Say what you will about him, his voice is irritating, he is probably the nerdiest guy to ever step on the hip-hop scene (he’ll be the first to admit that), but don’t say the man doesn’t have crazy skills. Anyone who has heard the Jewish kid from Jersey knows he has a penchant for layers and layers of embedded rhymes, but who knew it was all mathematical.
In a recent interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Barman revealed that he likes to structure his rhymes according to math’s most famed sequence; the Fibonacci Sequence. “The mathematics of rhyming are there just by rhyming,” Barman told the paper. “So why not explore that? It’s just really fun. My math teacher thought I was going to be a mathematician anyway.”
For those that don’t know, the Fibonacci Sequence is 1,2,3,5,8,13 and on and on. Each number is the sum of the two previous digits. So just check a verse from “Enter Pan-Man,” the numbers have been added in to count the rhymes; “It was an action flick (1)/Pan-man kicked backwards (2) attackers (2)/Sent by the sexy matadors (3) from her Spanish fortress (3) of course the film was torturous (3)/Like Kaufman’s masterpiece (5) achieving wide release (5) logos in the marquees (5) said ‘Pac Man’ with the ‘Cs’ (5) rotated 90-degrees (5).” The next line has 8 rhymes, but it stops there. “Once I got to 13 I noticed the entire song would become gobbledygook,” he explains. “So I would just go from one to eight and then back to one again.”
You can check out Paul’s “It’s Very Stimulating” EP or his full length “Paullelujah!”
