Even when there is no music to speak of (which is not often), the pattern of speech feels like beat poetry, chock full of
internal rhyme schemes and percussive delivery (Baby's described as «Mozart in a go kart» and having «a hum in the drum»).
Hip - hop historians call this period the Golden Age (Bradley and DuBois date it from 1985 to 1992), and it produced the kinds of lyrical shifts that are easy to spot in print: extended similes and ambitious use of symbolism; an increased attention to character and ideology; unpredictable
internal rhyme schemes; enjambment and uneven line lengths.