Chopper flow is a hip-hop music style that can be traced back to the Midwestern United States. Those that rap in the style are known as choppers, and rapping in the style is sometimes referred to as chopping. The Kansas City-based rapper, Tech N9ne, also incorporated the Chopper style in his music in the 1990s and later took the lead in gathering Chopper-style rappers for several collaboration songs in the 2000s. The term and slang “Choppa” or “Chopper” was popularized in the south to mean a kind of automatic gun because it sounds like a helicopter when it’s shot.

Co-founder of record label Strange Music and musician in his own right, Tech N9ne follows the Chopper technique, executing perfect, clean pronunciation down to a single letter. In “Takin’ Online Orders,” a song he made with Brotha Lynch Hung, Tech N9ne lays down 12 words per beat, 76 beats per minute. To do the math for you: that’s 15.2 words per second. Tech N9ne switches up flow patterns quickly and easily, making it impossible to keep up with his blitz bars.

Twista is commonly considered the fastest rapper of all time, both officially and unofficially. In 1992 he became the Guinness Fastest Rapper Alive, able to drop 11.2 syllables per second. That’s right – 11 syllables in just one second. Twista has been featured on many popular songs, including some by fellow rap and hip-hop artists Chance the Rapper, Tech N9ne, and Busta Rhymes.

Detroit-born rapper Eminem, known for holding nothing back and more than once getting censored on his own track, takes no prisoners lyrically and speedily. He has always been a technically clean-cut chopper rapper, with the incredible ability to execute syllables in fractions of a second. “Rap God,” his 2013 single, shot its way into the Guinness Book of World Records for the Most Words in a Hit Single – 1,560 unique words in a little over six minutes, or about 4.28 words per second.
For Shady’s fans, his first record-breaker was in 2000, when “The Marshall Mathers LP” sold 1.76 million copies in its first week – the fastest of any hip-hop album ever. Definitely quick in more ways than one, Eminem maintains that biting, quick wit and employs a sharp tongue even today.

Brooklyn-born rapper Busta Rhymes comes to mind for fulfilling his name in every possible way, collecting 11 Grammy nominations across his decades-long career. From “Break Ya Neck” to “Look at Me Now,” “Touch It” and “I’ll Hurt Ya,” Busta Rhymes employed a rap technique that used both internal rhyme and half rhyme which, coupled with the breakneck speed he keeps, puts him up top the legacy list of speedy rappers. And he’s still doing it – in February of this year, Busta confirmed that he’s almost finished with a new album he created with Dr. Dre.

San Diego-based rapper and Brainsick Muzik founder Twisted Insane is known for being one of the fastest rappers in the industry, likely resulting from his practice in writing rhymes from the age of 12. Music became a way for him to survive as he faced homelessness in 2006, coinciding with the release of his first album, Shoot for the Face. Needless to say, Twisted Insane is one of the best Choppers of all time. Tech N9ne noticed the young rapper’s skill and invited him onto his 2011 single “Worldwide Choppers,” where Twisted Insane met Busta Rhymes and Twista among others.

Dubbed by The Guardian as the rapper with a wider vocabulary of words than Shakespeare, Aesop Rock is known for his incredible and far-flung techniques with lyrics. Designer Matt Daniels collected and analyzed data on a number of musicians, counting their first 35,000 words in three to five studio albums with 35,000 words of seven of Shakespeare’s early plays. With this analysis, Daniels can figure out how many unique words the artist uses, which he then ranks on a scale with other musicians of a similar calibre. The kingpin of underground rap, Aesop Rock clocked at 7,879 unique words used – more than 3,000 more than the average cluster of rappers, who hover between 3,000 and 4,500 unique words. The only competition to Aesop on the chart is Bus driver, but even he has 5,000 fewer unique words than the Appleseed artist. He himself said he reads a lot of news and science articles to find new words to use in his songs, writing down specific ones that he finds appealing.

From the group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Krayzie Bone’s star-studded solo album Thug Mentality 1999 and his 2001 album Thug on Da Line only set him up for his later successes, including a Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a duo or a Group for his song “Ridin’” with Chamillionaire. His verses are known for their speed, especially on “Heated Heavy,” “Clash of the Titans,” and “Flow Motion.”

Dylan Kwabena Mills MBE aka Dizzee Rascal is one of the names mentioned less often when people discuss the fastest rappers of all time. The London-born rapper has had a long career and was one of the first commercially successful grime MCs. His 2003 album Boy in da Corner laid the foundations for the genre and made him a household name in Britain.
Most measurements put Dizzee’s rapping speed at around three and a half words per second, making him by far one of the fastest MCs in the game, however, he falls short of some of the other names on this list such as Twista and Eminem.







