I am hip to the beat poets connection to rap, and recently turned on some hip hop performer friends to the connection. It is less beat centric than most modern rap. I've been listening to a lot of old school rappers on my Sirius radio and I think their language was more figurative and more clever than most popular rap today. They had more limited beats back then, but used other musical elements and other instruments to make up for it. The evolution of this music fascinates me. Of course bridging the blues to rap is essential for my teaching gig. I have them lay down a beat and I improvise over it. Very often a young person will step up and lay down some free form rap that is really good.
I heard a presentation from a Scientist at NIH about putting a free form poet in an MRI. He found out that the inhibitory part of his brain switched off when he did his thing. This has profound implications for education. We are terrifying kids with tests activating their inhibitory brain area with endless rules of conduct and then expecting them to "be creative!" Here is the study. The scientist is a Jazz musician which is where he got his interest in the neurology of improvisation. Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00834/full/srep00834.html Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap : Scientific Reports : Na... http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00834/full/srep00834.html The neural correlates of creativity are poorly understood. Freestyle rap provides a unique opportunity to study spontaneous lyrical improvisation, a multidimensional form of creativity at the interface of music and language. Here we use functional magnetic resonance im... View on www.nature.com http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00834/full/srep00834.html Preview by Yahoo ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <noozguru@...> wrote : A trumpet player I worked with in high school taught English in high school. He had a method of teaching anyone how to write poetry. When I switched schools I had him as a teacher. I not only learned how to write poetry but fiction as well. My main use of the poetry writing was of course for writing song lyrics. As for rap, to listen to it's roots, early beat poetry. There's got to be some videos of Dizzy Gillespie reciting some of his beat poetry back in the 1940s. On 01/05/2015 08:47 AM, curtisdeltablues@... mailto:curtisdeltablues@... [FairfieldLife] wrote: Great food porn, thanks for posting this Alex. I am also a black salt fan. It is a secret ingredient for western cooking that is unique and delicious. I am not such a fan of the expensive designer salts. They are just salt and dirt! I guess we could try to use dirt and some of it might be good. I just don't need any in my salt. I wanted to thank you for turning me on to red palm oil. You were the first person I heard about it from. I just got some from Trader Joes and it is delicious. I have been using it for grilled cheese sandwiches and it adds something great. I like coconut oil for sweet things only. But this seems to be more versatile. Although you may despise poetry when it is presented as such you seem to have affinity for that language form when you discuss internal states. Figurative language has its uses outside the context of poetry. Now if I could only convert all the wanna be rappers in my inner city schools to buy into this POV! ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <j_alexander_stanley@...> mailto:j_alexander_stanley@... wrote : Brussels sprouts and yellow bell pepper, sauteed in coconut oil with coarsely chopped fresh ginger. Then I added diced chicken thigh and dried sour cherries and cooked until chicken was done but still tender. I didn't add enough salt during cooking (Real Salt from Redmond Utah), so I sprinkled on some Indian black salt and a touch of a dried hot pepper mix called Volcano Dust 2. I love black salt; Petra hates it, so I'm only allowed to use it in my room because any room it's used in stinks like rotten eggs. I just lit a stick of incense, and I'll let it burn for a few minutes before putting it out. Speaking of Petra, we've been married 27 years, and yesterday, while sitting around the gas fireplace in the living room, we both learned something about each other that neither of us knew before: both of us absolutely despise poetry.
