Wednesday 29 August 2007

Rocking the Mike



I think most of the time why I choke on the invisible freestylin' mike is because I just do not have the hip-hop element in me. Nada. Zilch. When I try to make things rhyme I try to make them as ambiguous as I can get. From the chickens of a potter lady in Shanghai to the hallucinations of a guy in an Amazon jungle, that is how random I want my imagination to run. On the other hands, the hip-hop MCs I see are always struggling with their rhymes because they always want to fit everything together like a jig-saw puzzle.

Not to say that there is anything wrong with that but if one really thinks about it then why the hell should the ambiguous pattern of life be made so solidly rhythmic? Nothing happens in rhyme. I hate things that rhyme because it is just so all too convenient. Most rappers make hope rhyme with dope and imagine that it is a connection for which I should be thankful to them ('you opened my eyes' and all that bollocks) but it really isn't. It restricts me; it restricts the reader and most of the time it restricts the listener as well but most of the time the listener is so awestruck by the 'awesomeness' of rhyme that he/she immediately buy into the whole song be it about shredding babies or raping cows.

Give me prose anytime.

Rappers don't understand prose, they think they are sentences. Mind you, I'm not making a full-on assumption on the hip-hop couture because I know many a rapper out there have read a book or perhaps (crazy as it sounds) some poetry too. All I'm saying is that I don't quite understand it when someone thinks they are poetical just because they rhyme. When did that standard fall in place? I missed that meeting. Poetry (and it don't matter if it's street poetry) is supposed to be a free form of expression free from the limits of limits.

In such scenarios, the wake-up call of madness is perhaps the best an artist of any art could possibly ask for. Me, as a former poet and as one that wants to be one again, I'm having all too many difficulties with fitting my old persona with my new. This is again something that I think only poets go through, not street-poets (if you think I'm being prejudicial, fuck off right now) because rappers all too often stick with the image that make the most sense to them whereas to me (whether or not I'm a bloody poet) the only sense comes in losing myself all the time, everywhere, anyhow.

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