Copia

As I look back on my life
To get where I am I had to sacrifice
You slammed my name in your magazine
This business gets hard trying to stay a queen
You're checking for me, you need to check yourself
And be someone, not someone else
[...]
Don't you know I heard you're trying to take mine
While I shine, you're living fake lives
Don't ya know I heard you tryin' to take mine
But while I shine, you lip and fake y'all styles

[All to the tune of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine"]

--Queen Latifah--Paper (featuring Jaz-A-Belle & Pras Michel)

Queen Latifah: "Give me that beat, fool, it's a full-time jack move"
Marvin Gaye: "Alright. This is that next generation I was looking for. Damn my crazy-ass pops"

Just kidding. She didn't actually jack the beat: she used the tune, approximated the lyrics, and then laid it on a spare, sassy, mellow-funky beat. Overall, a pretty tight caper. Dana Owens the Queen is always entertaining (and nice to look at, with that smooth thickness).

I just caught the ridiculously over-done Paul Hunter video for this song (actually a combo of "Bananas/Paper"--clip) on VH1 Soul (what would I do without that channel?) For some reason I'd never seen it, though I used have the song on a favorite mix tape. It's surreal listening to this soothing sound set against incoherent scenes of Mad Max types battling in space, but whateva. It's just nice to hear the track again.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Ils reviendront, ces Dieux que tu pleures toujours!
Le temps va ramener l'ordre des anciens jours;
La terre a tressailli d'un souffle prophétique...

Cependant la sibylle au visage latin
Est endormie encor sous l'arc de Constantin
--Et rien n'a dérangé le sévère portique.

--Gérard de Nerval--from "Delfica"

My translation to English verse:

They shall return, these Gods you always mourn!
Time shall to ancient days order return;
The ground has shuddered with prophetic blow...

Meanwhile the Sibyl with the Latin face
Under Constantine's arc still sleeps in place
And naught has molested the strict portico.

My first foray into French poetry for plaisir (as opposed to slogging through Hugo in fifth form French class) was to get properly at the Symbolistes, revered by my hero Ezra Pound. I started, as all Symboliste studies do, with Nerval. But rather than seeing him as a bump on the road to the greats--Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud--I was captured by his lunatic vision.

"Delfica" has always been a favorite poem in mine, and it has come to my mind often during this papal interregnum. The heavy marble of Catholic order doesn't exactly recall Delfica's arboreal pagan shrine (from the earlier part of the poem I didn't quote), but in the thread of latin-tongued prophecy, Constantine triumphant, and severity of mission I do find resonance with the somber, perfunctionary pageant constantly being reported from The Vatican.

Not that it stirs any sort of devotion in me. My Catholicism is even more dormant than Nerval's Sibyl. If anything, I read Delfica's two prophetic final stanzas as a window beyond the apotheosis of some odd bureaucrat cardinal, looking beyond the evident crumbling of empire-church. Even in the case (middling likelihood) that the new Pope is fellow Igbo Cardinal Arinze, I'd probably be more stirred by sense of nationalism than religion (and nationalism is very weak in me).

What paganism gets right about religion over Christianity is mystery of the local. No. Protenstantism didn't get this right either. They claimed to be rebelling against the tyranny of Catholic dogma, but they are still chained to the Bible. Paganism derives power not from some dusty logos, but rather from the magic of particular time and place. I think that local mystery is enhanced rather than abated by global communication, and I can imagine a near end to all these crepuscular, ecclesiastical institutions that now seem to dominate our lives.

I see the church as Petronius's Cumaean Sibyl (famous from Eliot's quotation in The Wasteland). She says "apothanein thelo". Yes thelo. Every immortal Sibyl dies, succeeded by symbol, which becomes Sibyl. Et rien n'a dérangé le sévère portique.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Just like that, Hasina was the son of all man
Type blood. He a realer fighter, super fro.
Bust it. The beast may want a war in the summer;
Thus, I rock my camoflage playing corners
Represents kites, while they pimp hip hop
I strategize my joints; you know it don't shtop
And it don't pop son, its p-ject 'round together
For beats, and concrete, when I'm creamy with my stilleto
got 16, for the imperial fascist
Bomb beats brothers, and honeys we 'bouts to set it
Domino theory, 'cause they stalled our flow
Collecting pitchforks, till they free Geronimo
Why you blaze up. Right on. I say my fist raise up.
While you bent, I represent... what!...
Uptown, Downtown, across; wherever
Meet me at the Crooklyn, we can piece it all together.

--Butterfly of Digable Planets--"Dial 7 (Axioms of Creamy Spies)", Blowout Comb

Hasina is a Swahili name, meaning "good" but I never figured out just what Butterfly meant there. I do know that Butterfly must have built up quite the pitchfork collection before Johnnny Cochran finally sprang Geronimo Pratt from jail.

But anyway, sing it like that Ladybug and Sara Webb: "Heeeeeeeeeeeeeey. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeey." Lori informed me that not only have Digable Planets reunited, but they'll be in Boulder in June (Fox Theatre). I'm not sure how I missed the news that they're back and working on an album, but I'm amped on the prospect. I loved their frank use of classic Jazz samples on Reachin' and I loved their Black Panther Funk on Blowout Comb (including the sublime "For Corners" and the cool, playful "Borough Check"). Most importantly, I love Mecca/Ladybug and Ishmael/Butterfly's mega-hip, abstract metaphors and laid back flow. Many of their lines are timeless quotables for Lori and me. Just from Reachin':

"What is really what when the supreme court is, like, all in my uterus"

"They harassed me at the clinic and called me a murderer. Now that's hate."

"In the scheme of things time is unreal. We're just babies. We're just babies, man."

"Hanging out, relax, ain't nothing to fo. Checking out some Frome, some Sartre, Camus."

"As bosoms float by keeping Doodlebug in heat"

"Hit it like a Dig Planet, god dammit!"

and of course

"You down with Digable Planets, you's a hipster. Shit."

The Digable Planets were also one of my first concert experiences with Lori (can't remember whether we saw them before we saw Me'Shell Ndegeocello). We were walking to the venue, at Marquette University in Milwaukee, and another black guy happened to be walking with another white girl in front of us. Some students riding by in a bus yelled out the window. "Hey, you black guys better stop stealing all our dates". The girl in front of us, unfazed, said to her companion "you'd almost think we were back in Philly". I've never been able to figure out exactly what she meant. Anyway, the concert was the bomb, especially the explosion that occurred when Ladybug shushed the crowd so we'd get the full effect of the killer Art Blakey sample that forms the backbone of "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)".

I guess we'll see if they still have that magic June 13th. "We groove like dat. We smooth like dat. We funk like that. We out."

[Uche Ogbuji]

If a lynx, that plush fellow,
climbed down a
tree and left behind
his face, his thick neck,

and, most of all, the lamps of his eyes,
there you would have it--
the owl,...

-- Mary Oliver -- "Owl in the Black Oaks", White Pine

Very sharp. Even though Oliver is so economical in her description, I get a strong picture from the passage, a picture of the transformation from lithe, angled lynx to staid, round owl. I think it's the discord in "lamps of his eyes" that nails it: a phrase that clearly looks forward to the owl even though it hasn't yet been announced. If I were writing such lines, I think I would have had a few words about the contrasting characters of the two animals. That would probably be a mistake, but it takes Oliver's tautness to make this clear to me. Always nice to receive a poetic lesson in the morning.

My friend Susan lent me Mary Oliver's White Pine, a collection of poems in traditional and prose format, on the theme of nature in New England (well trodden topic, that). It has been a pleasant read. Oliver is certainly a poet. She manages the necessary combination of aptness and efficiency with language. In developing both qualities, she clearly has learned from Emily Dickinson. It's great to find a contemporary in the American landscape with some poetical aptitude. I've found a few others of some merit by accident, such as Dana Gioia, X.J. Kennedy and Alice Fulton. But in general, reading through contemporary American verse is nothing short of torture. No wonder the public has shrugged off the art. I'm grateful for having been led to Oliver.

[Uche Ogbuji]

                       Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

-- T.S. Eliot -- "Little Gidding"

I already posted a quote from the first movement of "Little Gidding". Leave it to Colorado to impishly reply with a reason to post more from that great work. I wouldn't be surprised if the unimaginable zero summer, when it did venture outside of Antarctica, teased a bit around the Front Range before returning to its home. Then again, winter never seems to have sure dominion here (300 annual days of sunshine and all that), so it's fitting that it gets to sneak up on us at odd times, and give us a smart blow.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Six a.m. -- getting out of bed again
Can’t get back in -- ‘cause sleep ain’t gonna pay the rent
Day to day -- they've got you working like a slave
Taking credit for the work you gave and stealing your raise -- well I...
I know you’re down, when you gon’ get up
I see you're down, when you gon’ get up

-- Amel Larrieux -- "Get Up"

Ah, one of the best songs to wake up with (or fall asleep with, or just...). If anyone could be said to have a voice that caresses the ear, ex-Groove Theory chick has it on lock. Her voice is a soft, succulent marvel. And I love the mellow-but-odd stylings of the video. And "Get Up" just the intro to one of the best albums that came out at the turn of the century. Oh, you slept on it like everyone else? I see you ain't down. When you gon' get up?

[Uche Ogbuji]

         If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

-- T.S. Eliot -- "Little Gidding"

"Little Gidding" is the brilliant jewel of the ponderous Four Quartets. So much so that Eliot had to issue instructions barring anyone from reproducing "Little Gidding" outside the context of the entire Four Quartets (I wonder what the RDF would look like to express that in some extension of the Creative Common licensing). It used to be the longest poem I had entirely off head, and I still have a good portion of it (I sometimes recite the "Ash on an old man's sleeve" lyric to Osi at bed time).

When I once recited the passage including the above quote at Nsukka's great Anthill Club, some in the audience figured I was a religious fundamentalist of some sort, come to preach. Of course Eliot meant Christian prayer (specifically Anglo-protestant prayer--"No bleedin' 'Ail Marys"), but his expression transcends all that. The words are amazingly apt when held up to indigenous Igbo religion/cosmology, with which I've always been fascinated, but just to be clear, have never practiced (lapsed Catholic Dad, Charismatic Evangelical Mom). Even if you're agnostic, as I am, the words are still a powerful expression of the awe that that certain places carry for us, whether in a natural or a preternatural sense.

[Uche Ogbuji]

And then he turned his power on and the ground began to move
And all the buildings for miles around were swaying to the groove
And just when he had fooled the crowd and swore he wouldn't fight
We rocked his beat with a 12 inch cut called Disco Kryptonite

-- Cozmo D of Newcleus -- "Jam on it"

I've had old-school hip-hop in my head lately. T La Rock's "It's yours", UTFO's "Roxanne, Roxanne" and "Bad Luck Barry", Kurtis Blow's "Basketball", and of course all sorts of stuff from Grandmaster Caz, The Trecherous Three, Afrika Bambaata and Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five. It's just been coming into my head unbidden. And when I think of the great classic "Jam on it", I get the most powerful memories of illegally jumping the fence at my boarding school with a few of my fellow hip-hop nerd friends and walking to Okigwe town to loiter about the local record shops. We'd ask the owner to play the Wiki Wiki Wiki song over and over. Serious psychedelic cosmic slop. I was too young (12 or 13) for it to have occurred to me that those dudes must have been on some heavy grass when they wrote that.

And by the way, I love the way that the French group Saïan Supa Crew (French hip hop is killing it right now, f'real) take on Newcleus's touch of a dude interjecting comic relief in a helium gassed up voice.

[Uche Ogbuji]

Words by others have always given me a lot of the energy I need every day, but I don't find my inspiring words from the typical quotation repositories. As a student of poetry and hip-hop, my influences are often fairly unusual. In Quotidie (Latin for every day), I'll share selections in the hopes that they might inspire someone else as well.

To kick it off, what better than the namesake of my brother and Copia partner? Bright Chimezie was a big one-hit wonder back home in Nigeria with his smash hit "Okoro Junior". The lyrics were a complaint against those who had abandoned their African roots in cultural taste:

I went to a disco party
I requested for African sound
The whole people call me Okoro Junior
Imagine...
Imagine oooh...
In Africa ah...
Okoro le Okoro
Okoro le Okoro...

Bright Chimezie probably wouldn't find the Ogbuji brothers quite native enough, but never fear, we'll never keep things too far from the old Motherland.

[Uche Ogbuji]