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.
[CHORUS]
poet laureate of my living room
poet laureate of my living room
poet laureate of my living room
poet laureate of my living room
elephant in the hallway,
poet laureate of my living room,
dripping trunk snot,
down-talking the TMC in Khartoum
the nebbish Frederick Douglass
feeling peckish,
techno-yiddish scribbled with a pencil,
vestibule, a threshold of lectures,
lectern as he raps all the measures
reclaimant on the bidet,
shoeless pedant, yeah in the dining room,
on hands and knees with a genuflect,
trademarks phenotypes with Legal Zoom
raps in fugues, sestinas,
Prussian Blue iambs begrudges
antifa farmers market luncheon,
yeah, hair parted like a truncheon
Huey P, à la carte, à la mode Hebdo
in the drawing room
sketching prophets in the margins,
dry humping scripture, yeah well,
on a full moon
pre-fab in the 9th house,
flipping-flopping in a gender neutral blouse,
abstract verse just to out-joust,
just to out-joust
[CHORUS]
peanut butter Sandy Koufax
spitting cold facts
in the cryochamber,
no hitter, eight figures rejoined with words,
syntax spinning like an Escher spitter
eschewing monochrome delusions,
every step and footprint a Black realist movement,
expanding bibliography for the duration
of the Uber
talking shop, chewing lipids,
liquid diet sans pill-form stock nonfiction,
placebo freelance eccentric evidence of
a pre-screened well goal post postgrad diction
with a PR firm over my thumb,
facial recognition, yo, on the upswung,
downsized, upsold
solid-state wheezing like just another iron lung
“partate the bars,” says the Creole Voltaire,
23 back-up discs, yeah, in the time-share,
single lyric sheet for each sector and hemisphere
with a reading fee so laissez-faire
sitting mid-vacation deloused,
bouncing .wav files, yeah, surfing on a couch,
poet laureate of my living room,
bed and breakfast, yeah, in a random house
motherfucker
[CHORUS]
“ohh, get up or get out the way! I might be in the studio or something, but I’m still getting hype!”
the definition of idiosyncratic; a beautiful, raw odyssey through depersonalization and free association against the canon and toward a new one Rhys Langston
