2005-04-18

I wrote a big amount of stuff for a project last month, it was meant to read aloud on a video as part of an installation/performance for a show in Beacon. Every day in the month of march I spent some time writing about whatever came up, the big theme centered on meditation. What follows is an entry from March 15, regarding rappers and breath (its ok to get bored and not finish it all...):

3.15.05

Rap Artists use the theme of breathing in their lyrics from time to time, of breathing in and out to stay calm, or to keep up with the flow, as if exercising. As if to keep up with their vocal calisthenics, they need to keep the whole apparatus of inhaling and exhaling through the throat warmed up.

Fabolous had a huge hit last year, entitled Breathe. In the song, he counts of �one and then two, two and then a 3, 3 and then a 4, and then you gotta breathe ....:� Images of breathing, respirators, inhaling ganga, etc. are peppered throughout the song.

In J-Z�s �Breathe Easy� the song begins with a man talking, as if in an interview:

�So I had to memorize these rhymes till I got home, you understand? So you know once you memorized a sentence, its like an exercise . . .� Then the song starts off, again with the count: 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 Breathe Easy
A Jesting Song where the rapper compares himself to a man in training, going to spring training in the middle of winter, waking the birds that have the nerve to sleep at night, jogging, doing jumping jacks, huffing and puffing through the song. After the first chorus, JZ jeers, �It�s a lyrical exercise, ya�ll aint tired, right?�

Kanye West�s �Breathe in Breathe out� with Ludacris, off of his grammy award winning �the college dropout� album, talks about all the gangsta poses of black culture, which he argues are invalid, and void of any real substance. People get caught up in the fast life of what�s cool, what makes money, crime, disrespect of woman, and drugs. The answer is to breathe in, breathe out, and let it all go. Likewise, he uses the actual rapping as a metaphor for this lifestyle of more money / more problems, the faster you fill lines with words, the longer you rap without talking a break. Unlike early rappers like Rakim, or Run DMC, today�s rappers often leave no space in between the words. (Eminem is a prime example). A frantic style replaces the classic unhurried attitude of the original rappers. In his lyrics, Rakim brought a content and complexity with a �less is more� attitude, something that applies not only in word slinging, but in life as well. West ends the song, �If you don�t need a fix, girl you gotta leave, you can�t take that all at one time you gotta breathe.�

Ghostface�s song �Beat the Clock�, from his latest album, a sample:
�This is how I�m gonna kill�em with 4 lines left/ hold your breath, say my name 5 times, it takes practice, yo/ Be caful way sayin my name, its like ma adress yo/ Besides you fuck up on a count in a house of blow.�

A fun excuse of a rap where the rapper is challenged to finish a song on the spot . . . as the dialogue between the challenger and the rapper is laid over the real time beat, the rap is likened to an improvisation, a race against the clock. Ghostface tries to bow out after 2 sets, saying he�s �tired�, but the challenger refuses to allow him to �cheat.�

The beat is time in hip-hop. A clock, a mechanism that continues. The Hindu creator, Shiva dancing to a rhythm. His consort is sometimes � Black Kali, in the Hindu tantrik pantheon, the central deity of time. Her own nature is pure ecstasy. Her hips decorated by a girdle of dead men�s hands, the crescent moon poised on her disheveled hair, two trickles of blood dribbling from the corners of her smiling mouth, as she flourishes a sacrificial sword and sits enjoying the creative lord, mahakala, both of them using a corpse as a couch.�
She is writhing to the same beat that these rappers are continually trying to keep up with .
�The goddess sitting alert, writhing and gesticulating [in pleasure], is the kinetic principle of reality, active creation, called Prakriti. The male who penetrates and continually fertilizes her into being and action is the principle called Purusa, or lord ... ... lying on [an] inert corpse, which represents his alter ego.
In other words, the alter ego of the dude mackin� on the goddess of time so that she will have creative energy, is death. It�s like Notorious B.I.G., who released and album called �Ready to Die�. He was ready to die, and that hurried his incredible output of material. A man aquainted with death, is a man on fire.

J-Z speaking of memorizing lines till he got home in �Breathe Easy� mirrors similar events in James Joyce�s �Portrait of the Artist as a young man.� The protaganist composes couplets (he is a poet) while walking to school, or home, or whereever, and edits and polishes it up as he walks. Then recites it to himself until he can get home and write it down.

Likewise, this art installation that you are now looking at originated in a mind�clearing, and alternatively imagination � igniting walk around New York City. As I crossed the 59th street bridge, at its tip, its exact center, did I find myself struck, and joined with this idea.

The Buddha talking about nothing in a roundabout way, is all this is.

Art is killed by silence and inaction. Meditation is the death of art. Art can be reborn every day, everyday I feel a tendency to avoid meditation, just as I also a feel an urge to want to relax. Seeing the sun, and all the energy of the people moving about is so damn enervating, and wonderful. The warmth and the light of the sun bursting through the windows is a drug to amplify my heart�s beat,
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Beat is like breath, breath is like thread, it connects us all the days of our lives, the minutes of our day; it connects the motions and ideas that are released in us.

So that they are all part of a fabric. There is another breath that the universe has. In Tantric thought, there is a larger body that is the universe, called the Subtle body, and smaller bodies, which are us � people � all come from the larger body.
So the larger body also has a breath, that connects all of us together. In a web or fabric � all people and animals, and things are part of this larger composite physical body of the universe; ant that breath I can compare to what physicists have held to be a �String theory,� advanced by a paper by physicists Joel Scherk in Paris and John Schwarz from the California Institute of Technology. This theory, favored by the world�s scientists since the mid 80�s, holds that there are strings that wave as if held between two vibrating points, and that they account for the wave � like attributes of what we always thought of as particles, and also for the particle-like activity of energy that moves in waves. The earth is connected to the sun, so this theory goes, by billions and billions of strings, the rays of light we perceive represent channels through which both sides are sending and receiving parcels. The sun spits out light and warmth to us, the earth returns energy in the form of gravitational pull, sending back particles called �Gravitons�. What we call �gravity� is the tensile strength of an uncountable number of these strings. We are also strung to the earth, and strung again to each other. It takes more energy to hold two things apart than to allow them to come together.
(it takes more muscles to frown than to smile).
This is why tantric buddhists believed the monks in their monasteries and caves were wrong to abandon the world of sensation for the mysteries of God and the ecstasy of nature, that the energy expended in doing so made one spiteful of the world.

Hip � hop lends itself, promotes, the form of the single, over that of the album. It is more difficult to make a rising action, an opera, out of talk and beats than songs with scales, melody. It is easier to turn rap on and then off, for me at least. It is power in a moment, the strength of a good rapper is to express with linearity. Story telling, flowing over syllabales, assonance, internal rhyme, etc. A rapper doesn�t need more than 8 bars to impress.
Eminem, in �What you say?�, concerning his flow:

�and I�m gonna pour it on like syrup bitch, thick and grits sick and twisted Mr. Buttersworth/ Dre told me to milk this shit for what it�s worth/ til the couch is temped tipps and stones to earth/ and if i fumble a verse keep going/ First take I make mistakes just keep it, no punches pulled, no punches that�s weak shit ...�

This leads me to an article in memory of recently deceased Susan Sontag in this month�s Art Forum, where Wayne Koestenbaum writes: (quote) �Sontag�s credo: Move on . . . �The aesthete�s radicalism: to be multiple, to make multiple identifications; to assume fully the privilege of the personal... The writer�s freedom that Bartes describes is, in part, flight. The writer is the deputy of his own ego � of that self in perpetual flight before what is fixed by writing, as the mind is in perpetual flight from doctrine.� Barthes wants to move on -- that is one of the imperatives of the aesthete�s sensibility.
Move on, Sontag urged. Leave the field untilled. Switch projects. Change hemispheres. Make a film. Direct a play. Writhe a novel. Fly to Hanoi. Nonspecialist, she refused restriction, scorned the limiting identity of expert. She would rather have been considered a collector, connoisseur, sad pervert � anything but an academic.� (unquote)

Like the Eminem lyrics urging himself to �Keep going�, is Sontag�s identical remark to Move on. Do not sweat the small stuff. It will pull you down from the heights that you seek, enjoy, and lavish yourself in. It�s what I tell myself as I sit and write about nothing in earnest here, and report it to you from my lotus pose.

Second, the idea of writing as flight. Rappers write and rap with dreams of moving out of the ghetto. They keep moving with the beat, and if they can syncronize their pace with a light touch , an internal knowlege of what is important to carry and what to leave behind, then they show the grace and style that we interpret as talent. It is all about being comfortable with flight, with removing yourself.
Writing now, here, and speaking what I have written, I am tapping in to a fight or flight mechanism, an instinctual social apparatus that is self-preservational. In order to leave this life, or evolve into a conscious alternative to pure biological mechanism, I need to overcome this fight or flight mentality of speaking to you, and talk to you with the understanding of what you are feeling right now. Don�t worry, I can tell what you are thinking. Don�t mind me, just listen to what I have to say. I feel your pain and confusion. Sit here a while longer and we will have a good time.