2005-07-28

Today I read an appalling article about the Canadian rapper Baba, who has recorded a rap version of The Canterbury Tales. Baba said, “All the themes of rap music are there in the tales: jealousy, anger, greed, lust…It was a painstaking process to convert Chaucer into a rhyme scheme that young people would like." He paused for a moment, then added, “Zounds.”

I’m not decrying the use of rap as an educational tool. I learned all my state capitals from an educational rap, okay? So now, when someone asks me what the capital of Alaska is, I can confidently answer “Louisville”, with no fear of appearing stupid, uneducated, or ignorant of the ways of the Esquimaux, who kill old people and have nine thousand words for snow.

All the same, I cannot wholly approve of Baba’s undertaking. When I was in fifth grade, I was assigned to compose a rap about a current event. (My teacher had obviously never heard the canard, “Rap is news that stays news” or “It is hard to get the news from raps, but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”) I was then to perform the rap in front of my classmates while wearing a costume. The current event I chose to rap about? The unearthing of a massive slave graveyard. I remember the first verse distinctly:

Well, some workers were diggin’ in the ground
When the bones of some slaves these workers found.
An archaeologist said, “Why, this might be
The oldest slave graveyard in history.”

The rest was mercifully blotted from my childish memory. I am proof that tasteless people are born, not made.

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