What to rap about when you freestyle

Why your mind goes blank

It’s one of the biggest problems in freestyle. You don’t know what to talk about when you get on the mic. Or you pick a topic, but you can’t stay on it: you spit one weird rhyme, the music falls apart, and your mind goes blank again.

It’s not because you have no ideas. If someone asked about your goals, your childhood or your favorite music, you could easily talk for four minutes straight without even thinking about it.

The difference is that when you freestyle, you aren’t just talking. You’re making music, and your brain has to juggle two conflicting forces:

• Freedom: you want to speak your mind, tell a story, get a message across.
• Structure: rhymes, rhythm and timing all have to line up for it to sound musical.

That clash is what gets you stuck. The fix is to practice both at once, until fitting your ideas into the music stops being a fight.

The Big Topic drill

Step 1: pick one big theme

Choose one theme and stick with it for the entire round. These are the five most useful themes to have in your freestyle toolkit, because they come up again and again and fit almost any situation. Most of them have two sides you can take:

Theme	One side	The other side
Bragging	You’re the best rapper in the world.	—
Love	Romance, falling in love	Heartbreak, love that isn’t returned
Money	Being rich, spending big, living lavishly	Struggling, trying to hold it together
Origin story	Where you come from, what makes you proud and strong	The struggles and pain you went through to get here
Your future	Your dreams, where you’re going, what you believe in	Your fears, your worries, what might go wrong

Even if you’re a total beginner, learn to brag. It’s the default theme in rap, and you’ll use it more than any other.

Step 2: let the rhymes be decided for you

Next, play a rhyme game that decides your rhyme words for you, and when they land. Your job is to be creative and fill in the start of each line so that it:

1. ends on the rhyme word the game gives you, on the beat, and
2. stays on your theme.

For example, on the theme of money, with gold and told as the rhyme words:

Started with nothing, now I’m chasing the gold
Every dollar I make is a story I’ve told

The words on screen have nothing to do with your theme until you make them fit. That’s the skill.

Why it works

Most of the time the drill hands you words that seem to have nothing to do with your topic. Making them fit anyway teaches you to make any word, any rhythm and any rhyme work with any topic, which is exactly the skill that stops you going blank.

And because you practice the same five themes over and over, you also build a stock of ideas, angles and lines for each one. The next time you freestyle, you can always go back to the well. Both together mean you never run out of words or draw a blank on the mic.

Slow it down or speed it up

This drill isn’t about how fast your brain can go. It’s about expanding your repertoire, and however you get there is fine.

If you’re new to freestyle, slow way down:

• Play the video at 0.5× or even 0.25× speed.
• Pause whenever you need to, and just look at the words on screen.
• Write your lines down if you want, leading up to each rhyme word on your theme.

If you’re more advanced, rap it at full speed, no stopping. Practice adapting to whatever word comes next without breaking your flow.

In The Rhyme Game: choose All Words with AABB, and pick your theme before you press play. To slow things down, go to the beat’s advanced settings and run the ball at half speed, or pick a slower beat from the Beat Library. Try a different theme each day to cover all five in a week.

Where to go next

• Keep the music tight while you talk with three rules of freestyle flow.
• Give your theme lines more punch with freestyle wordplay.
• Still blanking? The beginner’s guide has recovery moves for when it happens mid-verse.