prose and ho's
Here’s a minor cultural product I’ve never been able to get used to: high-octane critical prose about hip-hop. I just can't get past the incongruity of it all. I’m reminded of my usual response by this piece by Jonah Weiner in Slate: “UTFO's fictional object of desire and scorn had roared improbably to life and spoken for herself.” “Boss wanted to reimagine the money-grubbing ho as a Machiavellian gangsta in her own right.” Maybe I’m immature, but sentences like that just make me giggle — even though Weiner is less pompous than many, especially my fellow academics, tend to be when writing about such topics.
This is hardly a new story: there’s a long history of somber, stentorian, academic, and theoretically-inflected discourse about jazz, blues, and rock too. And critical prose can’t and shouldn’t imitate musical lyrics — the genres are utterly different, and those differences need to be respected. But I think there needs to be a degree of fit between the style of the subject and the style of the critic. In his best writings about rock music, Greil Marcus manages that: his prose tends to go over the top, but hey, what’s rock-and-roll if not over the top? Stanley Crouch can be similarly apt in writing about jazz, and — to return to hip-hop — Michael Eric Dyson’s book on Tupac Shakur, Holler If You Hear Me, seems to me to get the tone and approach just right: colloquial and free but really smart, and not playing at a gangsta style. It’s a tough kind of writing to do well.
It’s interesting to think about other forms of journalistic critical writing along similar lines. One of these days I’m going to write a post on how James Agee simply invented modern film reviewing — he was the first person to find a style that matched the medium, and almost every good film critic since owes a significant debt to Agee, wittingly or unwittingly. (I say a little about that in this essay.)
Finally, and disturbingly: in any class of mine that includes poetry, I require students to memorize fifty lines or so and recite them to me. In the first meeting this semester of my Modern British Literature class I was explaining that requirement when one student’s hand shot up: “Can we rap it out?” he asked, eagerly. I said yes — at the moment I couldn't think of a reason to say no — and now I’m living in dread of the day when he comes into my office and lays into “The Waste Land” or “The Shield of Achilles” or “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Maybe he’ll bring in a friend with beatboxing skills to lay down the rhythm track for him. God help me.
You’ll have to take it on faith that this is 100% of the cuff, Alan. Just to give you a little something to feel encouraged about.
I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity
And the pride of life that planned her, still couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
of her salamandrine fires
cold currents thread, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
III
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
IV
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls: grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: what does this vaingloriousness down here?
VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing
The immanent will, that stirs and urges everything
VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her— so gaily great—
A shape of ice, for the time far and disassociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew,
in stature, grace, and hue,
in shadowy silent distance grew the iceberg too.
IX
Alien they seemed to be
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their fair history
X
Or signs that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event.
XI
Til the spinner of the years
Cried out “Now!” and each one hears
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
— Freddie · Nov 6, 03:55 PM · #
lol, this my meat!
Cross Movement, ‘Rise Up” from the album Holy Culture
Hook:
We’re goin’ live this life
We’re goin’ live it right
Not just talk it but walk it cause we’re goin’ live for Christ
We’re goin’ hold it down, stone cold, hold our ground
All my soldiers RISE UP, SPARK THE HOLY CULTURE
BLAAW!
You know the squad is a collection artist
Blessin’ our God regardless of the fact we’re engulfed in this godless
world that’s spiritually broke like when folks are jobless
no spiritual ear like when corn is cob-less
No spiritual sight, no optics
No wonder spiritual life is hard to grasp like rice with chopsticks
We need our heart fixed, pull out the heart-kit
If change is gonna come then God has to spark it
We don’t need another material object
We need to be re-plugged back into God, He’s the socket
We’ll meditate on His law but won’t exhaust it
God’ll take our heart and carve it like Boston Market
Sin kills like arsenic, God is pure,
but some can’t stomach His cure like when you’re car-sick
Dead right, you need a headlight- you’re headed for darkness
Get Christ—-you get life—-you’re dead as a carcass
We’re tellin’ men that your sins are red as a carpet
He won’t just forgive you He’ll turn your debt into profit
You need to sweat Him, and let Him get in the cockpit
Halt the “co-pilot” talk you need to stop it
Man, you ain’t in a Benz you’re in a rocket
Life’s too heavy for you, you men will drop it
We saw fit to take His path and walk it
Was on a high horse but got kicked right off it
Fought with Christ but we were forced the forfeit
Had a towel but we were forced to toss it
Had ego but thank God we lost it
Sin’s signal was strong but thank God He crossed it
Oh, what a sight now, we’re living right now
Use the skills until we put the mic down
Check it, yo, cause the flow is like a nightgown
Rep Christ for life so you know we’ve got the right sound
And though the world is godless we thank God that God has called us
from being ballers, and players, and pimps and alcoholics
Times are hard but even still we must run our hardest
“Run like Forest,” with a limp, but we run regardless!
For His glory we wanna be the flyest artist
But because of what our vocals be socially we may die as martyrs
Might have to take flight and say our “Sayonara’s”
But that’s alright we’re meeting Christ in the sky tomorrow
So no more weed in us, or Hennessey in us
We’ve been freed indeed, we’ve got His seed in us
so while you’re teasing us, He’s gonna present us
faultless and blameless because He died for these sinners
Betcha didn’t know there was gospel hiphop, Alan
— matoko_chan · Nov 6, 04:04 PM · #
Like all cultural evolution, hiphop is a fusion of all that has gone before.
I know more about dance, in hiphop dance we use EVERYTHING.
Ballet, jazz, modern, martial arts, it is all fused.
Hiphop is rap with a bassline so you can dance to it.
I don’t think anyone can really appreciate hiphop without dancing to it.
;)
— matoko_chan · Nov 6, 04:11 PM · #
I also require the poem memorization bit—and at 40 lines I get howls of protest (even from some colleagues)!
Anyway, I cannot remember where I saw this, but a few years ago I read an article by someone who relies on the fact that there’s always an aspiring rapper in her poetry classes to teach meter. The performance would inevitably reveal the pattern of stressed/unstressed syllables.
— Jason · Nov 6, 04:17 PM · #
There was an old man
From Peru, whose lim’ricks all
Look’d like haiku. He
Said with a laugh “I
Cut them in half, the pay is
Much better for two.”
— bcg · Nov 6, 04:26 PM · #
I knew MC Lars in college – here he is rapping The Raven.
— Trevor · Nov 6, 04:26 PM · #
That is truly encouraging, Freddie — and this is turning into an awesome thread.
— Alan Jacobs · Nov 6, 05:32 PM · #
Can’t remember who wrote this one, but I adore it.
Two
Both were so shy
Their only tie
Was bedded, hooded, dark delight
Pity their plight
And curse the night
She wept and could not tell him why.
— Freddie · Nov 6, 06:02 PM · #
I’m sure you are aware of this hilarious little tidbit… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXbrSALG684 Your student isn’t the first.
— Jesse A. · Nov 6, 06:25 PM · #
This book.
http://www.amazon.com/Hip-Hop-Japan-Paths-Cultural-Globalization/dp/0822338920
and Ta-nehisi gets it. he does hiphop every friday. ;)
Hiphop is the language of protest and social inequity, and youth…
Anything anything by these guyz
Asian Dub Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Dub_Foundation
— matoko_chan · Nov 6, 06:30 PM · #
Freddie, until I read some of the other posts and recalled what this thread was about, I thought you meant you had written that poem off the cuff. Even now that I’ve figured it out, I’m still impressed.
I can do Antony’s soliloquy over Caesar’s corpse, plus about the first half of the friends, romans countrymen speech, but that’s about all I have stored.
— J Mann · Nov 6, 08:41 PM · #
A shame it’s modern English poetry. I think Pope’s translation of the Illiad would make a great rap epic. The poem is all about gangters fronting, feuding, and falling out over bitches, and Pope’s translation really flows.
“Here on the monarch’s speech Achilles broke,
And furious, thus, and interrupting spoke:
“Tyrant, I well deserved thy galling chain,
To live thy slave, and still to serve in vain,
Should I submit to each unjust decree:—
Command thy vassals, but command not me.
Seize on Briseis, whom the Grecians doom’d
My prize of war, yet tamely see resumed;
And seize secure; no more Achilles draws
His conquering sword in any woman’s cause.
The gods command me to forgive the past:
But let this first invasion be the last:
For know, thy blood, when next thou darest invade,
Shall stream in vengeance on my reeking blade.”
— MQ · Nov 7, 01:12 AM · #
This reminds me a little of how I’m always disappointed when I go see a Shakespeare play and find out it’s not in period costume.
— Joules · Nov 7, 01:36 AM · #
Last summer, local rap band Flotbots put out a call on 93.3 for help in making crowd scenes for a music video.
Me, some friends, and 3 or 4 thousand other people got up at 5 am on a Sunday and drove to Denver.
This is the video for Rise.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0XmsUlz2hI
I just heard on local radio 93.3 that Rise may be played for the inaugral in January.
— matoko_chan · Nov 8, 05:43 PM · #