Jukebox Sunday 2: Yusef Komunyakaa, Eyedea, Anticon

AND WE'RE BACK!

Jukebox Sunday 2 is here with some poetry videos and poetic music for you fine folks. And just a warning, I'm feeling a little nostalgic for hip hop today.

Let's start out with a little poetry fun. Billy Collins' very entertaining poem "Lanyard" is as good a place as any. We'll meet back up with poetry at the end with Yusef Komunyakaa.

Sean Bonnette's escaped the trap that we built to capture him last week, he's been spotted in this recording of the AJJ song "A Poem" which has one of the better poetry-related lines in recent songs: A poem is a song, that no one cares about, except the writers of the songs that we're all singing"

Let's move toward some poetic indie hip hop from 20 years ago, everyone's favorite! I know it's one of mine, at least! Anticon was a tremendous force of poetry in the hip hop scene and Sole was one of its co-founders. One of my favorite albums from that era was Sole's Bottle of Humans, and this is its title track.

Now a bit more abstract, here is alternative/indie hip hop supergroup Deep Puddle Dynamics formed of Slug, Sole, Doseone, and Alias, and their 1998 song "Scarecrow Speaks"

And coming around via Slug to one of my favorite little hot spots of music, Minnesota Hip Hop, here is the Eyedea & Abilities song "Sky Diver"

While we're with Eyedea, one of my favorite emcees, legendary lyricist, freestyler, battler etc etc. here is a song from his Oliver Hart project, this song is called "How Much Do You Pay" and it has some recordings of a very well-known homeless man from the time in Minneapolis who played a bucket and was very friendly.

As we transition back towards poetry let's do that through Atmosphere's anaphoric list song "Scapegoats".

Dipping back to Eyedea's Oliver Hart for this minimalist narrative rap "Step by Step"

OK, Back to poetry. This is a writing blog after all. Here is a short video of Yusef Komunyakaa talking about when a poem is finished, more specifically, he gives a little insight into the revision process that is quite useful. 

To add to what Mr. Komunyakaa says, I also am wary of the beginnings of poems. Sometimes it can take a stanza or two even for a poem to find its feet, to discover what it's trying to say, what truth it's trying to highligh about the human condition or whatever, and this can often be rectified in editing, sometimes that opening needs to be hacked off. I just chopped the opening stanza of a poem I'd been sending out and had been proud of and I couldn't feel better about the excision. And finally we'll end with a short film made by the filmmaker Iriana Rucker for Komunyakaa's poem "Slam, Dunk & Hook".

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Bonus Writing Exercises: You didn't think you'd get away without writing a poem did you? 

1)Take inspiration from what you've listened and use either a setting, a turn of phrase, an object, something from one of the songs and write a piece based on that.

2) Look up the lyrics to your favorite of those songs at Lyrics Genius and make an erasure poem from those lyrics.

3) Look up the lyrics to your favorite of those songs and find a line to use as the epigraph for a piece of writing. The quote usually will be a pithy way to 'sum up' some aspect of your piece, or just be related in a way that the quote informs the piece.

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Jukebox Sunday 1: That time Joy Harjo went on Def Poetry Jam and some music that is poetry

To anchor this first Jukebox Sunday, let's start with  video from Def Poetry Jam. A lot of academics dismiss spoken word as being preoccupied with performance and identity politics, but a lot of academics don't like hip hop or think cartoons are only for kids—they're closed minded, is what I'm saying. But they're also getting older, retiring etc, and while some pieces that work well on the stage don't hold up on the page, the same can be said about a lot of plays, yet you'd be hard-pressed to find someone that would say playwriting isn't a worthy creative endeavor (unless they're a parent paying for someone's MFA or something. I wish I had something like that!).

So, now that I've been rude to academics, let's watch that time the current US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo went on Def Poetry Jam on HBO. I think the whole show's definitely worth a watch, Beau Sia is one standout from both of his appearances, but it's great as sort of little one man shows, as many pieces take the loose form of the monologue. But, here's just a great poem from a great poet.

And hey, it's Sunday. Here are a couple other videos that you may not have seen that I really love. I get to play DJ for a little bit, because I want to. I'm putting off the last few touches of the Experimental Lit Journal article for a little fun with music, get off my back!

First, Sean Bonnette is one of my favorite songwriters right now (Pat Schneeweis owns my heart right now) and he's been live streaming little shows everynight for almost 4 months now. He fronts the folk punk band The AJJs . I think folk-punk, especially with Dylan winning the Pulitzer in poetry, is definitely worthy of a close listen. They pick up the spirit of the Beats in many unexpected ways that I think you'll all like. But also, just good, different songs. That's what's following. This song is called Kokopelli Face Tattoo, and it has a chorus I can't get out of my head 3 days out of the week: "Hey dude, I hate everything you do, but I'm trying really hard to not hate you, hating you won't make you suck any less"

While we have Sean, here's a short clip of him playing one of his favorite songs from the quarantine shows, Roger Miller's Oo-de-lally" from the Disney animated Robin Hood movie, which actually has an interesting rhyme scheme if you listen to the sounds.

We'll get back to Sean at the end, but here is one of my favorite Rapper-turned-Folk singers. He still raps, but this is more folky, which makes sense because it's off a split with Pat the Bunny. A bummer, but hey, poetry can be a bummer sometimes. And so can folk-punk so... just enjoy the beautiful corpse imagery.

Remember how I said Ceschi was only one of my favorite rapper-turned-folk singers? That's because Yoni Wolf is pretty awesome, and even more on the weird or 'avant-garde' tip, if you want. I'm going to be posting my huge article about experimental writing soon after this, so I guess I just have it on the brain. This song is insanely catchy, and I don't know how many times I've gotten the chorus in my head "Shit I said to school counselors haunts me, and I am not okay boy". Yoni Wolf is of course one of the founders of Anticon Records, forerunners of avant-garde/alternative hip hop from 1998 to 2014. Why? "Strawberries", enjoy.

And on the positive tip, here's something you may not have heard in oddly wonderful pairing that was The Uncluded. Aesop Rock and Kimya Dawson. And by positivity, I mean the song, not the current events. Here's one of my favorite songs of theirs called "Delicate Cycle" that comes together really well from the seemingly dissonant parts.

Since I was talking about avant-garde writing, and even though that was a pretty clear Aesop Rock verse, as they go, I don't think many writers of avant-garde and experimental poetry know just how much they need some Noah23 in their life. His Plague Language record label has produced a lot of very interesting music over the past 2 decades. He isn't always as inventive as this, but I just love the wordplay and sound disassociation in some of this 2001 song "Insect Network". I actually used to post on a rhyme board back around that time so I probably have a special place in my heart for his music. Those were the days... Homegrownhiphopzone forever.

Now I'll sneak in a Pat Schneeweis song. I'm going to be reading lyrics of his songs in the first podcast, but not this awesome song. He is the godfather of current folk punk. Such a great, great songwriter. This one is called "The Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist".

Now a quick jump across the pond for UK folk punker Frank Turner's sad and defiant song of narrative fragments "The Queen is Dead"

I love A Fistful of Vinyl's videos, kind of like an 'actual' small desk concert, and this acoustic version of the AJJ's song "Linda Ronstadt" is a great way to end this little juke box of songs with interesting and poetic lyrics.

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Bonus Writing Exercises: You didn't think you'd get away without writing a poem did you? 

1)Take inspiration from what you've listened and use either a setting, a turn of phrase, an object, something from one of the songs and write a piece based on that.

2) Look up the lyrics to your favorite of those songs at Lyrics Genius and make an erasure poem from those lyrics.

3) Look up the lyrics to your favorite of those songs and find a line to use as the epigraph for a piece of writing. The quote usually will be a pithy way to 'sum up' some aspect of your piece, or just be related in a way that the quote informs the piece.

Read More