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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$11USDor more
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.
“you soon will be a goddamn man,
now start learning what life is about now son”
[CHORUS]
“get smacked ‘cause you’re blue Black,
throwback to welts and twist naps,
’n[]gg[],’ you
ain’t allowed to say that,
light-skinned with choice
to format,
“born in that white hospital
but they transferred her and I
in the moment when crowned
my Black ass”
called my grandfather
for connections,
megabytes per second cousin
I
dialed tone
when I breathed in
and felt my own baggage rushing
I
hung up and slumped over that chair,
staring at that gradient
between forearm and the thigh meat,
the pale yellow dimmed radiance
as if
time was the only gulf between us,
continuity and through-line sequence
medley, bevy of poly-genes
silk-printed just to rerun
mitochondria, yeah, fitted and colloquial,
some preshrunk embodiment,
and all the credentials for a tailor
fitting qualified postmodernists
[CHORUS]
Write my own way out of a
brown paper bag
club, race as form
and content,
across a continent
blood ties fists gripped
in blackened love
I
remember those sunny afternoons out
basking just to darken my skin,
comment section effigies of my peers
scrolling minds in tandem
metrics, lines,
self-spurred another scientist with
google image case study basis:
inherent blackness, intrinsic research,
a doubt of predetermined 31 flavors
(sample size per serving,
just a feast of the eyes,
intersections of what swatches
seem to serve and surmise)
with some stubbornness as intuition
or attrition
attributed to affinity
for new scriptures
sketched in books
and doodled verse reliefs,
Black-marked whiteness
prescription lobbying minds
to some greater prophetic margins
two parallel lines
for an abstract
starting
[CHORUS]
“soft curls on my neck flap
caress she’d tell me and scratch,
‘yeah, boy you look like me
but only back there where them good genes at,’
“brother and sister took after,
we shared features
but the pigment masked us”
[CHORUS]
crawfish étouffée in my census identification
written on the back of an SUV double-parked,
a New Orleans gas station
knee-length grass roots
with storm swept down
to the foundation,
charitable body’s
[family] records
given to the gulf as a donation
“word,”
of mouth, I remarked
as the portraits I’d yet to see
they met a watery fate,
sweeping the bayou sweat from my
sun-yellowed perplexing pate
I’d yet to contemplate
where does this history start
(no, really)?
and if memory by its very nature
is its own form of art.
the definition of idiosyncratic; a beautiful, raw odyssey through depersonalization and free association against the canon and toward a new one Rhys Langston
