feat. Mummy-D et al.

I was more than happy to see the return to my ken of Mummy-D lately of the hip hop trio Rhymester, due in no small part to our girl Ringo-han. J-hop or J-hip-hop or whatever you want to call it has always been something of a mystery to me, much like its American counterpart, if only because it seems the more groups I listen to the less I seem to know what's going on.

Rhymester often beg comparisons to Jurassic 5, a comparison that while sometimes apt fails to account for the fact that J5's style is much more a throwback to classic b-boy styling. Most of their tracks can be reduced to lyric flow over clever mixes. Not that there is anything wrong with this, but it isn't very much like the much more melodic and occasionally instrumentalized music Mummy-D and company put out. If hard pressed for a point of comparison, I'd say they mostly resemble the Roots, but even that isn't quite right.



A song like "The Great Amateurism" is indicative of what I find infinitely more difficult to grapple with in J-hop both visuallly and musically than in our homespun variety. The video doesn't seem to quite understand the aggressive dynamics of the underground freestyle battle it portrays, as Mummy (on the left) and Utamaru (on the right) move in and out of solo and unison flows with relative ease. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps subtly parody) the hyper-aggressive individualism the rap battle is meant to manifest; at one point Jin (the DJ) even breaks in with a few rhymes. Obviously, American hip hop is as much a culture as it is a(n extremely broad) musical genre, and that this culture wouldn't precisely translate is understandable. Japan doesn't have the semi-segregated, urban often poor communities where hip hop was born and certain doesn't have a history of competitive freestyle. It begs the question then whether this transplantation of hip hop is a corruption (a misunderstanding) or an adaptation (an understood-all-too-well). Are the unison choruses prior to each individual flow a beckon to J5 style group efforts or a play to homegrown trends in J-pop where unison singing (especially amongst all-boy/all-girl groups) is the norm and harmony all but nonexistent?

The obvious answer is J-hop is a hybrid, but to what extent and in what ways remains a mystery, as disparate elements of the lyric performance seem to hail to both sides of the pond. Maybe, just maybe, boys and girls, it's meant to.

Spenser, Taxed

My love of Edmund Spenser is somewhat obvious; I find him a much maligned poet (even though, because of his treatment of the Irish, much of that malignance is deserved), often read very poorly or against some arcane scheme (like the apposition of each of the Amoretti to a particular verse reading from the Book of Common Prayer) likely to make ones head spin. And it is well known that Spenser adapted his Italian models, as most English Renaissance poets did, but that word, "adapted," does a great deal to conceal how a poet like Torquato Tasso is adapted in Spenser's sonnets and whether "adapt" is even the proper characterization.

The Norton edition of the Amoretti has a note to sonnet 43 that reads as follows: "The first and third quatrains adapt Tasso's 'Se taccio, il duol s'avanza.'" What follows are those first and third quatrains along with their correspondences in Tasso's rima (#166 in Bruno Maier's edition) and my own somewhat more literal translation thereof. Note, I come to Italian mostly through Dante, through whose verse I generally have to puzzle for hours, so forgive any gross oddities in my own rendition.

Qu. 1 -

Shall I then silent be or shall I speake?
And if I speake, her wrath renew I shall:
And if I silent be, my hart will breake,
Or chokèd be with overflowing gall.

Se taccio, il duol s'avanza;
se parlo, accresco l'ira,
donna bella e crudel, che mi martira.

If I am silent, my grief advances;
If I speak, I increase her ire,
lady beautiful and cruel, who martyrs me.

Qu. 3 -

Yet I my hart with silence secretly
Will teach to speak, and my just cause to plead:
And eke mine eies with meeke humility,
Love-learnèd letters to her eyes to read.

E prego Amor che spieghi
nel mio doglioso aspetto
con lettre di pietà l'occulto affetto.

And I pray Love would show
in my painful aspect
with letters of piety the hidden affection.

Of course, a sonnet is more than just two quatrains, and it is in the second qu. of sonnet 43 that Spenser shows he is more in conversation with Tasso than merely adapting him.

What tyranny is this both my hart to thrall,
And eke my toung with proud restraint to tie;
That nether I may speake nor thinke at all,
But like a stupid stock in silence die?

Spenser has appropriated Tasso's double bind and applied it not only to his amorous situation but also to the problem of the poet adapting his contemporary. For Spenser's tounge is not only enthralled to his lady but to Tasso as well, and if this poem were to remain a simple translation or adaptation of "Se taccio," Spenser's poetic voice and subjectivity would be all but eviscerated. Thus, to maintain the presence of Spenser's voice and Tasso's, the sonnet engages in a kind of poetic correspondence whose mode happens partially to be translation. Of course, the presence of Tasso' "Se taccio" is not obvious in Spenser's poem; I never would have known if it weren't for the textual note. So, a third person is invited into this conversation, a figure whose silence in the poem is genuine and not a mere figure of discourse, i.e. the reader. The poem's concluding couplet casts the reader as the always absent yet ever present lady.

Which her deep wit, that true harts thought can spel,
Wil soone conceive, and learne to construe well.

Tasso's "l'occulto affetto" and Spenser's silent speech can only be revealed through the efforts of their absent Loves, the readers whose task it is decipher the "hidden affection" in pious letters, the speech in silence, and the presence of one poet in another. So while we readers are invited into the discourse of the poem, it expects us all the while to play its game: to be as crafty in reading as it is in writing.