Word made Fresh
November 24, 2005
Amalia Nickel
ESTEA EL
Crew: Influents
Location: Langley, BC
Associations: Mobilization Against War and Occupation, The DoJo hip-hop school
Sample:
Now the whole of everything is in everyone / So it really only just takes one / To get the job done/
Spirit turns flame, burnin’ like the sun / the last stand for the livin’ has finally begun…
I consider Thom to be the heart and soul behind Influents, going so far as to incorporate his work at the community centre with his hip-hop crew in starting up a weekly forum for kids to learn to master the many arts of hip hop culture. Thom and I sat down in Douglas Park, at the picnic tables between the children’s playground and the notoriously drug-ridden bushes and benches of the Park Proper. We talked about language and meaning, and the way in which hip-hop tends toward community, self-discovery and growth.
“Self awareness is the hugest part of the human condition,” Thom said. “Through language, through culture, people express themselves in a constant striving for identity.” He told me that we as humans manifest our self image as we formulate thoughts and test them out on the people around us. In this way individual understanding leads to community understanding, with language as the vehicle.
“At the core of the human psyche there is a need for a steady rhythms,” Thom thoughtfully explained to me in regard to the appeal of hip-hop music. “We crave the comfort of the instinctual memory that accompanies rhythm: memory of the time in the womb, the mother’s breath and heart in slow, reliable, repetitious sound.” He said that because there aren’t a lot of whacky time signatures and tempos in hip-hop, it holds an emotional, maternal meaning while remaining one of the freest forms of self expression. No equipment is needed, no education in musical theory, just lungs, mouth, and brain.
“Hip-hop has developed to the level where there is something for everyone to relate to,” he said, pointing out how it gave the oppressed a voice because there were no financial restraints and the stage was the street. “Hip-hop is a powerful tool for social change, so it’s best to make the most of that circumstance. Universals come through specifics, and everybody has their triumphs and hardships.”
Thom further explained, from across the picnic table, that “people understand language cerebrally; it is not an external experience.” Words are specific symbols, yet are completely malleable. We manipulate them with tone and context, and when we take these symbols into our own understanding there are infinite meanings for them. “You create the image described with your own mind so it becomes a whole different level of experience, an internalized and more powerful understanding,” he said.
All hip-hop artists are engaged in a battle within the genre, a consorted effort to rise above those whose art has no depth or quality. B-Boys call each other to compete on the smooth surface of the break dancing floor, graffiti artists paint over work which is half-hearted or unattractive, and rappers engage in battles of free-styling rhymes. DJ’s scratch with all their might, collaging flashes of expression in an attempt to be the best. Thom said that the battle aspect is essential to keeping the music and art vibrant and cutting edge, “pushing for a reevaluation of your approach and of yourself.” Contemporaries are the critics in such a real and obvious way; “You just know that you have to come correct.”
K’NAAN
Location: currently Toronto and formerly Somalia
Associations: Performs regularly for enthusiastic audiences at the United Nations.
Sample:
I know struggle, and struggle knows me/My life owes me / like an overdose I’m slowly /
Drifting in the arms of trouble / And trouble holds me / And nothing else’s close to me /
More than pain unfortunately / Like a self-fulfilling prophecy…
K’naan sounded tired when he spoke with me from his Toronto residence. The combination of a late performance the previous night and preparations for an impending South African tour have obviously drawn on his energy levels. Plus, it is Ramadan, so as a practicing Muslim with a “personal faith” he is fasting.
His rising fame is due as much to his unique history, growing up in the violence torn neighborhood of Mogadishu, Somalia, as to his organic sound of hand drums for beats and lyrics which unabashedly speak out for peace and resolution. He answered my questions in an articulate though gentle way, describing language as “the beginning of things,” a memory bank for the struggles and biases of a community. “Knowing the self depends on language,” he explained, describing how his own oral community’s memory bank is “supposed to have transferred all of the collective wisdom to [his] own existence,” and how in turn it is his responsibility to pass this wisdom on to the next generation. In a land where “your articulation is your manhood,” a Somali child can, “by reciting the names of his forefathers backwards all the way to the beginning of is lineage,” trace his family history 2000 years.
Now a part of the modern hip-hop community, K’naan described the tension between “the ancient way” of his past and “a new, young culture” of his present as “a grandfather and child in the same room.” In this way, he brings the wisdom of the Somali traditions of poetic language to an emerging forum of social justice and philosophy in North American hip-hop. This tension is “part of a balance in having to create a new path,” and he forges his way through drawing ideas from both parts of his identity. Hip-hop at a grassroots level stays “connected to struggle,” and speaks “for those [struggling] communities in their own language.” K’naan compassionately explained that “people need real things; too many people are living parallel with death and need more than entertainment, something they can feel.”
LYRIC
Crew: F.T.S. (Free Thinker’s Society)
Location: Brookswood
Sample:
“As I walk through the valley of the shadow of the dead /
Watch where I tread, I’m led by one thought in my head /
Wake people from their slumber and put ignorance to bed… /
Shootin’ verses at your chest, hear Lyric do his best /
To help your spirit feel blessed, the motivation for this quest…
(E.P. “High Spirits”)
I spoke to Lyric over sushi and tea, the resonance of his ideas filling the enclosed paper booth as I scribbled furiously. Lyric’s hip-hop history is distinct; it is synonymous with his spiritual history. Faith and rhymes are the remnants of an awakening which transformed him from a “devoutly agnostic” kid from Wally, Surrey, with a stigma against rap and higher power. Now, Lyric is a self-described “tool for a higher power” whose goal is “to be the best writer out there.” Lyric found that the “consistent creativity of rhyming [went] hand in hand with the realization that we’re here for a higher power to work though us” as he found his rhymes flowing with an “offering to life.”
Lyric’s passion for metaphysics leads him to believe that “we can move everything around us, in literal terms.” He told me of times on stage when he’s been able to sense the movement of energy: “thoughts are in my head, put into rhyme format, and I’m physically projecting them, holding them in my hands like a well rapped gift.” (Pun intended.) For Lyric, the invocation of language is a physical act, something the audience can grasp with an understanding of humanity when he succeeds at “being a really good channel or vessel.”
“We all love, and we all hate and every shade of grey in between,” he says of the universalism of hip-hop music. Lyric’s musical talents are driven by a goal to engage each listener on an individual level, and in doing so to offer a transforming experience similar to his own. He wants “people to drop their stigmas and biases about hip-hop,” and sees this happening when the underground world of rap becomes a normal part of life, “when self-expression through rhyming becomes a respected skill.”
Lyric’s story of transformation is evident in each rhyme he writes, and I can attest to the physical blessings which his performances bestow on the audience. Indeed, I have felt the magnitude of God manifest as His word is spoken through this beautiful vessel.
Now you go...
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