(Small Caveat: It's Friday and feeling a little lame for staying in and working, I opened a bottle of wine when I started writing this, so if it starts getting a little messy blame "Quinta Da Aveleda")
Last night after we got off the phone I was playing around with my i-Pad and started downloading some books so I could get my electronic read on. I downloaded a couple I have been wanting to read for awhile, "Living In The End Times", by Slavoj Zizek, "Toward a New Architecture", by Le Corbusier (because I am trying to impress this architectural "shorty") and "The Book of Ice" by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky. When I downloaded the last one, Apple did what it normally does and made some recommendations on what I might like. These suggestions have always given me the creeps. It's as if you were in a book store and someone, catching a glimpse of what you were browsing through, came up and whispered in your ear. Like someone barging in your room while having sex and asking if you would like some fried chicken. It's at once disturbing and way too intimate for the situation. But, this one suggestion did give me pause. It was Jay-Z's new book "Decoded." I had already heard of it because of an article I read about the marketing campaign which involved a digital scavenger hunt all through out New York City. So I bought it. Today I had to go to the police station to get my car out of the pound because of some "alleged" illegal parking I had done the day before. I ended up being there 3 hours waiting for an email from my insurance to verify that everything was up to date and I was a respectful, fully insured, citizen. You can say that I was more than frustrated, but knowing that loosing your temper in the middle of police station can cause you more problems than you want, I kept my cool. I ended up taking a seat and doing the most rebellious thing I could, considering the resources I had, which was my i-Pad, car keys and various documents of identification. I started reading "Decoded". Take that Pigs! Fuck the Police! Ok, so my act of rebellion wasn't all that bad ass, but I did find the book better than I thought it would be and it has led me to today's post.
"No one reads poetry anymore" is a constant refrain that you hear all the time. Scolars and professors are always eulogizing the death of literature and poetic verse. Until today I actually was one of those people. Not that it bothered me one way or another. I could give a fuck whether kids want to drink beer and listen to Justin Bieber instead of read Roethke, Plath, or Ginsberg. But if asked, before my stint in the police station, I would probably have agreed with the above statement. But as I was reading I cam across this passage in the book :
"When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow chops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch."
I read it again. That sounded like something. Something that sounded so familiar that it all instantly clicked in my head. Hip Hop is modern Poetry. Now, this isn't something that I hadn't thought before. I love Hip Hop and have know that the lyrics are a form of street poetry, but I hadn't really put it on the same level of Keats or Puskin. But sitting in that chair, I instantly realized that one day the whole poetic canon would one day include ryhmes from the likes of Nas, Rakim and Jay-Z. That somewhere in the future those expensive, thick anthologies of poetry that we have to buy in University would surely include Hip Hop songs. I spent the last hour our so thinking of my favourite poetry verses:
A robin red breast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage
William Blake
And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal.
Oscar Wilde
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
Sylvia Plath
I've lived to bury my desires,
And see my dreams corrode with rust;
Now all that's left are fruitless fires
That burn my empty heart to dust.
Aleksandr Pushkin
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Allen Ginsberg
Then I thought of my favourite Hip Hop Lyrics:
Words of wisdom wail from my windpipe
Imaginations in flight
I send light like Ben's kite
I've been bright.
Common
Music orientated
so when hip-hop was originated
fitted like pieces of puzzles
complicated.
Eric B and Rakim
Truth brings light
light refracts off the mirror
visions of yourself and error could never clearer.
The truth is that you ugly
not on the outside
but in the inside
on the outside you frontin you lovely
Pharoahe Monch
I switched my motto
Instead of saying fuck tomorrow
that buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto.
Nas
I knew I was on to something and when I got home I started doing a little more research and I came across this English professor named Adam Bradley. A couple of years ago he issued a manifesto to his fellow-scholars. He urged them to expand the poetic canon, and possibly enlarge poetry’s audience, by embracing, or co-opting, the greatest hits of hip-hop. “Thanks to the engines of global commerce, rap is now the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world,” he wrote. “The best MCs—like Rakim, Jay-Z, Tupac, and many others—deserve consideration alongside the giants of American poetry. We ignore them at our own expense.” So in honor of my esteemed mother fuckin' professor Bradley I compiled some songs for you that I think are good enough to stand side beside the giants of Poetry and if the Poetry scholars leave them out...they best be prepared to get a cap in their ass.
If you were a bottle of wine I would break you over a gorillas face and rape him.
Nas "Life's a Bitch" "I switched my motto / Instead of saying fuck tomorrow, that buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto." This vivid articulation of hope in the face of despair could be defined as the same circumstances that created hip-hop culture in the first place. Nas's hip-hop lyrics show maturity, urgency and a vivid view of urban struggle.
I could add at least 100 more Nas Tracks.
Common "Resurrection" "Words of wisdom wail from my windpipe / Imaginations in flight, I send light like Ben's kite / I've been bright." How often does Benjamin Franklin wind up in hip-hop lyrics? When you have the ability to resurrect the status quo of rap ability like Common, expect the unexpected.
Eric B. & Rakim "Microphone Fiend" "Music orientated so when hip-hop was originated, fitted like pieces of puzzles, complicated." Rakim proudly raised the standards of hip-hop lyrics with this statement. His microphone addiction allowed us to get high off of his talent right along with him.
Kool G Rapp "Streets of New York" "It gets tiring, the sight of a gun firing / They must desire for the sound of a siren." Kool G Rapp takes us inside the violent realities of his New York environment with these melancholy lyrics. Hip-hop songs of this social caliber deserve to be studied in universities.
”Truth brings light, light refracts off the mirror, visions of yourself and error could never clearer. The truth is that you ugly, not on the outside, but in the inside, on the outside you frontin you lovely”-Pharoahe Monch, The Truth
”Make a radio hit - headz criticize it; Underground classic - nobody buys it”-Ras Kass, Reelishymn
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