Like playing tennis without a net, man.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!
That’s prose, and rhetoric. Ain’t the same.
Look, you can have all sorts of rules for versification. But the standard rule for rhymed verse in present-day English is that you can’t rhyme a word with itself (and that includes homophones), unless you do it by pattern, such as having the sixth and eighth lines of every verse always the same word. Make up your own rules, but don’t be slovenly. Same thing for meter. A line that I’m quite fond of by Charles Williams is this alexandrine. A plain-vanilla alexandrine is
-'/-'/-'/-'/-'/-'—six iambs, twelve syllables.But this is an alexandrine, too, if you’re being loose:
In Ló/gres the King’s/Fríend/lánd/ed, Lán/celot of Gául.Just pick a rule and then follow it.
I guess the slovenly Walt Whitman didn’t get a copy of your rules.
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
To be fair, that’s being used in a rhethorical manner in a free verse poem (“Song of Myself.”)
It’s not a standard perfect rhyme, but it is absolutely a type of rhyme, and one that can be employed to good effect. There’s no reason to dismiss it as “slovenly.” Poe repeats rhymes every fourth and fifth line in The Raven to great effect, changing the words every repeated pair, to great effect. I suppose that’ll satisfy your “pattern” exception, except that it’s not always the same word. I have Emily Dickinson’s contribution above, which I think works splendidly in her context. Or why isn’t Robert Frost “slovenly” by not just rhyming “sleep” with "sleep in the last two lines of his poem, but copying the entire line? You couldn’t tell me he couldn’t come up with a proper closing couplet, the lazy bastard!
How do you feel about slant rhymes and eye rhymes and things of that nature? Is rhyming “stone” with “frown” and “swarm” with “worm” or even “harm” slovenly, too? (I honestly prefer those types of rhymes or even less perfect ones to the conspicuousness of perfect rhyme.)
But, like with anything else, all these types of rhymes are just more colors for the crayon box, even if self-rhyme is just a white crayon. Used skillfully, it can create a specific effect or emphasize a particular word or idea, much like in the same way repetition is used in oratories.
Actually, looking at the lyrics in the OP as a whole, I do think it is better contextualized as a repetition than a rhyme – more as a rhetorical form. The lines do act more like epiphora than identical rhyme, as you first said. There really isn’t an established rhyme scheme where you would expect a particular rhyme there or anything.
Well, what is rap other than free verse poetry? @John_W.Kennedy was replying to my links to epiphora, implying that the usage in Beez in the Trap doesn’t qualify as epiphora.
As I said earlier, I think epiphora is probably better characterized as repetition rather than “self rhyme”. In any event (as I think you agree from your second comment) the repetition in Beez in the Trap seems analogous to the Whitman poem to me.
Nicki:
Bitches ain’t shit and they ain’t saying nothing
A hundred mothafuckas can’t tell me nothing
Let me bust that U-ey, bitch, bust that open
Might spend a couple thou’ just to bust that open
Walt:
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Yea, we agree. I looked at the example this morning again, and realized self-rhyme is not the best description as there is no established rhyme pattern, and it just sounds something more like you would hear in a sermon or speech for repetitive/emphatic/echoing effect. (Which a self-rhyme can be used for, as well, of course, if used in an established rhyme scheme.)
From America by Leonard Bernstein :-
I like to be in America
Okay by me in America
Everything free in America
For a small fee in America
…
Skyscrapers bloom in America
Cadillacs zoom in America
Industry boom in America
Twelve in a room in America
…
Life can be bright in America
If you can fight in America
Life is all right in America
If you’re all white in America
…
Everywhere grime in America
Organized crime in America
Terrible time in America
You forget I’m in America
(interspersed with lines which don’t end with “America”)
Bit OTT IMHO.
He’s rhyming the word before “In America” in that case.
Well, than some prosodist may take ubrage to the “time/I’m” rhyme, which is also technically an identity.
If you look at the word previous, the onset is a “t” from “forget.”
From Chicago:
I went ahead and listened to the song a bunch of times, and it does not sound jarring anymore. That could be because “repetition legitimizes”. Nonetheless, I feel like your analysis is correct, and all the repetition is not lazy but for deliberate effect, starting from the title, all the way to the final verse:
x2 
Here’s an explanation of what it all means, apparently.