The (Not Quite) New into the Old

My first encounter with Dr. Dre's 1992 effort The Chronic was in my brother's car, back in the days when "your first car" generally meant no air conditioning, in the middle of summer, windows rolled down, an old school Sony Discman slightly larger than my Wii connected to a cigarette lighter for power and an odd tape adapter designed to interface the digital with the hopelessly analog. A melancholic bit of verse I wrote while watching the wonderfully awful Dead Poets Society (whose only useful truth is that A Midsummer Night's Dream leads to suicide) reminded me of how sweaty I felt.

I wanted to rid my happiness of hap
and happenstance – what sweeps me
into piles of dirt and wasted skin –
I was made of what others had left
behind. I knew and tried to be hip,
but the hipper I felt the more I saw
dust and ash the substance of myself:
ash, for I was burned and sooted well,
to dust,

That's all the further I got. My most recent encounter with The Chronic, where Ben Folds actually got a bunch of folk-loving Ann Arborites to chant "bitches can't hang with the streets," led to a quizzical moment with the Gimlet before a snooze of a job talk, where we hypothesized Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" as a 14th century canzone. Our initial efforts were giggle worthy (as are most of our earnest efforts), so I decided to take up the task. The work is still in progress, but my first offerings (the first stanza and envoi) show promise, I think.

Canzone di “Bitches Ain’t Shit”

one Eric Wright, a well-known whetted tart,
a boon companion who’d with ladies play,
made turns of verse the lubricant of tarts’
weak thighs—oh how he loved to taste that tart
and wicked fame! so long my purse was fat,
I cared not where proceeded she, the tart
who with the paler ladies dined—that tart!—
on sausages she’d tickle off to trick
them of their coin. no profit her the trick,
so suing me she’d have her due, the tart,
because she cannot bide the cruel streets:
this truer tale for you, ye friendly streets.

Envoi:

amounting to but naught the saucy tart
on meat would suckle and with balls would play
until with satisfaction I’d be fat:
she’d find her way to yet another trick,
and I’d find fresh conveyance thru the streets.

I wonder how a song of Dre's would measure on the infamous J. Evans Pritchard scale. What would its total area be?