How to improve your freestyle wordplay

Why rhymes alone sound flat

Wordplay is one of the most important parts of rap, and one of the most overlooked.

New freestylers spend almost all their brain power just getting rhythms and rhymes to work. Every bit of mental energy goes into the beat and the next rhyme, and everything else gets neglected: tone, rhetoric and wordplay. You can practice rhythm and rhyme for years this way and still not get the big reactions you’re after.

What you end up with is what freestylers call a word salad (or a “lyrical miracle”): a stream of syllables that rhyme, in a clever rhythm, that somehow feels flat.

Yo, I’m on a mission, my vision is this decision, the incision…

That’s a lot of rhymes. It doesn’t mean anything, though, so the rhymes don’t matter much, and to a listener it ends up sounding boring. Boring is the last thing you want to be in a freestyle.

What wordplay is

Wordplay is when a word or phrase in your rap points to more than one idea at once. A line with two meanings is called a double entendre. For example:

I’m unleashed, now I’m running this town with my dogs

On one level, it means you’re out on the loose, running around town with your friends. On another level, it’s literally about dogs, and unleashed is the word that ties the two meanings together.

Why crowds love it

When a line carries more than one meaning, the audience gets to unravel it, and figuring it out is exciting. Drop a double meaning every line and your freestyle becomes a kind of race: you keep moving, and the crowd is racing to decode each line before the next one lands. That’s the opposite of boring.

Six wordplay tactics

Wordplay is hard to invent from nothing mid-verse. It gets much easier with a mental checklist of tactics you can scroll through as you build toward each punchline.

Tactics that create double meanings

Tactic	What it is	Example
Simile	Compare one thing to another with like or as. The most common wordplay in freestyle.	My bars are as cool as ice. / My bars are hot like fire.
Metaphor	Say one thing is another, without like or as.	The mic’s so hot it’s about to catch fire. / I’m so cool my booth might freeze.
Idiom	Use a common phrase everyone already knows isn’t meant literally, then make the literal meaning true too.	I trusted my dogs too much, and it came back to bite me.
Homophone	Words that sound alike but mean different things.	Jay-Z’s well-known “businessman” line works because the same sounds can be heard as one word or two.

Metaphors can stretch over a whole verse if you’re skilled enough. Kanye West’s “Homecoming” is a classic example: the song sounds like it’s about falling in love with a woman, but it’s really about his love for the city of Chicago.

When you can’t find a double meaning

You won’t always find a double meaning for the word you’re setting up, and that’s okay. These two still make a line land:

Tactic	What it is	Example
Opposite	Set your punchline against its opposite.	Other rappers think they’re cool, but I’m as hot as fire.
Hyperbole	Exaggerate something to the max.	My money stack’s as high as the Burj Khalifa. It obviously isn’t, but the picture is dope.

In the end it comes down to your creativity. Whatever seems interesting or neat to you, look for a way to set up more than one meaning for each punchline.

The drill: all the rhymes, none of the work

In the drill, every rhyme in the whole verse is already filled in, and the bouncing ball keeps time for you. That means you spend zero brain power on finding rhymes or holding the rhythm, the two things that usually use up all your attention. All of it goes to wordplay.

1. Watch for the rhyme word at the end of each line. That’s your punchline.
2. As the line starts, look for a double meaning you can build around it, using the tactics above.
3. Land the punchline on the beat so the second meaning hits at the same moment as the rhyme.

You won’t get every line, so count how many you do get. Get wordplay into 16 bars in a row and a crowd will go wild. Try the drill a couple of times a day and aim to beat your count each time.

In The Rhyme Game: choose All Words, so every rhyme is on screen before you reach it. Start with AABB. Once wordplay starts coming more easily, move to Last Only and set up each punchline yourself, which is the setup and punchline drill with wordplay on top. The built-in Rhyme Dictionary is also worth a look after a round: tap any word to explore its rhymes and spot new double meanings.

Where to go next

• Practice building each line toward its punchline with setup and punchline.
• Wordplay only lands on a solid rhythm. Tighten it with three rules of freestyle flow.
• Need material to play with? Try the Big Topic drill.