If a deaf man screams in the woods, does he exist?
Shit.
King Britt aka
Daddy Never Sleeps put me on this via
twidda. But what's the lasting imprint of this here? Ignoring the metaphor of the song, he's saying, 'in 2009, some girls shoplift'.
Let's zoom to the future,
Mortal Engines style, where this joint gets picked up and analysed as being representative of this moment in time. They're going to listen to this track and be all like, yeah, this was how folk told stories in those days. They made a backing track of rhythms and talked in loose verse about what they saw. People shoplifted in those days. It would be just a little document about society in a time gone by. But, they'd missing a whole lot about hip hop for sure, right?
What are we missing when we look at older folk literature? When we read the old icelandic Sagas (cos I do that sometimes) like this one, translated by
sagadb.org:
Of Aulvir Hnuf.
Audbjorn was then king over the Firthfolk; there was an earl of his named Hroald, whose son was Thorir. Atli the Slim was then an earl, he dwelt at Gaula; he had sons - Hallstein, Holmstein, and Herstein; and a daughter, Solveig the Fair. It happened one autumn that much people were gathered at Gaula for a sacrificial feast, then saw Aulvir Hnuf Solveig and courted her; he afterwards asked her to wife. But the earl thought him an unequal match and would not give her. Whereupon Aulvir composed many love-songs, and thought so much of Solveig that he left freebooting, but Thorolf and Eyvind Lambi kept it on.
Was this their hip hop? A lot of yoof are into edo period Japanese poet
Basho at the minute it seems (upstart and
RBMA accepted producer kidkanevil is naming his 2010 debut album
Basho Basho according to
his website, fer instance), so lets use him as another example;
People in the world
Hardly notice these blossoms -
Chestnuts by the eaves
Sick ed. Here's what fave film head Andrei Tarkovsky had to say about Basho's haikus;
How simply and accurately life is observed. What discipline of mind and nobility of imagination. The lines are beautiful, because the moment, plucked out and fixed, is one, and falls into infinity.
Thanks Andy. Now, was Basho hip hop? I reckon
freetree would say that the rza would say that he totally was. That's it really. Was just listening to this beat tape late at night and got all googly-eyed, thinking, shit, is some kid gonna do a history report in the future on folk literature and be all like;
Folk literature was how people told stories about their day to day life. It didn't change much between the years 1000-2000AC, they just called it different things like haikus, sagas and beat tapes.
Just people passing on messages, telling stories, telling shit how it is. Hip Hop.
