The Fraudulent Genius of Freestyle Rap

Rhyme without reason is just recall

I memorized encyclopedias and dictionaries / I wrote anthems from antonyms

harmonies from homonyms / Created cinema from synonyms

—Chino XL, Wordsmith

Intelligence tests don’t measure style. They don’t care if language sounds good. They measure your ability to make sense. Listen to a street schizophrenic and you’ll hear nonsense that sounds like rap. Or like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” That sentence is grammatically correct and emotionally charged, but it communicates nothing. Smart people can appreciate the difference between structure and meaning.

But many rappers cannot make this distinction, as they show by enforcing a taboo around “the n-word.” What sounds like a single term in casual speech is actually two. One is a commonly sung term of affection with a semantic range from “brother” to “friend” to “my guy.” The other is an obsolete racial slur. Kanye West demonstrated his claimed IQ of 133 by using both senses in the same song. Pop quiz!

To check your answer, see if—and where—Kanye drops the hard R in Rari. Did you hear “Nazi” and assume enemy, without asking who he meant? Did you shortcut your way through A and B by following rhyme or sound, instead of context?¹ Verbal intelligence tests measure your ability to slow down, override instinct, and figure out what’s actually being said. That kind of effortful reasoning predicts success at life.

Specialized skills like rap don’t transfer to other domains. General cognitive skills do, which is why the OECD tests a set of abilities called functional literacy. Its Survey of Adult Skills presents practical scenarios drawn from everyday life. Can a father read a list of preschool rules and figure out the latest drop-off time? Can a homemaker read a short article about why bread goes stale and learn how to keep her loaf fresh?

Nonfunctional literacy: what is flow?

Hip-hop heads celebrate freestyle rap² as the purest demonstration of an artist’s “genius.” But brain scans show freestylers dialing down the executive control regions (DLPFC) while cranking up the emotional processing areas (MPFC). Spitting off the dome feels like “divine inspiration” because improvisation bypasses consciousness itself. This loss of oversight is more typical of artistic creativity than of intelligence.

Everyday activities usually focus on finding a single best answer to a well-defined problem; for example, diagnosing why your car won’t start. This is called convergent thinking, which activates the DLPFC to filter out irrelevant information. The contrasting pattern, divergent thinking, loosens self-control to enable uninhibited idea generation. This mental mode correlates with extroversion and mild ADHD.

This is your brain on vibes. The supervisor done stepped out, feelings flooding in.

Effective artists switch between chaos and control, but Mephistopheles takes his toll. The mind pays for fluency, since music and language processing compete for resources. A neuroimaging study from 2019 asked “lyricists” whether word pairs rhymed. It found that expert freestylers were more than twice as likely to mistake a half-rhyme (e.g. speet with yeek) for a perfect rhyme compared to non-rappers.

Plenty of rappers self-identify as lyricists, “flow gods,” or wordsmiths. But they’re closer to drummers than to opera divas. Rhythm is preverbal and preconscious. It moves the body. Melody, by contrast, builds palaces in the mind. Appreciating a symphony takes pitch, recursion, and hierarchical parsing.³ Baby Einstein pushes Beethoven over Burna Boy for a reason. Parents are chasing higher-order skills!

Study Hard Mathematic but for Scrabble

As a matter of aesthetic preference, Cally is a Barb and claps on the backbeat.⁴ But truth demands we acknowledge which skills carry over, and which don’t. That kind of versatility comes from proven, not “promising,” scholars. For example, two Silicon Valley Ashkenazim with halting speech patterns can reverse engineer freestyle for a party trick, but could Biggie dip into Noah Smith’s or Erik Torenberg’s day job?

When judging intelligence, we rarely have access to professionally-administered tests. A common workaround is to use Wordsum, a vocabulary quiz that correlated at 0.71 with adult IQ in a study from the 1940s; or more crudely, to hear someone speak. Vocabulary picked up naturally reflects strong semantic networks, but rappers routinely cramming thesauruses to spice up their verses weakens this association.

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand how Rari rhymes with Rari.

Yet the mirage of the mouth athlete as undiscovered genius repeatedly disappoints researchers. Geneva psychologists, noting improv musicians show enhanced intelligence, tested expert freestylers but found no evidence of superior cognition.⁵ This confirms what Torenberg intuited and DLPFC deactivation suggests: freestylers are not inventing rhymes in real time but accessing pre-practiced lyrical chunks.

Thus the rapper turns off his executive control, operating on mental autopilot. Unlike debaters and orators, who must employ logical argument and factual recall, these bar-spitters register minimal conscious activity under the MRI scanner. Their boasts of wealth, skill, and intellect are merely recycled clichés. Rappers don’t have agency: they surrender self-governance for flow, mimicking thought while evading its demands.

Confidence Men and Crypto Bottoms

The breakdown of trust in institutions and elite gatekeepers has been a boon to peddlers of hate, conspiracy theorists, and financial sharks. Stupider people are more prone to addictive and pathological forms of celebrity worship, like agreeing to commit a crime if their idol asked. One way that celebrities, especially rappers, monetize these parasocial relationships is to ask fans to buy a memecoin or NFT.

A Detroit-based strain of rap called “scam rap” breaks that containment zone. Its lyrics are called lessons because they double as step-by-step guides: which tools to buy to clone credit cards, how to finance iPhones using stolen Social Security numbers. Since the scams are online, the victim pool is endless. Confessing to felonies on a beat is irrational, but not surprising to someone with a correct theory of mind for rappers.

Why aren’t they locked up? Ask that about scam rappers or Hamas and you’ll find the same answer: they hide inside oppositional cultures, daring outsiders to intervene without triggering blowback. Hence Venmo for brunch and Cash App for felonies. The privacy-first payment app spread through rappers, sex workers, and petty thieves, leveraging elite concern over “financial inclusion” and optics to stay untouchable.

What looks like genius is often just repetition with better branding. When an articulate young man hands you his card reader and a sob story, you’re hearing the chunked encore of years of practice. The scam rapper thrives where rhythm sells better than rigor, and nobody checks the receipts. His dimmed prefrontal cortex means no regrets. He smiles as you pay: don’t think about the charge, just feel the flow.

1. Answer key: (2). “All my enemies are Nazis” doesn’t make sense if you’re bragging about “rocking swastikas.” If B = friends, A can’t also be a friend, because the A line underlines a semantic contrast between Hitler and the speaker. So A refers to someone Hitler opposed, and the correct answer needs to fall within the semantic range of “victim” or “outsider.”

2. Freestyle rap, in this 2012 study “Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation” by Liu et al., is contrasted with “conventional performance of an overlearned, well-rehearsed set.”

3. Soleimanifar et al. (2016) revealed that melodic skills demand more sophisticated cognitive processing compared to the more intuitive, body-engaging rhythmic perception. Melodic skills develop later (around ages 4-5) and correlate more strongly with intelligence.

4. She’s my queen and I ain’t even British
She’s the only reason that I went to school and I finished

5. Despite the intuitive link between freestyle rap and mental agility, expert freestylers showed no advantage on cognitive tests that mirror skills seemingly needed during performance. These included staying on beat while avoiding errors (response inhibition), switching between topics (cognitive flexibility), juggling words in mind (working memory), filtering out distractions (selective attention), rapid idea generation (semantic retrieval), and rhyme creation (phonological processing). The authors even controlled for marijuana use!