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Class notes & activities

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Macbeth translation page (text from Act I, scene one)

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Macbeth translation page (text from Act I, scene one)

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For April 25, 2016

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Week of 4.25 (for each day do a new one).

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Jay Z & Shakespeare Article for the week of 4.18-4.22

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Jay Z & Shakespeare Article for the week of 4.18-4.22

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"No one on the corner has swagga like us," sang rapper M.I.A. in her global hit "Paper Planes." The song was later sampled by T.I. and Jay Z in their hit song "Swagga Like Us." A few years before that, it was Jay-Z who declared "I guess I got my swagger back" on his 2001 album The Blueprint.

The word swagger should be a familiar term to anyone who has listened to popular hip-hop songs in recent years; a recent search on Rap Genius turned up more than a thousand songs that used the word in the lyrics.

Given those stats, you'd be forgiven for thinking "swagger" is a relatively new concept, but it can be traced all the way back to Elizabethan England. As with so many other famous words and phrases, the first writer to use it was William Shakespeare. The playwright first had the "shrewd and knavish sprite" Puck use it in this monologue in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here,

So near the cradle of the fairy queen?

While there is a tiny hint in this usage that swagger is closely related to braggadocio and pride, it wasn't until Henry IV, Part 2 that the meaning was really driven home by the bard. It's in that play that the London innkeeper Mistress Quickly gives this speech about one of the overly aggressive and forward men who frequent her tavern:

If he swagger, let him not come here: no, by my

faith; I must live among my neighbours; I'll no

swaggerers: I am in good name and fame with the

very best: shut the door; there comes no swaggerers

here: I have not lived all this while, to have

swaggering now: shut the door, I pray you.

It's clear from this passage that swagger has two meanings - one that refers to drunken behavior, and another, more familiar one that denotes arrogance and (in the eyes of people like Mistress Quickly) an outsized sense of self-worth.

Sound familiar?

Jonathan Swift would also pick up this usage more than a century later, in 1726, with Gulliver's Travels, when he wrote that the Queen's Dwarf "would always affect to swagger and look big as he passed by me in the Queen's Antechamber ... and he seldom failed of a small Word or two upon my Littleness."

While the definition of the word would keep its judgmental connotations during the 1800s, in his 1865 dictionary, British etymologist Hensleigh Wedgwood defined the word in poetic terms, writing that it was "the idea of tremulous motion, swaying backwards and forwards ... commonly expressed by forms originally representing the sound made by the dashing of water."

By the 1870s, the word would take on the definition we know today - that is, as this 1872 dictionary puts it, "to boast or brag noisily." (Cultural critics have been declaring that "swagger" has been on the decline since at least 1892. A piece in the magazine Science that year called swagger "[t]he most obvious and disagreeable form of self-assertion, which consists of making other people conscious of their inferiority ... ")

But swagger, fittingly, was and is persistent. Definitions like the one in that 1892 article show how "swagger" was in many ways a natural fit for the hip-hop of the past two decades. According to Slate, the very first hip-hop artists to use "swagger" in a song were the group Brand Nubian in their 1990 song " Slow Down," where they note someone "used to walk with a swagger, now you simply stagger."

"Slow Down" would start a lyrical trend. As Ben Gabriel wrote in The New Inquiry three years ago:

Swagger is not new to hip-hop but has always been exterior to it. It recalls '70s rockers, '20s gangsters, pirates and Shakespearean vagabonds. The connotations are all, one might say, very white. But it is a very particular kind of whiteness - one which is very aware of itself and makes an explicit performance of its own economic or legal disenfranchisement.

Since then, the evolution of swagger has continued, and the word has been shortened to simply "swag" in recent years.

Apparently it's true, as Jay Z raps in " Otis," that the hip-hog mogul invented "swag."

But the award for the most gratuitous and random use of "swag" goes to rapper Souljah Boy in his song about Joseph Kony, leader of the guerrilla Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, "Stop Kony":

Stop Kony
What do you think we should do about it?
We should stop him
We should stop who?
Him.
It's obvious that Kony should be stoppped.
The problem is that 99% of the planet doesn't know who he is.
Swag.
If they knew, Kony would have been stopped long ago.
Swag.

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What Do Jay Z And Shakespeare Have In Common? Swagger

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"No one on the corner has swagga like us," sang rapper M.I.A. in her global hit "Paper Planes." The song was later sampled by T.I. and Jay Z in their hit song "Swagga Like Us." A few years before that, it was Jay-Z who declared "I guess I got my swagger back" on his 2001 album The Blueprint.

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The History of Words article for the week of 4.18-4.22

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The History of Words article for the week of 4.18-4.22

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Part 4 of the TED Radio Hour episode Spoken And Unspoken.
About Mark Forsyth's TEDTalk
Etymologist Mark Forsyth shares the surprising back story on the term "president."
About Mark Forsyth
Mark Forsyth is an author, blogger, journalist, proofreader and ghostwriter. On his blog, the Inky Fool, he dispells grammar myths. His book The Etymologicon takes "a circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language" by history of one word or phrase with each chapter.

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Mark Forsyth: How Does History Change The Meaning Of Words?

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Part 4 of the TED Radio Hour episode Spoken And Unspoken. About Mark Forsyth's TEDTalk Etymologist Mark Forsyth shares the surprising back story on the term "president." About Mark Forsyth Mark Forsyth is an author, blogger, journalist, proofreader and ghostwriter. On his blog, the Inky Fool, he dispells grammar myths.

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Anthology of Rap Article for the week of 4.18-4.22

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Anthology of Rap Article for the week of 4.18-4.22

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Introduction

The Anthology of Rap is the first anthology of lyrics representing rap's recorded history from the late 1970s to the present. It tells the story of rap as lyric poetry. The lyrics included stretch from a transcription of a 1978 live performance by Grandmaster Flash and (the then) Furious Four to the latest poetic innovations of Jay-Z, Mos Def, Jean Grae, and Lupe Fiasco. The anthology's purpose is threefold: (1) to distill, convey, and preserve rap's poetic tradition within the context of African American oral culture and the Western poetic heritage; (2) to establish a wide and inclusive cultural history of rap on the grounds of its fundamental literary and artistic nature; and (3) to provide tools with which to read rap lyrics with close attention.

Rap and hip-hop are not synonymous, though they are so closely associated that some use the terms interchangeably. Others invest them with distinct values-either rap describes commercialized music and hip-hop the sounds of the underground; or rap suggests a gritty style (as in gangsta rap) and hip-hop a more politically and socially conscious approach (as in backpack hip-hop). At the end of his song "HipHop Knowledge," legendary rap artist and producer KRS-One succinctly explains the distinction: "Rap music is something we do, but hip hop is something we live." Hip-hop, in other words, is an umbrella term to describe the multifaceted culture of which rap is but a part. MCs, hip-hop's masters of ceremonies, are its literary artists. They are the poets, and rap is the poetry of hip-hop culture.

Hip-hop emerged out of the impoverished South Bronx in the mid-1970s. In defiance of circumstance, a generation of young people-mostly black and brown-crafted a rich culture of words and song, of art and movement. Rap was the voice of this culture, the linguistic analog of hyperkinetic dance moves, vividly painted subway cars, and skillfully mixed break beats. "Rap was the final conclusion of a generation of creative people oppressed with the reality of lack," KRS-One explains. Hip-hop's pioneers fashioned in rap an art form that draws not only from the folk idioms of the African diaspora but from the legacy of Western verse and the musical traditions of jazz, blues, funk, gospel, and reggae. These young artists commandeered the English language, bending it to their own expressive purposes. Over time, the poetry they set to beats would command the ears of their block, their borough, their nation, and eventually the world.

Rap today bears the legacy of this inaugural generation and, as a consequence, is rightly associated with African American culture. Equally, it is a form of expression governed by a set of conventions available to all and vivified by the creativity of anyone who learns rap's history and masters rap's craft. This helps explain how rap-and hip-hop culture in general-has come to be embraced by people of all races and nations. It is now the lingua franca of global youth culture, varied in its expressions but rooted in a common past.

At the same time, rap has inspired heated debate concerning its explicit speech and subjects. For some, rap constitutes a chorus of welcome voices, previously suppressed; for others, it presents a troubling sign of cultural disarray. Beyond its controversy, however, a hip-hop lyrical tradition has taken shape through poetic gestures and forms that rappers developed over time. The substantial body of literature that has emerged is both related to and distinct from the poetry of the past. In the past thirty years rap has led a renaissance of the word, driving a return to poetry in public life.

Though rap is now widely disseminated in American culture, it has yet to attain adequate recognition as poetry even as universities incorporate it into English, African American studies, and music curricula. Only a few poetry anthologies contain rap lyrics. Those that do, like the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and Ishmael Reed's From Totems to Hip Hop, do so in a representative fashion. Books like Flocabulary's Shakespeare Is Hip Hop and Alan Sitomer and Michael Cirelli's Hip Hop Poetry and the Classics offer effective and entertaining tools for using rap to teach canonical poetry to middle school and high school students, but don't illuminate rap's distinct poetic tradition.

This volume treats rap as a body of lyrics that responds to transcription, explication, and analysis as poetry. The lyrics included offer a kind of laboratory of language for those interested in the principles of poetics. Indeed, the study of rap is an effective means of introducing the key forms and concepts that define the poetic tradition: rappers embrace the clear sonic qualities of rhythm and rhyme, make ample use of figures and forms such as simile and metaphor, make storytelling a key component of their art, and emphasize the spirit of competition once central to poetry.

Just as any body of poetry can be studied from many angles, so too can rap. Viable approaches to the aesthetics of rap abound. From a formal perspective, one might look at a song's rhetorical figures, at its local sonic qualities, or at its revisions of conventions of genre. An interest in cultural studies will likely lead one to situate rap in relation to its sociological, geographical, or racial contexts. A range of historical approaches seems relevant in considering rap as an art, whether that means focusing on a song's relationship to African American oral poetry of the distant or recent past, or to English-language lyric poetry from Beowulf until now, or to the vast range of commercial popular song lyrics in general-all bodies of poetry with rich and various histories, of which rap is also a part. As the lyrics in this book attest, rap has been and remains many things for many people; perhaps the wisest approach is one as capacious as the art form itself.

Excerpted from The Anthology of Rap

Edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois

©2010 by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois

Excerpted by permission of Yale Universityi Press

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'The Anthology Of Rap': Lyrics As Poetry

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Now almost 40 years old, rap burst out of the Bronx to become one of the dominant musical and cultural forces in this country. A new book, called The Anthology of Rap, tracks the development of the genre from New York house parties to Eminem and Jay-Z.

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What do Shakespeare & Jay-Z have in Common Summary Rubric?

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What do Shakespeare & Jay-Z have in Common Summary Rubric?

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For this week of April 18-22

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Please download and complete, and then upload to your page.

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Need more information on Shakespeare? Click here!

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Need more information on Shakespeare? Click here!

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Need help building your Padlet? Click here!

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Vocabulary Graphic Organizer for Swagger

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Vocabulary Graphic Organizer for Swagger

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For the week of April 18-22

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Questions for Swagger Article (Jay Z & Shakespeare)

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Questions for Swagger Article (Jay Z & Shakespeare)

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For the week of April 18-22