Everbody Loves Rhyme, Man

Image: The March Hare and Dodo, one of the Alice in Wonderland stained-glass windows in the All Saints' Church, Daresbury, England, via Vitreosity (cool blog about stained glass)

i. My First Lines

Rx for stiff writing brain: rhythm and rhyme.

I want to write some rap based on my geography books. I loved working on them, but the end results had to be dry. I want to juice them up, for fun.

bink can rhyme a million times faster than me (makes me mad). Trouble is, I don't hear words as sound, I hear them as ideas.
So when I sat down to rhyme "gross domestic product"--admittedly not an easy first rhyme--I kept thinking about millet or steel.

I had to chant the phrase out loud to myself over and over to HEAR it.
It took me hours to come up with three rhymes.
Here they are.

gross domestic product
pope's fantastic Prada

gross domestic product
nose don't lick a poor fuck

gross domestic product
dodo's nest tick prodder [this is my favorite]

Not sure where I'd go from there, but rhyme can be an end in itself, like this fun nonsense rap "Alphabet Aerobics" by Blackalicious.


ii. R.A.P. "Rhythm And Poetry"

Everybody loves rhyme (maybe), but not everybody loves rap.

I ran into my pal Terry at the library, where I was checking out How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip Hop MC, by Paul Edwards (2009) (links to the book's site, which has about 100 links to tracks on youTube--what a find for a beginner like me).

I told him I want to learn how to rap.

He looked at me, shocked, and this generous, generally open-minded guy said,
"When do you have to get back to the home, for your meds?"

I told him rap wasn't all nasty; lots of it is crazy inventive word play expressing a joyous life force or honestly calling out the hard stuff.

Well, he said, he'd heard two little boys rapping on the sidewalk,
"I'm gonna have some fun,
shoot you in the face with a B.B. gun."

Yeah, it can be like that, but that's not its necessary nature. Tish Jones says its fundamentals are Rhythm And Poetry.
"I mean, let's rewrite that," I said, "I'm gonna have some fun..."

He finished, "Go to Jamaica, sit in the sun..."

"Drink some rum," I added. "Well, that doesn't really rhyme..."

"It doesn't have to!" he said, instantly getting into it. And he admitted he didn't really know rap.
Neither do I, but rhythm and rhyme... it's like the brain's breathing deep, pushing out against its limits.
I love that.

iii. art in the dark
Terry's response is pretty typical, in my experience.
The last time I got such horrified reactions to a pursuit of mine is when I joined the Catholic Church.

In both cases, those reactions aren't altogether wrong--the Church and rap have misogynistic and violent histories. But they're also thrumming with life force and creative energy out the whazoo.
You aren't going to find any worthwhile human endeavor that doesn't have its dark side because that's who we humans are.

I like art from the dark, anyway, because I've been there. Haven't we all, to some extent?
Like gun violence...
My mother shot herself in the head with a gun, so I get that, I welcome raw poetry about that kind of thing.
Life can be that bad, it can be that ugly. That's not unusual.

There're all kinds of ghettos we make for ourselves and each other, and all kinds of ways to break out of them.