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Grant Money Raps T-Shirt [Limited Edition]
T-Shirt/Apparel
A year after the release of Rhys Langston's "Grant Money Raps," we at the Black Market Poetry Bureau of Internal Affairs decided to print up these shirts commemorating the dopeness of the artwork.
Consider a purchase so that we might make more of these— and other bits of physical merchandise we dream of.
Grant Money Raps is a short effort at practicing some of the theory contained in Rhys Langston's LP and book, Language Arts Unit. Namely, it poses a brief answer to questions written like: "It is worth wondering if a song would be as catchy and seductive to the senses if it had the same beat, melody, and/or flow pattern with simply different words and concepts used than what is expected. Or is there something essential about the baseline pool of ideas and words that has been established? Does the rate and immediacy with which songs are made disallow references to synonyms, or re-examinations of the whole picture and message given by compositions?"
But this EP is neither a Kendrick-Lamar-esque re-fashioning of sounds into artfully moralized 808s and triplet flows, nor something like the (tacit) disrespect of a Lil-Dicky-like satire of Black club-environment aesthetics. From a post-Carti number about "his bitch" not being a socialist and in favor of universal healthcare, to a barred-out attack on paying dues in the dystopia, to a freestyle proclaiming himself a MacArthur Genius on Black Twitter, Rhys Langston asks, in the plain language of pop music, if our alternative is still somewhat conservative. If we expect the sound of something to be indicative of its meaning, is this reflective of how we perceive certain people's capacity to be complex or not?
And who better to take this on than a Los Angeles born-and-raised, multidisciplinary Black Jewish William Tell with popular rap's tropes in the crosshairs?
credits
released July 3, 2020
written and performed by Rhys Langston, featuring Reg Mason
the definition of idiosyncratic; a beautiful, raw odyssey through depersonalization and free association against the canon and toward a new one Rhys Langston
supported by 8 fans who also own “GRANT MONEY RAPS”
...it's a work of art. The way he goes across genres to express the black experience...I LOVED Ensley but I'm glad that he went totally left. James Smith