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.
“after about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor, he fell to the floor exhausted. we saw him creep, feebly, into the nest of the poems which are always there. so that all this work had not been in vain, we made an examination”
it’s the poet-swordsmith [of] Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Mall,
hits but with the shammgod,
dangles phrasing like car alarms
it’s the poet-swordsmith [of] Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Mall,
spoken soloist,
three filled notebooks all ajar
it’s the poet-swordsmith[of] Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Mall,
hits but with the shammgod,
dangles phrasing like car alarms
it’s the poet-swordsmith [of] Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Mall,
spoken soloist,
three filled notebooks all ajar
I became a brown man in Los Angeles
on a magazine cover,
man-of-color-mumbled through an interview
then fumbled,
my line of scrimmage
down and out counting inches,
became a Black man downtown
with a u-turn
in the business district
between my verse
and spurned romantic interests
whereas certain phone numbers
now have become prison jumpsuit digits,
I’m on a cell reverse translating
my tweets in techno-yiddish,
while I lament solipsism
as a well-educated happy idiot
you never met a wordsmith more illiterate,
reclaimant of ride share privileges,
unemployment benefits,
and breadline manuscripts,
who makes a mean sautéed spinach,
that plate of wine-reduced predilections,
that visage akin
revisionist stone-faced grimace
(like what?)
of the strong silent typography,
apocryphal Olmec and circumspect
to get hemmed denim wet
spit the rawest paroxysms
to focus groupers in headphones
I’m in the gutter club
slanging clichés
the same way a dictionary
rents out ad space
to price human emotion
and contemporary art,
in the gallery as an attendant and
as a pedant I’m a synonym
to [sic] an off-camera Petrarchan rant,
like like like like fuck it, we’ll do it live
rewrite the verse from first stanza,
top to bottom,
right to left,
just to just to just to just to just to
get a rise
it’s the poet-swordsmith [of] Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Mall,
hits but with the shammgod,
dangles phrasing like car alarms
it’s the poet-swordsmith [of] Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Mall,
spoken soloist,
three filled notebooks all ajar
the definition of idiosyncratic; a beautiful, raw odyssey through depersonalization and free association against the canon and toward a new one Rhys Langston
