artists such as Freestyle Fellowship through to Eminem’s 8 Mile, "freestyle" has come to be the widely used term for rap lyrics which are improvised on the spot. This type of freestyle is the focus of Kevin Fitzgerald’s documentary, Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme, where the term is used throughout by numerous artists to mean improvisational rapping.
Kool Moe Dee suggests the change in how the term is used happened somewhere in the mid to late ‘80s, saying, "until 1986, all freestyles were written," and “before the ‘90s it was about how hard you could come with a written rhyme with no particular subject matter and no real purpose other than showing your lyrical prowess."
Myka 9 explains that Freestyle Fellowship helped redefine the term – “that’s what they say I helped do - I helped get the world to freestyle, me and the Freestyle Fellowship, by inventing the Freestyle Fellowship and by redefining what freestyle is… We have redefined what freestyle is by saying that it’s improvisational rap like a jazz solo”.
Although this kind of freestyling is very well respected today, Kool Moe Dee states that this was not the case previously:
"A lot of the old-school artists didn’t even respect what’s being called freestyle now... any emcee coming off the top of the head wasn’t really respected. The sentiment was emcees only did that if they couldn’t write. The coming off the top of the head rhymer had a built-in excuse to not be critiqued as hard".
Artists like Jay-Z and Lil Wayne have made it difficult to determine when an MC is freestyling a verse or recitting a written one; they who freestyle on their albums and features, so an on the spot freestyle is just a memorized verse. Artists who do this say that they write lyrics in their heads and call freestyles "free verses." There are still MC's who do freestyle the original way, meaning written verses rapped on a random beat. These artists such as Joe Budden, Royce Da 5'9, Crooked I, and Joell Ortiz prepare written freestyles just for freestyling on the spot.
Read more about this topic: Freestyle Rap
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