Well, a long while since I rapped at ya as Jim Anchower would say. My life has been a hectic dance of English teaching between two schools, one in Midtown, the other in the Empire State Building. Twixt these two, I have an hour long lunch break and the din of Times Square in prime tourist season when the heat causes all the critters to go wild. I've seen three Spidermen--one selling handbags, one riding on the handlebars of a penny-farthing and this guy. Where are these critter people when it's cold out? Are they wearing Spiderman suits under layers of wool? Anyways, I've been doing a lot of singing myself lately. I've always been impressed by the guys freestyling on the train. Most of them keep their ears plugged into bass tracks. I've always seen rap as this primarily urban art form excreted from the human rhythms and concrete textures of the city. Most freestylers draw inspiration from their environment as evidenced by Mr. Def here. Hip-hop has always been a hijacking a someone else's music, filing the serial numbers off, and restyling it as your own. Very po-mo.
Anyways, I've always had this habit of singing to myself. Lately, I've had Dion's "The Wanderer" rolling through my noggin. This especially happens when I go through Time Square and am awash amidst people, texts, and surfaces on everything. Now, I've never been very good at freestyling, but I love rockabilly rhythms. Today on the subway platforrm, I listened to a young African-American fella strumming acoustic and singing Garth Brooks "Rodeo." I began to think about the invention of rock and roll as a fusion between black bluesmen and white country singers. I was thinking why can't white peckerwoods start laying hip stream-of-consciousness beat poetry over gospel, rockabilly, and doowop tracks? I've been described by many people as being corny, which I read defined as overly-sentimental. Well, what's more sentimental than allt that white music from Statler Brothers to Porter Wagone?
I'm going to be the first person to label this fusion and we'll call it "corn rap." Hillbillies remixing tracks. But not Kid Rock because he's a douche. I'm talking about acoustic sincerity. See it's already sort of happening and it sounds pretty good.