i was playing Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega when this beat
(smirk, the cool word, ha ha)
came out - i once said to a brief drinking
buddy on a bench in town that
i didn't like rap - didn't rap kinda ****
off poetry? quintessential 1990s summary -
in essence, it sounded just like that -
but no one really bothers Us3 - except the BBC -
rhymes to boom boom b b beat -
sentences expecting you to stand for
a minute's silence or a national anthem or
the presence of royalty for jokes -
oh yah - yappy puppy and mint fresh pomp -
sentences that seem so extraordinary
but being ordinary are nonetheless extra -
bounce bounce bounce - b b -
you choose your timing with the punctuation
marks on that one - the beauty of not recording
your poems? no one and everyone owns it -
it's as much mine as yours -
i was more Coolio than (before you think a white
boy trying to apt himself in culture -
more into John Coltrane than N.W.A. -
more into Bunny Wailer than Tupac -
gangster jokes - never read of the Russians or
the Yakuza - no films about them, too scary -
or there's Frank Sinatra - ratted out, took to the Las Vegas
strip and sang his heart out)...
1990s were loads of fun - by the time 1999 came along
with Prince's anthem not resounding with the fireworks
i was, what? 14? but i remember - or maybe it's
the child-effect - you can sense a crispness to those years -
for however-many hours the song was tip-of-this-iceberg
and the tickling of the tongue - had to go among
some obscure internet forums to get an answer -
black boy raps, white boy sings opera -
black boy runs 100m under a 10 seconds - white boy swims
100m under 47 seconds - that's positive discrimination
that is - better embrace our differences and STATE WHAT
THEY ARE than in secret keep a wasp nest of jealousy -
it's a bit ****, i know - but after two weeks in Kenya
spent mostly under the shade of a canopy, drinking
my way to a serenity i just kept thinking of Scandinavia -
best part of Kenya? sitting on a balcony feeding
macaques sugar and other things - to the grave:
that shock-look of the macaques - eyes wide open as if
injected with a kilogram of caffeine, the open mouth
O, the sound that came with it - a great ~Aposematism
(can't be bothered to look for an exact word,
this one will have to do, otherwise the waterfall is
not waterfall, and i still haven't made my intended point) -
that's when i realised Darwinism was a bit unnecessary -
sit on a balcony with two wild monkeys,
it won't really matter peering at them with a Galapagos
micro or telescope - that sort of thing breaks the chill -
yeah, a wild monkey, not a zoological monkey -
i mean a free monkey, not a fraudster or a thief or
murderer - a free one - and historically speaking
there's a certain absenteeism behind Darwinism -
a certain attempt to rewrite history - Darwinism is more
or a problem for historians than theologians, i'm
look at the timescale - going back to a chaste beginning
will not wash away all the **** in between.
oh right, the main point... the reason i said that opera
should not be sang in French (or English, but i'll have
to be biased and put Handel's Messiah as satisfying) -
is because it's spoken beautifully - some languages have
that characteristic - some languages are not worth
the opera - German is beautifully sang operatically (Mozart
was right on that one), as is Italian - and the only reason
being they're not exactly languages that are beautifully
spoke - Spanish is also a contender to join these two -
immediately it probes the ears - French speak and the English
too so beautifully, going beyond mere folk-song or
rock castrato is suicide - you'd think that excess French
spelling and the unspoken rule of gobbling letters from
being said, as what the English do slightly less would
aid the sometimes undecipherable operatic - but it doesn't -
opera in German and Italian sure, French and English?
what a tragedy.