music to write to. Natürlich. Mr. Skwirl.
19 NovMr. Skwirl provided the soundscape for our Remaking Moby-Dick project and a series of new tracks for PRJ3. We love the way his music continues to evolve and the way it’s changed since he moved from London to Berlin. (We love you, Skwirl.)
“It is as if we are incapable of making words that truly capture what the soul is, so we have allowed music to be how we all truly communicate.”
Mic Write. Onus Chain.
17 Nov
We’ve known Mic Write and watched his work evolve for 8 years now. His Onus Chain is brilliant.
If it don’t love you, don’t serve it.
You become what you deserve.
You’re a nation all your own.
Where there’s love, there’s always home.
Art with No Easel: Jay-Z on poetry
24 AugWe love Jay-Z’s Decoded. You should have your own copy.
In the Negative Space section of the book, this riff on the connections between poetry making and song making:
“Since rap is poetry, and a good MC is a good poet, you can’t just half-listen to a song once and think you’ve got it. Here’s what I mean: A poet’s mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level. For instance, a poet makes words work sonically — as sounds, as music. Hip-hop tracks have traditionally been heavy on the beats, light on melody, but some MCs — Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony, for example — find ways to work melodies into the rapping. Other MCs — thing about Run from Run-DMC — turn words into percussion: cool chief rocka, I don’t drink vodka, but keep a bag of cheeba inside my locka. The words themselves don’t mean much, but he snaps those clipped syllables out like drumbeats, bap bap bapbap. It’s as exciting as watching a middle weight throw a perfect combination. If you listened to that joint and came away thinking it was a simple rhyme about holding weed in a gym locker, you’d be reading it wrong: The point of those bars is to bang out a rhythmic idea, not to impress you with the literal meaning of the words.”