As hip hop and slam poetry are becoming part of a new generation of Chicagoans’ fabric, many students are searching for tools to make these practices easier. Enter B-Rhymes, an app and website that goes beyond your typical rhyming dictionary. While popular sites like RhymeZone and Rhymer will give you exact rhymes, rigid to the last consonants and vowels in your word, B-Rhymes breaks each word in its extensive library by the exact vowel sound. This allows for creative, multi-syllabic rhyming computations.

If you are to go to your favorite hip hop track, and really look at the words that are being rhymed, you will likely find that the industry relies on slant-rhymes. These are rhymes that aren’t exact but still sound similar (like ‘vocabulary’ and ‘reactionary’). This is a fact of the game, and B-Rhymes provides an automated helping hand to aspiring and veteran authors alike.

Musician Carter Music (@ThisIsCarterMsc) tweeted his endorsement of the app, saying “Songwriter’s best friend, this trend won’t end, ain’t gonna descend from this high-end pent with no rent, ur a godsend no pretend.” Even local Whitney Young teens love the slant rhymes this app provides at the tip of their fingers. Nick Earley ‘17, bassist of Third Rail and mastermind of the highly anticipated Zed Project, says “It’s hard to begin to deconstruct the lyrics to a Third Rail song. The app really comes in handy.” Georgia Greenberg ‘16, bassist/drummer/vocalist for WY bands Dyphelia Grey and Strawbabies, endorses the app because “sometimes it takes a good solid slant rhyme to get the process moving.”

Writing lyrics is no easy task, regardless of the type or genre of music you are trying to create. That’s why we can all use some help from our toolboxes every now and again. And there’s no better asset to your belt than B-Rhymes, a complex computer of rhymes to utilize.