Happy Birthday Willie!

                                                       Happy Birthday Hip Hop Willie

Happy Birthday Willie! As the world celebrates Shakespeare’s 450^th birth anniversary on 23^rd April, 2014, we at the Hindu Literary Review raise a toast to greatest litterateur who has always enthralled  us with his amazing wordplay. Shakespearean works have been dissected and studied a million times over , but the latest ongoing study has completely bowled us. Hallelujah! Willie is the biggest rapper of all times!  Sonnet 18 as a rap verse completely astounds us! The Bards poetry raps to the beat of hip hop music!!!  

Originally, speaking of Shakespeare and hip hop in the same breath is like pairing the sacred with the profane.  Initially it sounds completely bizarre to classify the highbrow poetry of the Bard with that of rappers however popular they may be : R.E.M, Saul Williams, Kool Keith or Tupac Shakur. Yet research leads us to teachers, performers and projects, wherein hard core passionate followers of Shakespeare and hip hop have unearthed close resonance between the wordplay, meter and rhyme of the Bard and hip hop. Both employ meter, are fueled by rhyme, weave music and language to create the rhythm of a rap.

A visit back in time to the Globe Theatre with a Shakespearean play being enacted on stage would be an education in itself. The market place outside the theatre would be full of noisy jostling people, laughing, buying beer, nuts, and fruit from hawkers. The ambience inside would be no different, with people selling the same inside through the duration of the play. The crowd of charboys, servants, the illiterates who thronged the pit around the stage, and others in the galleries or boxes would be talking, criticizing, and booing through the performance of the play. Now if the Bard were to write serious poetry for such a crowd ( who had to be  lured from the bear baiting and bull fighting stands to come and attend his performances) he would have to rhyme and imbue it with powerful imagery and wordplay to be able to get their attention. In the absence of props, backdrops, stage settings, lights and other special effects ( the bards plays have no such directions ) it was the sound, wordplay, and rhythm of the language which conveyed everything. No doubt the poetry is high brow and all inclusive of action, imagery, thought and meter.  Ben Johnson’s quote – ‘Soul of the age, not of an age, but for all time - Thou art a monument, without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give’ holds so true.  Shakespeare, the ultimate master of human psychology and behaviour has held his audience at the time and through all times in the palm of his hand, through the sheer force of his powerful hip hop poetry.

Hip hop as a genre of music and song is familiar to us as a dervish chant of crude, debasing, violent lyric- which then understandably makes the comparison very difficult to assimilate. But if we were to shift our attention to the hip pop music of rappers like Saul Williams, (a decorated poet turned hip hop musician) we are pleasantly treated to a cathartic listening experience of  thought provoking , artistically viable poetry. Works of rappers like Aesop Rock, Illogic, Kool Keith, Andre 3000 from Outkast, Eyedea, Slug from Atmosphere introduce us to  clever use of words, exploring human psyche, existential disillusionments,  life , death, political and social upheavals . Sound diction, metaphoric- artistically themed poems rendered in pretty rhyme. Hip hop has a rich cultural context, a tradition that goes back thousands of years. ‘The most sacred histories of ancient African nations were recorded by a man known as a Griot, who was effectively a rapper. He would recite the nation's history over a beat of a drum’. Both Shakespeare works and hip hop as cultural expressions have been misinterpreted. Former is labelled as highbrow and taught in boring study rooms, and the latter is not accepted on a literary platform as an intellectual, artistic, poetic expression.

The ongoing projects sponsored by the UK government, explore intersections; where the twain shall meet.  One such project is the Hip Hop Shakespeare, where the Mobo hip hop award winning artiste Akala ( a passionate follower of Shakespeare) conducts workshops for teenagers. The exercise explores the close relationship between the rhythms of modern hip-hop and the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare. Iambic pentameter of Shakespearean verse has five sets of 2 beats each, which is the basis of hip hop and enables an emcee rap a Shakespearean sonnet at 80bpm and then 140 bpm tempo too. The iambic pentameter is stable, versatile and adaptable. It is maybe so because it is intrinsic to our life force, based on the beat of our hearts- dadham, dadham, dadham, dadham, dadham. Comprehension of this similarity in rhythm, prepares the students for the next step. Each teenager is   given a bag with strips of poetry lines from rappers and Shakespearean works. Th e students have to decipher and segregate the lines into two groups, that from Shakespeare and the other from contemporary hip hop poetry.  They get tangled in a maze and find it nearly impossible to do so, because of the similarity in wordplay, meter and rhyme.  Another group is given a task of writing a found poem by mixing lines from the love poetry of rappers and the Bard.

Shakespeare

Love is merely a madness

The course of true love never did run smooth

You, in my respect, are all the world

My heart unto yours is knit

O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

I do love nothing in the world so well as you

I give away myself for you

Speak low if you speak love

I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep

My love shall in my verse ever live young

Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee

I, beyond all limit of what else i' th’ world, do love, prize, honor you

Hip-hop

Walk this earth for her, glory, I'm grateful

To be in her presence I try to stay faithful

From lack of love many hide, some run

Love can free us, to it some of us react as a slave

Serenade her, without speaking a word

Because of you I'm stronger, I'm afraid no longer

I feel so alive in me, you have liberated me

I just want you to know your whole being is beautiful

I want to build a tribe with you, protect and provide for you

You're everything, sometimes I get nervous when I'm in front you

Send your soul through your lips to my heart

Sweet music will start, I want you to be the music of my art

Go through the seasons of love and never change with the weather

The language of love cannot be translated

Love is blind, you just see bright light

‘Hip hop Shakespeare Live’ -  are performances which explore the social , cultural and linguistic parallel  between the two , a modern retelling of William Shakespeare’s Richard II set against the backdrop of a live hip-hop concept album. My Macbeth class the other day resounded to the witches chant set to a rap beat :

• Once upon a midnight dreary, while I find her weak and weary
• Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
• Fair is foul : and foul is fair : hover through the fog and filthy air.

 Our most beloved Sonnet 18 rendered to a rap tune is the latest craze on you tube.

Happy birthday Hip-Hop Willie! We shall rap, sing and celebrate you endlessly through the year.

 Should I compare thee to hip hop! Yes I definitely shall !