Madvillain: "Raid"

Released by hip-hop artist Madvillain, off their 2004 album Madvillainy, the song "Raid" can be described as poetry. The song's lyrics and rhythm/melody contribute to the album's main idea and display a deliberate creative methodology. "Raid", in particular, contributes to the main idea of the album: that "audiences can relate their experience in life with the villains and their dastardly doings." Put another way, ordinary people can relate to those individuals who are often considered outside the mainstream, such as clowns, prostitutes, and Rhinestone cowboys. To convey this idea, Madvillain makes use of meter, internal rhyme, end rhyme, slant rhyme, simile, imagery, and multi-dimensional language.

In each of the twenty-two songs off of Madvillainy, Madlib, a Madvillain group member, raps, also known as "spitting." Madlib spits to a constant meter. He raps for seven quarter notes and then rests for an eighth note or sixteenth note.

Simile in the line "Street turns, keep me in this dirt like an earthworm" conveys the idea that while the shallow works of other rappers become hits, the works of Madvillain remain unnoticed.

In the song "Raid", Madlib refers to his particularly smooth, continuous style of rapping as the "buttery flow":

"About the buttery flow, he need to cut the ego
Trippin', to date the Metal Fellow been rippin' flows
Since New York plates was ghetto yellow with broke blue writing
This is too exciting"

Madlib calls out other hip-hop artists for being egotistical and unoriginal in contrast to his original "buttery flow." He takes great pride in his own style of rapping. Ironically, Madvillain displays a certain narcissism in "Raid", referring to himself in the third person (Illeism). Madvillain also takes particular pride in having been in the New York rap "game" since the 1970s.

In the line "On one starry night, I saw the light" Madvillain pronounces the word starry as "starey." The word comes to represent not just a bright sky full with stars but also a fixed gaze. The reference to "starry night" also evokes Van Gogh's masterpiece, "Starry Night." This line conveys Madlib's self-admiration in that he is putting himself in the same league as Vincent van Gogh.