All you need to know about

THE EXPERIMENT

           If you told 10th grade me that within a year he’d literally exclusively be listening to rap and hip-hop, he’d be aghast. To help put this in perspective, I am aggressively middle class and I used be a ride or die Mumford and Sons fan. I started investigating this weird new genre called “Rap” not because I was looking to expand my horizons, but because I was working on a playlist. A workout playlist specifically. Let me tell you, it is hard as hell to work out to the banjo-centric instrumentals of Mumford and Sons. I’ll actually go on record and say the banjo has no business anywhere near a gym. So, what was 10th grade me to do? What music was the most hype? The toughest? The most badass? It had to be rap music. I could have started with any of the hip-hop classics. Illmatic. Graduation. Ready to Die. But I didn’t know any of these classics, so I went with 2Pac’s Greatest Hits. Now, I got very lucky that Pac has some very dope tracks. But more than having that quintessential dopeness, Pac showed me a side of rap that as an outsider I was never going to see. “Brenda’s Got A Baby” and “Dear Mama” are not the songs I was expecting from a rap album. I came in with the idea that all rap music had to be hard as nails, and that every bar had to be about gangbanging and drug dealing (I quickly learned to love those tracks too). The great thing about hip-hop for me was how lyrical it was. I loved every poetry unit of high school English, and I even tried to write my own poems. Despite enjoying poetry, reading and writing it felt like work. The last thing a prep-school boy wanted to do at the end of a long day was more work. Rap to me has always encapsulated all the fun parts about poetry: the narrative, the rhyme scheme, metaphor stacked on metaphor. However, it does so without ever feeling esoteric, or pretentious, or abstruse (unlike this sentence). I could just play a track and let poetry wash over me. I have been riding that wave ever since.

            Fast-forward five years and I’m at the beginning of my Junior year of college. At this point I’m deep into hip-hop. The banjo to me was nothing more than a youthful folly meant to be forgotten. My new friends were snares, high hats, and chopped-up samples. That said, at this point I still firmly identified as a consumer of hip-hop. My relation to the art was a listener, and nothing was really going to change that. Like I said, my background does not really mesh with the origin story of the archetypal rapper. However, I certainly had been tempted. My best friend is a lifelong musician, and at that point was dabbling with producing his own hip-hop instrumentals. He wanted me to try writing lyrics for his tracks, but I always shrugged it off. Then I hit my Gateway writing class, and was told the entire semester was supposed to be an experiment. A time to try new genres and a rare chance to fail gloriously without repercussion. I took the message to heart, and I decided my first experiment was a rap song.

            But what to write about?  The model of the class was to take one piece of writing, any writing at all, and try and completely transform it. I choose a journal entry. That Summer I had started working with a local hospice program. I was a volunteer companion, and every week I’d spend a few hours with an assigned patient enrolled in the program. My patient at that time was a sweet lady. Huge pet fan. Very loving mother and grandmother. She also had dementia and bladder cancer. Every meeting was bittersweet, and as a way to work out my feelings after each session I would write a short journal entry. I chose one of those entries, a journal I wrote after a really great session, and made it the origin piece of my experiments.

            The goal of any experiment is to learn something, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily will learn what you set out to. Just ask Newton and the apple or Fleming and Penicillin (I’ll liken this rap song to their seminal work because, honestly, nobody’s going to stop me). In my experiment, I stumbled upon the groundbreaking realization that you can love something and have it be a huge part of your life, while at the same time barely understanding it. As I researched how to write a rap song, I discovered basics about the genre that honestly I should’ve already known. I figured out exactly what a bar is. That almost every track has four beats per measure. And apparently there’s a difference between a hook and a bridge. Beyond just formal elements, I started listening to some of my favorite tracks and focusing on why I liked them in the first place. How did the rapper develop the narrative?  How did he introduce the song? How did he make rhyme schemes subtle and make those lyrics flow? While it’s hard for me to delineate every element I investigated in those pieces, it undoubtedly made my song writing easier, and more importantly helped me rediscover some of my favorite pieces.

Beyond my ignorance of the formal elements of hip-hop, I struggled to find direction for my piece. There was no anthemic hip-hop track about hospice. I had to carve out a narrative from a scattered journal entry that I wrote in 30 seconds. But just because my journal was short does not mean it was lacking. That entry has so much of myself in it: my love of my patient, my sadness that I knew that within 6 months she would probably die, and how awful I think dementia is. However, instead of forcing those themes into my song, I tried writing my song like one of my journals. You can’t shoehorn a bunch of themes to make a narrative, but you can tell your story and let the listener figure out what you’re saying and why you’re saying it. That’s one of my huge takeaways from this semester: I should have faith in my reader. Instead of trying to start a project with the goal of being super profound, I just need to have a coherent piece that speaks my mind and trust that my audience will glean something from my story.

Figuring out that story took work. Over the course of this semester this song was not my only project. I also tried my hand at writing a forum post on a hospice support group and creating an infographic about the phenomenon of caregiver burnout. While in terms of form these experiments are rather divorced from my final project, they did help me understand what my original journal piece meant to me. I gained insight on my personal fears about old age, my sense of helplessness over my patient’s situation, and ultimately the confusing mixture of loss and relief I felt upon her passing. By the end of the semester, I changed almost every lyric I wrote from my original track, not only because my perspective changed but more importantly because I better understood what that perspective was. I’ve started a lot of pieces with the goal of just putting text on paper, and hoping the ideas will just fall into place. For this song I had to actually figure out my stance on a lot of personal issues before I could really put together anything I was proud of, and I feel like that’s the way it should be.

That all brings me to this one track. I don’t think its perfect by any means, and I don’t think my career as an MC has any wings. However, it was fun to make, it helped me deal with the rougher parts about hospice, and it taught me a ton about something I hold dear to my heart. It also is the first written project where I feel like I made this for myself, not a teacher or for a grade.