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Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm producer Rihanna Cruz.

I'm musicologist Nate Sloan, and I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

When people talk about their favorite rappers, one of the words that I hear thrown around a lot is

the idea of flow. And while I have a vague sense of what it means as somebody that listens to a lot

of hip hop, it's a concept that I want to explore more deeply, the idea that it's not the lyrics,

but rather how a rapper spits their bars. This is a cool way to think about hip hop Rihanna,

because I feel like usually we zero in on the hardest hitting dishes in a track,

the most clever instances of wordplay, but part of what draws us to an artist is not just the

content of their lyrics, like you were saying, but it's actually the way they deliver them,

the rhythm, the pace, the cadence, the flow. And yet we don't really have like a definition.

You can't look in the Harvard musical dictionary under F and find flow next to, you know, I don't know,

forte and fortissimo, flugelhorn. Between fortissimo and flugelhorn lies the elusive flow.

This feels like a cool opportunity to do some listening, think about what flow means,

and hopefully get some insight from a practitioner themselves as to the meaning and the

sort of cultural history of flow. Right, so to answer this question of what is flow,

I wanted to go to one of the practitioners, somebody who's been in the game since nearly the

...