AIM away message haiku craziness / 10 page papers make jack a flipped-out fucker

this paper goes through
these incarnations of me.
Who is the writer?

Lepner's Pond

New Assignment bred out of moments of mad brilliance. Write a poem with the above title in mind. That's all, I don't want to taint the minds.

fragmentary compliments

I will dance through inches
wading along tectonic banks.

I'm messed up with a sweet salt
that even the saints can't help but lick.

With no context to glue
street bums become first rates of the book.

Paisley scratches the irises
I'm left discoballing reverse style--
the itch of the swell too

Homunculi

11.58

dull criss cross spiderweb
sky. No poetry, just lines.

Three pennies in my pocket
jingle, echo and quiet in step –

a thing is right only
in its rightful place.

12.08

my carbon body is steaming;
a reductionist epitaph –

until death, he’d been a man.

1.08

flickers on, a lucid dream of wire.
Blue storm, sight unseen, electric

mitosis. Half-awake, it’s waiting –
I’m waiting, for the prompt.

1.48

pan-fried scallops, spicy red
sauce – thinking of heat.

Mussels in delicious oils, good
for dipping bread and also for

facilitating compliments
attached with smiles stretched.

B.

oral fixations, haikus for your tonguely pleasure

(forgive me, they were written so quickly)

Man-handled turkey
looks up-town suave, arranged twine
tingles in me spine.

Ample evidence
for sureness of existence
is non-existent.

Treacherous trippings
I can’t walk on the damn quad
those squirrels are on crack.

on not believing in tryptophan coma, but experiencing it anyway

Church of the Dispossessed Bull

i.
The break of the bullock was not only
not loud, it was subtle-loud
cruising through plain side
rafting on mole hills.

ii.
And are we not happy with a paucity
of light, restrained & violent?

iii.
The break of the bullock is not
during indian spring
or sasquatch fall, it is here
in the crags of a coffee table.

iv.
I am uninterested
in the rates of current consumption
practice breathing in height instead of length.

An old poem, chopped into bits, and served on a platter, for your thanksgiving feasting.

(so) allen and walt meet in this bar.

I.
I dream of naked white boys
playing basketball-
these age seven savages run flat-footed to
the basket,
long black shocks of pubic hair
scraping the ground.
they move with no grace, rather with lead
(like the metal)
of foot, a loping lilting jilt, punctuated by periodic
squalls of Plant and Page-
the run of young adults whose knee caps
have been bashed out
by the aluminum baseball bats of unqualified
commercial love.
the shortest one, his bare ass wearing
bright red air jordans.
launches towards the basket while the logos
on his feet seem to swarm
and come loose and funnel around his legs, a tornado
of triangular angels.
as he begins his rapid descent two feet below
the net,
his logos fail him and stop humming, becoming little
white men, false silhouettes
plastered on bright red sneakers. they leave him
as he falls, cheap and broken.
the other boys keep playing around him, sporting their
genitals like bowling trophies. I do not know
why they are naked- they are young enfranchised and
white, filled with foam from cheap beer
and I love them, their white slit maxi-pad asses trotting
on hot blacktop,
and I love them, their translucent sweat smelling of old
curly fries and baking powder. I love
them because they leave the taste of rough cotton and
gatorade stuck to the roof of my mouth.

Ia.
in my dreams I am sitting under a railroad track somewhere in gray jersey eating potato chips, rubbing my eyes with sleepy time tater oil, and I eat and eat one then two then three. and as I sit there, gestating the tubers, the guy heating himself at the trashcan next to me starts screaming I CONTAIN MULTITUDES I CONTAIN MULTITUDES and I run to my car, filled to the brim, leaking my dreams like ice into tire ruts, hemorrhaging Doritos, my poor potato dreams.

Ic.
I am confused- did Walt Whitman know of basketball,
or am I getting this all mixed up with a poem by Sherman
Alexie, who wrote a lovely Robert Johnson book reservation
blues? I wish Whitman had at least known about real ass-stomping
spiritual blues, or something at least about gin covered sawdust
floors, rather than knowing all about boys near clear blue lakes.

What would Walt think of the island, overrun by Sherman’s
liquor stores and “no sovereign nation, no (Indian) reservation?”
Would the father of anglo-american poetry give an ass-stomping
to the higher ups or would he go down into his sawdust-
covered basement, stand on a chair, looking down at lakes
of words through the rope around his neck, never getting to see 3-on-3 basketball?

I think Allen (if he could) would take Walt to a fancy reservation-
only restaurant (the kind he would go to before giving an ass-stomping
and suck off to a beautiful boy with a straight-as-sawdust
spine) and give him oceans of vodka, goddamn lakes
of raspberry schnapps, until walt’s bladder was the size of a basketball.
Then Allen would take him home to lie on top of books about buddha and Sherman

tanks. Allen would ask him if he ever wanted to give an ass-stomping
to another man, and Walt would cringe with fear, because the sawdust
beauty of Allen’s shrugged off words would be his lake
covered in midday sun, much too warm and bright for sitting on the basketball
court and absorbing warmth. But the words would push through like Sherman’s
march through Georgia, burning without reservation.

Allen would want to fly around the anglo father of American poetry like sawdust
shards caught in a vacuum, he would want to be the lake
that Whitman writes about, that he makes love to with naked basketball-
sized toes. Whitman wants to leave and get away from his Sherman
tanks and giant linga, he wishes he had never gotten the reservation
to that fucking restaurant, he wants to give the bartender an ass-stomping

of the most profound kind. He dreams of eye-blue lakes
as Allen slumbers next to him, and he is there, basketball
in hand, playing against bare-chested kid TV mascots from the Sherman
theatre, yellow parrot heads on top of bodies from the Turning Stone reservation
casino, their lanky dealer bodies getting an ass-stomping
from walt, his long gray beard machining their offence into sawdust.

The lake was his court, and although he never read reservation
blues you could tell that his basketball money honey would cause quite an ass-stomping
to his brother, who still sees Sherman in his spinning dead mind, burning Atlanta into sawdust.

Ie.
back in the bar, before any of this might happen,
allen looks at walt, and walt looks at allen,
and the cat rubs against the barstool
and the Italian white trash in the parking lot play some pickup basketball,
moving from hoop to hoop,
and they are not anything, they are the form and grace of
bodies moving together, sweet music filling dead air space.
couple next door holding hands,
watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” with fingertouch,
so close together , you’d swear their hands can’t
be any closer than their eyelashes, and
back in the bar, the poets raise their glasses and toast
drunkenly, to the new year, one turkey away.

An (un) Thanksgiving Poem

A little diddy I wrote for Alice's class last year, which was published, and oddly enough, received some fan mail.

Wrist Fatigue

I stir figure nines
in the gravy until
a larger constellation comes
to deceive me.

It’s not gravy ya stirrin’, it’s the whole
goddamn dinner. Doncha fuck it up.

I know the consequences
for a fuck
up and I won’t.
I realize the thick tar
streaming from my
grandmother’s neck.

Ma I gotta wrap the meat.
Hold mah beer, Mattie.
Whatchu studyin’ again?

The sublime taste of subordination—
her tar is creeping its way
past chair legs, under carpet coil,
and the origin of the earth decides
to reveal itself to me in the center
of a gravy twister.

Go write me sommore poems
how bout mah drinkin’ and shit
or that waitress at D’s with the nice
tits.

The stove contemplates near
misses as the ooze rises to
ankles. It’s too hot here
and if I wanted to, one nod
and my face would slide
cool as heaven
into the gravy.

I’m savin’ my bones for the pie.

She secrets hornets
in her hair and never knows
the time of day.

Stirrin’ gravy’s the most important
thing, yah know. You’re burnin’ it
that way. Crazy shithead.

There exists no entropy
merely a lack of will to want
to do better,
to stand up to the deer mounted
on the dining room wall, take
its ruddy lips against mine
and whisper
No, No, you shut up.

let's play a game

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jermaine-dupri/a-good-album-is-more-than_b_73413.html
called "watch jermaine dupri's life fall apart in his huffington post blog." It's good fun. He has a point initially - Apple does take a far larger chunk of the profits than the artists do. BUT as good as Jay-Z's American Gangster was, it was a corporate album full of "eh" stuff. It was a big cross-marketed clusterf***. I respect an artist's desire to keep their work intact. But I don't for a second really see a larger work in Jay-Z's music - he's a man whose built his career off of some of the best singles ever made. There's nothing wrong with that. There just hasn't been a Jay-Z album released without some bum tracks - either singles gone wrong, or awful skits, or just songs to connect the singles together.

Then JD compares Jigga's album to an Andy Warhol painting, making one of the most emotionally unstable comparisons I've ever read. And the fact that JD is terrified that "the consumer" is going to figure out what's going on - can't give the consumer too much freedom or else we'll go postal on the music industry. Well, thing is, if you make fucking great albums, then people will buy them. Anyone who buys a song off of Jay-Z's Vol. 2 .... Hard Knock Life probably ends up buying the whole thing. Anyone who bought "D.A.N.C.E." has a good chance of buying Cross because guess what? A hit single is only better than the rest of the album if you're just trying to sell records. JD, it worked with Kriss Kross because they SUCKED. They needed a hit single or else that album was gonna sell a big donut. That's not a business model to emulate. Hip-hop's marketing power is still tied up in the big single. If the album doesn't have a big single, then why market it? Ghostface Killah's Fishscale, J Dilla's Donuts, The Roots Game Theory. Three great albums that came out last year, not one sold as much as it should have because they had no Ne-Yo/Lil' Wayne cross-overs, no hit singles. The entire album was pure hip-hop magic, but no Top 40 smash, no dice. So these albums didn't get promoted, didn't get hyped, and the best album of The Roots' career is now sitting in Target collecting dust. Donuts is a difficult but life changing album, and I'm the only one I know who owns the damn thing. That's not because it sucks, it's because Radiohead farts in a corner and the world pays attention, whereas corporate music structures think their brand is worth more than their artists.

You want to give the power to the consumers. Because then, if you really make some great shit, they'll buy it. There's nothing wrong with folks buying Mariah Carey - it doesn't keep the artistic shit from bubbling to the top (I think everyone who posts on this blog owns, in some respect, The Emancipation of Mimi, but have a mix of it with Miles Davis' On the Corner, Bendi listens to it along with Radiohead and indie rock and soul coughing, and Alesia observes and savors Timbaland beats like Dawkins adores himself). This industry just needs to grow a pair and a brain. Yeah, tell apple you want more money for your music - apple should be a third party, not a second party - but spend more of your focus on actually promoting your artists, coming up with creative business and advertising solutions, and actually making good music? Because a number 1 album doesn't translate into a vital industry - kriss kross sold millions? Nsync sold 3 million their first weekend? The God emcee only sold 425,000? That's an empty number one. Freaking Incubus went to number one and they only sold 125,000. Why should a new artist sign to Def Jam. Because if the big labels don't start doing their freakin' job, then they're gonna become obsolete - did you know artists can sell their music direct through itunes without a record label? True story - which will be good and bad, because it's way easier to sell records when you've got financial backing for promotion and touring. Radiohead doesn't need any of that, but the next Radiohead does. And maybe make some good music too, while you're doing your job again.

Oh, and JD - don't know if you got the memo - but "Fallin'" is one of the worst songs on American Gangster. So maybe you should take your own advice and go learn something from the greatest producer on that album - Puffy.

We Only Have Grey Crayons Here

I was with her on the face
of the lunar eclipse and we were drawing a different galaxy.
Delighted in her moon beam capacities
she drew her family except the house and dog.
No room for civilities

on the page, and I was with her until
the hand. A circle with five lines radiating out
or in, depending on the sharpness of the crayon.

Obscene half sun
no difference between thumb and pinkie
just claws of a primitive self.

A crude half-tool dangling
promiscuously promising a future without concert pianists
or delicate cupcakes. I panicked
trying to cover my own hand
beginning to ask about the shape of a palm

what it means to have a heart
but such questions are usually squelched by inadequacies—
the sound of her parents’ car scraping against pavement.

Poteen Evening

Late me into the night
because lately I’ve been feeling
that end gap of the first face isn’t really here
anymore. Late me into the night

and I won’t forget the sins or the sways
against the carpet. I won’t forgive the way you held
the child against the beaten potato sack
the fever had got her and the fever had got her.

Into the night and I am late already
with a jug of heady promise for the local policeman
who can stop the madness in the head if he has the coins
to prove it.

I am providing for the family, yes the night is late
and yes the babies are crying and no the hills aren’t green
but the moon shines and I have to work with its drippings.

Visceral Visages

I've been thinking a lot about the way our visual interactions with the world inform/supplement/enhance/upset our language. Mostly, this comes from Martin Lammon's News From Where I Live, which was a surprising book. I usually like something meaty that both resists and invites interpretation, but this one wasn't very meaty, and I didn't mind. The transparency of the poems didn't matter because his rifts on the separation and marriage between language and the image were so damn good. I'm not talking about any Imagist mumbojumbo either. There is a disjunct between the thing and the word, and Lammon messes with that.

Example:

The Secret of the Platypus
What could this curious melange be,
beyond a divine test of faith and patience?
-Stephen Jay Gould, "To be a Platypus"

Outside my window, a hill
rises the same
as every morning this summer.
I sit in my chair and read Gould's argument
for the marvelous platypus, whose species
dull biologists have relegated
to a lesser rank within Mammalia,
or I write a new poem
about mothers or fathers, cows
or trout. I lift up my head to look at the hill,
how it slopes above our neighborhood's
houses. I do not know how high
but steeper and wilder, I think than I
could climb. I watch the dawn
fog dissolve into the haze of August.

The platypus swims across the river, lays
eggs in the mud, and does not love my poem.
The hill does not need me
wedging my boot against some tender
root. The shrub has its own life. One leaf
strains for a little sunlight. So what if I cannot
witness the way leaves work? I know they stretch and curl
for one day's glory all their own, even if I don't
know how. And if I did sink my boot into mud
where no one had ever walked before, no photographer
or archelogist would celebrate that I had
climbed this hill. The maple, if it noticed me at all,
would shrug and endure my hug around its trunk, a man's
simple panic against gravity.

This morning, I sit in my chair
and read about the platypus, whose strange wet fur
glistens in the moonlight, or I write a poem about a beautiful
woman. There are so many lives whose secrets
do not belong to me, lives besides my own
whose secrets are worth loving.



The bit about the beautiful woman grosses me out, but otherwise, solid.

Therefore (!) a new poetry assignment is here (that's right, I'm going to keep on doling them out and you can choose to accept my gifts of brilliant insight, or you can not):
Use an image in such a way that the image informs or warps or screws with language...or vice versa (language messing with an image). The image at hand? Why, our trusty black & white chicken. Go on, desconstruct, reconstruct, make language sound like an illegitmate foreign sibling & make that chicken one ridiculous mofo.




ps- I wrote this post in a sleep

In the spirit of clarification

Jon's poem, 'Naked' references this one that I wrote about four members of our little coterie. It is late to the party, I apologize.

Dear:

—katherine

I don't remember ever falling
in love with sunsets, like worry

it was always there. Yet the stop-light
moment frozen in amber

skylines over sloping hills, reminds
each of us that beginnings exists.

Even as the sunsets nurse
the seeds of our forgetting.


—jonathan

to prove that boys are giants
is to undress the lion, file his teeth

and show that naked, he is fiercest.
He is fiercest, who knows only

what is beautiful. I follow suit. Unloosening
the riff and the tie. Jon, I'm getting there.


—alesia

If all the poems died, I think we would
laugh and drink beer to bitterness.

We would dance in the ashes of old
worlds and in our caffeine fingers, pray

new ones. Not just poets, but makers
better than those titans before who

pried worlds from words. We are the word:
Logos. Thunder. Sound and Fury. Always.


—beatrice

The body, which is art electric, art persona; masks
secrets which long to be naked. Fuck

polite skins, tear them off - wear earrings in our
ears. The body is the poem, is the method

of the message. I have long learned that skin
is a form of silence in which things not said

become poems and poems and poems.

naked

electric, I search for ground,
finding none, I body.

clouded, condensed, words
on your glasses, because I spoke too close.

if string theory is right, then you are
playing me like a fiddle. If I can ever stop

justifying my text, if I can prevent spreading
and thinning, if I can keep them close, then we can be

naked

because poems and poems and poems and poems and poems and poems and poems

bring the champagne....

... because lil ole chicken paprika is on the a list at wardsix! we may have been there all along, but how do I know? We're not on the b-list!

So if maybe you got curious and clicked their link, we're not nearly as wise as those sixers. But we're way more obsessive, if you like that.

Seriously though, let's keep being weird, and keep having fun. We lasted a full 4 months longer than I expected. Uber-pwnage.

Well I'm Reading Novels Now..

I think I may have overdosed on an entire genre. Reading ("closely") nine or so contemporary poets in the span of three months has really hurt not only my analytical skills, but my enjoyment factor as well. So, I've moved on to the novel, and what a doozie it was. Usually, I ascribe my lack of novel-love to my inability to sit still long enough. Wrong-o! I just hadn't been reading the right novels. Seeing as the last one I'd completed was Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (which is enough to depress anyone out of dating for awhile)...I decided to read Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

In case you weren't already aware, I go to Cornell. In case you weren't already aware times two, Cornell likes to take claim for any authors that so much as breathed on the arts quad. Junot Diaz was one of them--he received his MFA here in '95, and ever since then, he's been (deservingly) the pride and joy of the English Department. For some reason, I've been afraid to read contemporary novels thinking myself not well-versed enough in the oldies to get a handle on the newbies (hence the Thomas Hardy adventure this summer). Wrong-o again! Diaz's novel surprised and enraptured my forlorn writerly heart, and I'm kicking myself for not going to his reading last year.

Since J Robert Lennon did a pretty thorough job reviewing the book, and I'm out of practice.. I'll just include some of my favorite quotes:


Not only was our girl not embarassed by what had happened, even after being shaken down by the rector, and the nun and the janitor, a holy triple-team, she absolutely refused to profess her guilt! If she had rotated her head around 360 degrees and vomited green-pea soup it would have caused only slightly less of an uproar. 101

And what about the cook, Marco Antonio, a one-legged, no-ear grotesque straight out of Gormenghast? (His explanation for his appearance: I had an accident). 107

All that can be said is that is was the end of language, the end of hope. It was the sort of beating that breaks people, breaks them utterly. 147

Players: never never never fuck with a bitch named Awilda. Because when she awildas out on your ass you'll know pain for real. 175

But not one scrap of paper with his handwriting? That was more than thorough. You got to fear a motherfucker or what he's writing to do something like that. But hey, it's only a story, with no solid evidence, the kind of shit only a nerd could love. 246



The narrator was quirky, but never overbearing. It was exactly the kind of novel I needed to thin my poem-y thick brain. The funny and morose, the nerd and naked truth--it was a hybrid that bridged the gap between the verse and prose world, and any author that can do that in such a consistent and brilliant way is worth the read.



Next novel! William Kennedy and The Flaming Corsage

Saul Williams: The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust – 71%

Before we go any further with this review, bias should be disclosed. I haven’t been able to stomach the majority of slam poetry in about 5 years. It all seemed really cool and counter-cultural until I released that, just like Taylor Mali outlined in “How to write a political poem,” slam is as restrictive a template as your old fashioned pen-and-paper poetry, if not more so (go to http://marckellysmith.com/# for an example. And this guy I worshipped my freshman year. Age brings wisdom? Blech).

Saul Williams and his partner-in-crime Beau Sia are two slam poets that manage to do something creative in an entire genre dominated by one large bloated aesthetic. But Saul’s also a rapper, right? Well, sorta. In the same sense that that guy from Linkin Park is a rapper. For one of the few slam poets to really master rhythmic consistency and variation, a lot of Williams’ rhymes denigrate into a-rhythmic beat talking or Reznor-style shouting. Which leads us right to Niggy Tardust.

The production here is a gift and a curse. Thavius Beck’s production on “Black History Month” is L.A. filthy, Satan’s-marching-band rude (and somehow reminiscent of Death from Above 1979 to me, for some reason), and Trent Reznor’s hand makes “Break,” “Banged and Blown Through,” and even the cover of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” sound just really fucking good. “Break” itself veers between Zero-7 chanting, stereophonic dueling Saul raps, and a rave up that, if you didn’t know that NIN guy was producing it, you might mistake for a take on power music / electric revival (don’t worry, Trent Reznor did not ruin “B.O.B” thank god). That U2 cover still throws me, though. Out of context from the album, its good, but I still don’t see the artistic urgency in choosing that song. In the sequence of the album, I can make some kind of poor urban condition / street violence connection between it and the sprawling racial commentary that makes up Tardust, but it still seems a bit too easy on an album whose title track and hook actually addresses the DL.

If you’re unsure about what the DL happens to be, go learn it. Music review, not gender politics. Briefly, the urban community shies away from discussing homosexuality because many men have gay affairs on the side, contract HIV, and pass it to their partners. The community blames it on homosexuals rather than adjusting the uber-masculine image expectation on the African-American male. Fitting into all this are those never-gonna-die rumors about how your favorite rapper is in the closet. “Niggy Tardust,” as far as I can divine, a.) Spends a chunk of its time setting up 50 Cent as the new black androgynous bi-sexual figure, “don’t call him by his name / white people call him ‘Curtis,’” and b.) Notating the DL by singing in the hook “When I say Niggy, you say nothin’ / Niggy. Niggy. / When I say Niggy, you say nothin’ / Niggy. Noth-Shut up.” Not even the hook can come close to questioning this standard, because that compromise of masculinity would entirely destabilize the proto-machismo of his identity. It’s a kind of flip from actual Ziggy – you had to comment on Ziggy because Bowie was actively playing with gender roles and stereotypes. Even that Lil’ Wayne / Baby kiss fell out from the discourse because no one wanted to think about the repercussions of a non-heterosexual image in hip-hop.

“The realness // god of the streets,” is the fulcrum of Tardust. And as critical as Williams is of mainstream rap’s myopia, he’s still “got the whole host of angels // shuffling on my iPod.” The first line of the album comes from a Biz Markie song, “Tr(n)igger” samples “Welcome to the Terrordome.” When it comes to criticism, Williams is either quite naff (“Would Jesus Christ come back American? / What if he’s Iraqi and here again?”) or fire-and-brimstone-y (“Pimp thug bling / drug lord of the underground kings / how can you be so sure I won’t call down the rains?” both lines from “Tr(n)igger”). And that’s why this album is so difficult. It’s a combination of pure hip-hop experimentation and NIN b-side level stuff. For every two tracks like the Afro-beat crooning of “Sacred Money” and the Prince-ly “Raw” (“What’s a song if you can’t fuck to it?”), you get a “WTF!” and “Raised to be Lowered,” and on the former you can actually sing that “Every day is exactly the same” song off some recent NIN record (I could look it up, but it’s NIN. Just turn on the fucking radio). There’s something of worth in each song, either through Saul’s scattershot genius lyrics or some creative stuff with the hook (the ah-ah-ye’s at the end of “WTF!” are pretty alright) but you have to get through the first minute and a half without pressing the skip button. And when I hear Trent’s voice at the beginning of “WTF!” my finger has already pressed the button.

Here’s the thing. It’s thick for a hip-hop album, if it can be called that, and I love the idea of a truly 100% collaborative experience in hip-hop. But there’s an issue with hardness. In tracks like “DNA,” Williams and Reznor are commenting on some kind of “hardness” or “realness” of the streets, but these feel approximated at best on the album itself. It’s still a sort-of hot beat wrapped in those NIN/ennui synths, like Reznor looked up from his deck of Nine Inch Nails b-sides and said, “Hey, Saul, you’re black, this is hard, right?” The hook is whatever and the rhyme patterns you see coming from a mile away. So are you emulating that early nineties shit, or are you making fun and one upping modern attempts at it? Because neither is realized (for some real fun, check the “Have You Had a Stranger” skit from Pharoahe Monch’s Desire). The weird overproduction of Tardust throws Williams’ generally excellent vocals all around, keeping him occasionally trapped in that awkward rap shuffle (this may not be the best album for life-changing flows). At best his rhymes are angular and fluid, and his singing (especially in “Scared Money”) is like a sinister, black, rawer JT. At worst his flow is arrhythmic and nonsensical, and his singing is a kind of monstrous Frankenstein Reznor attempt (but that voice is great on “Black History Month”). It’s weird to have an album so invested in blackness and realness be bogged down by the music of sad white suburban teens across the country, but that said the first half of the album is produced real good. The second half falls off something steep, though.

That 71% is indicative of the goodness ratio, but not of whether you should buy it or not. Buy the goddamn thing, it’s worth every penny. This experiment, as flawed as it is at times, is worth $5. It’s ambitious as all get-out in its own way. The production curses the album with a surprisingly high forgetfulness factor. Unless I turn them on right now, I can’t recall the second half of Tardust. So it comes down to what you can tolerate. Me, I can’t tolerate NIN or most of Reznor’s production, but I still think this is the closest Williams has ever come to a really great album, and it’s completely worth the 5 bucks, if for nothing else than that sweet picture of him with that Blaxplotation disco jewelry on, holding a kitten with a red eye patch. Aspirations aside, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust is really good, and the best we’ve gotten from Saul Williams yet. It’s still a little uneven, and its play count drops off after a week or so, but it’s quite possibly a gift to any mix tape made in the next year. So he’s way better than that guy from Linkin Park – that was way harsh. Buy the album, and let’s steal Saul from that creepy old guy from that link up there once and for all – if he’s that good at poetry (and he’s fucking incredible) maybe we can finally get that Saul Williams & Ghostface Killah collab I’ve been jonseing for.

*****

Side note: Jay-Z's American Gangster is surprisingly good. Takes about 4 tracks to get cooking, but tracks 4-15 are pure soul sample rhyme magic. Like, fuck this guy, for taking six months on one of the worst albums of all time (Kingdom Come) but cranking out this almost-classic in 4 weeks. So, in closing, here is a sample of Jigga's most aware lyrics in the past 10 years, from the track ignorant shit: "So, don't believe everything your earlobe captures / It's mostly backwards, unless it happens to be as accurate as me / And everything said in song, you happen to see / Then, actually, believe half of what you see / None of what you hear, even if it's spat by me / And with that said, I will kill niggaz dead / Cut niggaz short, give you wheels for legs." That's right, meta-hova.

Clarinet Hating (If Mr. Spena had Allowed me to Play the Harp)

I don't remember how it went down
but I'm sure I was devastated

We are sorry to report a lack
of eye witness reports and fund raisings
has caused a cut
back on the allocation of orchestra materials
and maintenance. The band and choir, naturally will feel
no effect. Kindly encourage your children
to choose brass
or woodwind instrument.

In my dreams I see nothing
except suspended strings and horsehairs braising and bruising
suburban bodies.

Not that there was ever a harp
in the budget, but I was promised certain things.

Harpo
a banjo
the knot of string against a can
he was a real unmentionable mensch
but here I am twiddling along on the clarinet
so unlike Harpo, yet still I am earning, respectable.

I often wonder, if the band had been disbanded instead
what a harpist's skin would feel like, but I'm too loose
and the jacket is too tight, so I keep on clarifying the notes
on the page, the division of the staff
to my students--never a teacher for the ages
or for the apple.

Are Hooks Entitled to Interiority? Etc.

Couple of thoughts:

The other day I was listening through Ye's last album, preparing to write a post about how convuluted his idea of conscious rap is (which I'll get to in a bit) when a pattern emerged - Ye (and Common, all the Chi-Town backpack rappers, Souljaboy, Lil' Wayne, etc., etc., etc.) addressed the hook as though it had interiority, as though the song was an active duet. The particular one in mind is "Champion," where he flips the Steely Dan sample and answers ("Did you realize that you were a champion in their eyes? / Yes I did! / So I packed it up and brought it back for the kids...")

Hooks, middle eights, choruses, all function as the aural grab, the singable bit, or at least the cool bit that you don't really understand but sing in a high falsetto anyways (see "Peacebone," Animal Collective). However, addressing the hook, addressing an element of the song adds a kind of narcissistic mirroring to the proceedings, which makes perfect sense, given that all of the world's music loving population is aware of Kanye as "that guy who has hissy fits." It is kind of clever, but its also smug and in this situation, incredibly lazy.

Ye, via Steely Dan, has it declared that he is a champion. Now braggadacio is alive and well in rap, and if done well, is incredible, but the bar is raised that much higher. If you want to declare yourself the hottest thing alive, you've got to sound it, you've got to have the skills to shut people up. See Black Thought: "I'm like aquaman and brown hornet / I'm like Imhotep but don't flaunt it." As the Village Voice has already pointed out, Kanye is not really an MC, he's a rhythmic talker. His subject matter only includes himself, and is only referenced via immediate conventional means (Fresh, fly, shoes, Louis V, Chi-town, D's), and he has no rhythmic or melodic variation in most of his songs. He rap-talks. So this use of hook as interlocutor is smart on Kanye's part - he can have the hook declare him champion, and then rap about how he's lifting up Chicago's youth with his rhymes. This is essentially indicative of Graduation as a whole. It's an attempt at a true mc album, a rappers album to show off Kanye's rhymes, but unless you want to take eight hundred rhymes about LV and a "black kate moss" to the bank, then it's gone broke. When Lil' Wayne addresses a hook (here I'm looking at every song on Da Drought III), it's as a support - he takes the gist of the hook and raps about it. But this is a trend in rap, and an interesting one. As much as I think it's laziness on Kanye's part (like most of that album), I do think he's the only one who could get away with it. So we'll see. Nothing wrong with a conversation between rapper and hook - let's just get a bit more out of it.

One other thing, I had mentioned to both Alesia and Bendi wait I mean bic_razor and the ole bigscarygiraffe: Ye's fight to stop homophobia in rap lyrics is coupled with his ignorant misogyny. See "you could be my black Kate Moss tonight," "She'd do anything for a klondike / well I'd do anything for a blond dyke," "how the hell could you front on me / there's a thousand you's, there's only one of me." That's all from "Stronger." Ye wants to stop homophobia, but addresses the women on his album (in many places, not just Stronger) as dykes. Classy.

One last musical thought before I disappear into applications for the morning: In Rainbows has been the talk of the town, everybody's reviewed it (except for CMG, bless em), and it's "the heir to OK Computer" or "really peaceful." And I wonder if we're all listening to the same album. Everybody likes to divvy up RH albums: Kid A, Amesiac, HTTT are the "electronic," indulgent records, whereas Pablo Honey, The Bends, and OKC are the Brit-Pop, rock and roll records. And my god does that not make any sense at all. The prevalence of electronics on OKC is always ignored, bizarrely so, because on that record they have human voices (fitter happier, as well as exit music, karma police, and lucky - the weird, disembodied electric choir). You would not believe how much music in the current marketplace is synthesizered and not guitar, so the claims of "I don't like electronics" tell me that the person a. isn't listening and b. never really listened to Kid A or Amnesiac. (rant: at some point, some reviewer decided to use "glitchy bleeps and bloops" as a way to describe the beat elements in RH and Thom Yorke's albums. Least descriptive and most nothing phrase in musical criticism in the past couple years - Idioteque is certainly not bleepy or bloopy.) IR is not a rock record, nor is it an electronic record - I'm even disputing the claims of mellowness. It's sensual. Everything is tight and rounded, the bass is amped, even 15 Steps evolves from its initial banger-in-an-empty-stadium vibe to a just syrupy guitar line while Phil Selway freaks on the drums. It's something different. It's not the new OKC, and it won't be, no matter how many conspiracy theories you find in it (same number of letters in ok computer and in rainbows! OMFG).

So, word. Applications. Thanks for reading.