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.
ships out within 3 days
Purchasable with gift card
$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.
clock ticks are irrelevant,
settlement, the present tense
deed is an exegesis
with a felt-tipped rhetoric,
scratch and sniff
these ashy palms
smoking desert kiss
placebo christened with that
flick of the wrist
I’ve been in sediment of the
epoch’s layers deep,
carbon copy of my
like page’s physique,
a play count as oblique,
all scriptures written cut out
of my abdomen and sewn back
with Rap Genius caesarian annotation
marginal status
with the noose in the lattice,
unconscionable praxis,
theoretics on my axis spin cycle
raining high heavens on my mattress,
drool-stricken mornings
waking up to crusted mouth fractures.
forgive me for all these scriptures
forgive me for all these scriptures
forgive me for all these scriptures
all sense spent on well wishing
forgive me for all—
forgive me for all these scriptures
forgive me for all these scriptures
all sense spent on well wishing
forgive me for all—
forgive me for all these scriptures
forgive me for all—
I know I won’t be recognized today
I’m a plot device,
dim foil headdress
refracting upon the headlights,
curved dialogue when protagonists sleep
I’m still up at night
framed in unbeknownst
but rehearsed speech,
crushed dolomite
reading rights to obsequious pardons of
French exits
when mornings become apoplectic
and slept-on electronica
fills a vacuum
I seek the circumspect,
keep my eyes wet in this
moving traffic fishbowl
my optics are shifted 24 hours
in length to catalogue droll
not an allegory to [sic] better circumstances,
a drip-line gushing,
missing pair of blood lancelets,
but a metaphor to [sic]
elementary probabilities,
second chances spun on Quixotic windmills,
an allusion to a minor key,
but an anaphora to [sic] a trudged speed,
a permit to [sic] that concealed weapon.
I am my own epinephrine.
I’m an inverted apostrophe addressed to
no possession,
a series of quotations attributed to
bold-faced irrelevance.
forgive me for all these scriptures
forgive me for all these scriptures
forgive me for all these scriptures
all sense spent on well wishing
forgive me for all—
forgive me for all these scriptures
forgive me for all these scriptures
all sense spent on well wishing
forgive me for all—
forgive me for all these scriptures
forgive me for all—
I know I won’t be recognized today
As I bolt my head up to rise
in this time trial,
I humbly seek significance
quantifiable in numbers,
that one of import may walk through turnstiles
and recirculate my thoughts most worthwhile
for those in action of
insights, audience, and reach.
I ask forgiveness for all these scriptures,
all sense spent on well wishing,
minute hands holding hours,
self-immolating auto-da-fés
in the shower.
In the name of the non-gendered parent,
offspring, and all-encompassing spirit of WiFi,
I do ask and beseech.
the definition of idiosyncratic; a beautiful, raw odyssey through depersonalization and free association against the canon and toward a new one Rhys Langston
