Featuring alternative artwork and analog fuzz to provide as much warmth as you need, come these rarities from the Estate of the Lord Chocolate in collaboration with P.O.W. Recordings: cassette tapes of Rhys Langston's album and multimedia project "Language Arts Unit."
Includes unlimited streaming of Language Arts Unit
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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Book/Magazine
"Language Arts Unit: A Rap Textbook" is an exploration of rap as theory and praxis, race as form and content, music as social mobilizer and opiate. In a winding, discursive prefatory note Rhys Langston (Podell) utilizes a biting, absurdist humor to seriously appraise the power of words, music, and all manner of extra-lingual connotations in the age of rapid-transit information technologies. As the written half of a multimedia project, what follows are the lyrics from his long play album, written as poems with the clever enjambment of his characteristically idiosyncratic wordplay.
to come of age in the
Arathi Highlands
with my Guilty Sparks,
ethernet-linked systems
to controller hands
he taught me inverted,
yeah, my Plum dog
was the main cohort
in that digital-to-analog
K-8 bookended by
volumes of all the EB Games trade-ins
and when we snaked through Sotheby’s
just toe the line,
and I hugged your mom
the last time
those days of Nightfire and Azeroth—
so go, video my soul,
‘cause this was so real, so real
and no rush to record,
‘cause I’m just trying to feel
and I can’t deal
match made for an oddball,
holding on until the time expires
to load up an old file
is an old flame
that sparks harmonics on
a heartstring,
you’ll see it’s worthwhile
suggestion of a trial
to find perchance a reduction
of basic elements through
a concourse of past times
rendered worlds
drawing through-lines
and stuttered sights,
I stand, firmly anti-aliased to rewind
these games have brought
clear resolutions and bleary tears
graphical engines upgrading
as I doubled in years,
and it’s strange,
they’ve given me so much language,
strange how all these moving parts
saved for my own arrangement
still I feel myself anchored,
crazy as it sounds,
I feel myself anchored
12 years-old, docked in Seyda Neen,
my vocal chords now to express
this straining:
the first time I saved face on a cartridge
5 years-old there was moaning in a burning library,
strafing on a Blockbuster-rented
Leon Kennedy on CRT
with barely read ESRB
Big Rhys
on Lyric Avenue between alimony and Tracy
generations of consoles to console
private confirmation hearings,
Marty O’Donnell soundscapes and
West Gash symphonies
go, video my soul,
‘cause this was so real, so real
no rush to record,
‘cause I’m just trying to feel
and I can’t deal
now now, the Full Frontal Incumbent
thought nothing of it,
akin to something of an electoral puppet,
same script on the notarized budget:
an author’s note to a book of rhymes
made public
to obfuscate that collection of overly-abstracted raps
he takes a momentary lapse,
dips the pen inside an inkwell
dwelling on the right reference to
sentimentalize a whole past well
untaxed turns back with mindful inhalations,
citing source awards
with conflagrations
now rejoicing with congratulations for what
moments of childhood are recorded
and then stored
see well, an imaginary shoulder would hark here here,
to tip a solemn head a little there there,
circumnavigating fetal innocence,
transpositions octaves of a younger life
to somewhere more free and bare
(like what?)
go, video my soul,
‘cause this was so real, so real
no rush to record,
‘cause I’m just trying to feel
and I can’t deal
I’m documentarian, baby
full definition.
______________________
Flood session,
pizza, picture, essen,
retracing sketches
about another epoch:
after school flexing,
index’s the weapon,
information passed to
guild raiders and brethren.
Caravan to Karazhan,
tank buffed by power-words,
interior defended
(unseen, unheard).
Stadium Arcadium bumped through
Wet Sand Gateways,
unfurled through curls, braces,
farmer’s tans, race bait.
Jumps out of the gym
into punk bedrock,
niche in
silent cartography, maps drawn,
written plots,
pixel polyglot, ravenous mind, stomach,
stopped decibels for gendered interaction,
noiseless pundit.
the definition of idiosyncratic; a beautiful, raw odyssey through depersonalization and free association against the canon and toward a new one Rhys Langston
