I was reading Jeremy Siskind's new book Fundamentals of Songwriting. In the chapter on rhyme he mentions how Eminem makes up a whole sentence of words that rhyme with orange on the spot.
"I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with Ge-orge".
What? Rhyming "orange" with "four-inch" and "door hinge"? I have listened to quite a lot of rap, especially when I was younger, but I never realized how much it is centered on rhyming. People like Eminem are absolute word wizards.
This is the joy of fallibility. As a professional musician I should have known that rhymes are the basic musical ingredient in rap. Yet I had missed it. Now a whole genre took on a new meaning for me in an instant. I went through Eminems discography, which is great, and then someone like MF DOOM takes it to another level. The last couple of weeks I have been listening to his album "Madvillainy" non-stop. It's simply perfect from the first track to the last.
I think two observations are worth pointing out here. When we realize an error of ours, it's nice to take a step back and savour it, because correcting errors is the only way to make progress. The second observation is that experiencing art is theory-laden. When you change your theory of the artwork, you change your experience of it.