The men do not make anything at all, with the exception of arrows…they hunt and practice archery, for they are all, big and little, excellent archers, and their children begin as soon as they are two or three years old to ride and…are given bows to suit their stature and are taught to shoot.55
Later sources show that ancient Turkish archers practiced gripping and drawing heavy bows for years before they were even allowed to fire them. When finally judged ready, they then trained by firing 1,000 arrows a day. It was probably because of this strenuous training that Turkish archers were able to use much heavier bows than modern archers—some Ottoman Turkish bows, preserved in museums, take over 220 pounds of force to draw, or four times that of modern Olympic bows.56
* * *
Training
It might be thought that the super performances of our ancestral athletes demanded super preparation. Yet their match-day preparation often seems to have been at best useless and at worst positively harmful. Most athletes, indeed, probably succeeded despite rather than because of it. Ancient Chinese martial arts masters, for example, undoubtedly had logic on their side when they smashed their shins into logs repeatedly to toughen them, but the number of fractures and muscle hemorrhages must have also been enormous. Greek Olympic athletes, similarly, showed some sense in their tetrad system of training, which alternated endurance running, weightlifting, ball exercises, and sand running in a four-day cycle of hard and soft exercise. Yet the recommendation of some Greek authors that aspiring athletes wrestle with animals, including bulls and lions, seems more questionable. Cherokee ball-game players, on the other hand, mauled themselves in preparation for each match. By the time they had finished their pre-game “scratching” ordeal, in which each player was gashed bloodily three hundred times with a claw-like blade, they must have looked like they’d tangled with a horde of massive carnivores. Nor did Native American athletes go in for any nonsense about carb-loading: sound preparation for an Iroquois lacrosse match involved swallowing a disgusting emetic to make each player vomit. Still, there was some consolation to be had from this wild and woolly amateurism. The famous Greek doctor Hippocrates, for instance, had a simple remedy for an athlete’s aching muscles: he should “get drunk on wine once or twice.”
* * *
One word, I think, sums up the various causes of ancient athletic superiority: engagement. Ancient athletes were so much better at sport because they were so much more deeply engaged with it. Often they lived it. That’s also the reason, I believe, that ancient sport was frequently more dangerous and violent—usually so much more was at stake than it is today. An ancient Greek pankratiast couldn’t settle for second-place honors; there were none. He had to fight on, if need be to the death. An Aztec ball-gamer couldn’t play soft; to do so would be to dishonor the gods. This is the real truth of the “sport as a civilizing influence” theory: it has things backward. Modern sport is not the repository of aggression that has allowed other aspects of life to become more civilized: sport itself has been tamed and pacified as part of the civilizing process. This is largely the result, as Norbert Elias said, of the divorcing of sport from its original aims in ritual, war, hunting, and dueling. The flipside of this, however, is that modern sport is played with less passion, lower intensity, and vastly reduced drama. One reason for the high death rate in Roman chariot races, for example, was the charioteers’ habit of wrapping their reins around their waist. Since getting entangled in wreckage and dragged by frightened horses was a major killer of drivers, this was a serious statement of intention to “go down with the ship.” This is why charioteers attracted fanatical crowds the size of which LeBron James could only dream, why they made money beyond the fantasies of mere modern super-golfers, and why they earned the awe of kings and nobles: they literally put their lives on the line every time they raced.
What modern sportsman, in this era of the “blood rule” and hair-trigger litigation, would dare do the same?
In any case, the situation for Homo masculinus modernus is clearly getting serious. If sport isn’t our game then where do we modern males excel? What achievements can we use to salve our pride, impress our women, and ensure the propagation of our half of the species? Given our physical failings, might we, like Cyrano de Bergerac, make good such deficiencies through the power of our honeyed words? The eloquent poet of Rostand’s play did, after all, win Roxane’s heart, despite his oversized schnoz. There is even some scientific support for the notion: several studies have found women rate verbal creativity more highly than looks or even wealth in the sexual-attractiveness stakes.
That being the case, perhaps we can breathe easier. We are, after all, more literate, better educated, and more creative than any men in history…aren’t we?
To take one example, some literary theorists claim that modern hip-hop and rap represents the height of male poetic wordplay, superior to even classical poets such as Homer and Virgil. Rappers, they insist, improvise complex and witty lyrical barbs, on the spot, in the course of their live “battle raps”—a far cry from the years Virgil took to write Rome’s national poem, the Aeneid. To pursue a “beef,” or fight, with a rival, rappers must also write and release “diss [disrespecting] tracks” within days to respond to their enemy. What’s more they are also some of the best-paid entertainers in history: Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, raked in U.S. $150 million in 2008 alone, placing him on top of Forbes’s “Hip-Hop Cash Kings” list.
So far, so reassuring, but how do these claims fare under proper scientific study? Do modern rappers really blow ancient bards away with their incredible feats of memory, improvisation, creativity, and wordplay? Courtesy of the next chapter, BARDS, ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to announce a once-in-a-lifetime chance to find out. Sit back in ringside comfort then as, for one night only, the insults fly, grown men cry, and poetic reputations are deflated, berated, eliminated, and fustigated in this, the ultimate rappers’ beef: Homer vs. 50 Cent.
It should be a hell of a show.
Bards
First, let’s meet the contenders. In the red corner we have 50 Cent, a multi-award-winning rapper from New York whose albums have sold more than 22 million copies. Orphaned at eight and dealing crack on the streets of Queens by the age of twelve, Curtis Jackson is a poster boy for the violent world of “gangsta” hip-hop music. In 2000 he was even shot nine times by a rival gangster; his voice still carries a trademark slur from the bullet that hit his jaw. Jackson got his break, musically speaking, when he released the single “How to Rob,” which gave a comic but violent rundown of how he would rob a series of famous artists and entertainers. He went on to combine his thuggish but undeniable street cred with melodious rap beats and riffs on the hugely successful albums Get Rich or Die Trying and The Massacre. 50 Cent then parlayed these musical successes into a multimillion-dollar empire of clothing labels, beverages, films, and even mining interests.
So much for the man, but what of his art? What is rap, and why is it sometimes considered the pinnacle of male poetic creativity?1 Some critics, of course, dispute that it is, citing the undeniable obscenity, cruelty, boastfulness, and violence of many rap lyrics. Yet scratch a little deeper and another picture emerges. These crudities are often wittily and skillfully employed, as when New York rapper Supernatural won the crowd’s admiration in a live, “freestyle” (improvised) battle with rival rapper MC Juice (who had earlier defeated Eminem) using these lines:
Know it for a fact, nigger, you’re totally wack, you never could ever start to f#$! with Supernat. I could switch ya, one time, brother feel the mixture, I’m gonna come over, rip down this nigger’s picture.
Considering they were made up on the fly, these multi-syllabic, rhymed insults and threats are impressive. Not only do they fit their words into a fixed rhythm (what poets call a meter), they also organize each couplet around a finishing rhyme, with a secondary layer of internal rhymes: “never could ever” and “switch ya…mixture…picture.” These complex internal rhymes are, in fa
ct, rap’s signature, and a skilled practitioner can pack multiple examples into a verse, as in Public Enemy’s line: “Their pens and pads I snatch ’cause I’ve had it/I’m not an addict, fiending for static/I see their tape recorder and I grab it/No, you can’t have it back, silly rabbit.” Rap battles are also, surprisingly, a deeply traditional art form. Insult competitions like the Supernatural/MC Juice battle hark back to the verbal jousts of slave days known as “Playin’ the Dozens,” in which rival African males competed to win over a crowd using back-and-forth insults of the “Yo’ mama so fat she wear a tent for a dress” variety. The high esteem in which verbally skilled males are held in African-American communities may, in fact, date back a thousand years to the griots (“wandering poets”) of West Africa.
But if this gives us a snapshot of 50 Cent, what of the blue corner—the ancient Greek poet Homer? Why pick this literary fossil whose poetry is written in a long-dead dialect and of whom most people only know through his fat, dimwitted cartoon doppelgänger, the father of Bart Simpson? It is because of Homer’s (the poet’s, that is) central role in Western literature. Due to his two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, both of which tell the story of the ancient Greeks’ war against the Trojans, Homer is considered the founder of European writing. But hang on, isn’t pitting the written works of this father of Western literature against the spoken compositions of rappers comparing apples to literary oranges? Actually, it isn’t. Leaving aside the fact that most rap lyrics, even apparently improvised ones, are written (see below), it turns out that Homer’s poetry, too, was originally spoken rather than put down on paper (or, more properly, papyrus).
Literary theorists had long been puzzled by certain recurring set phrases in Homer’s poems, such as “rosy-fingered dawn” and “the wine-dark sea.” In the 1930s linguists Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated that these were a memory aid used in traditional spoken epic poetry across the world—Homer, it seems, didn’t write his poetry, he rapped it! It’s highly possible, in fact, that Homer, the greatest poet in Western literature, couldn’t write, since the Greek alphabet wasn’t invented until circa 800 BCE, around the time Homer was composing. The fact that we now have written versions of both the Iliad and Odyssey, however, has led to the “transcription hypothesis”: the theory that both poems were transcribed by some scribe directly from Homer’s, or one of his disciples’, oral performance.
Again, so much for the man, but what of his art? What type of poems were Homer’s oral epics? Like modern rappers, Homer would have delivered his lines to musical accompaniment, though probably a lyre rather than a turntable, beat box, and drum kit. His poetry, like rap, also depended on rhythm, though in Homer’s case this was the strict meter known as the dactylic hexameter—an arrangement of six dactyls, or long syllables followed by two shorts. Unlike rap, however, ancient Greek poetry didn’t rhyme. It also relied far more on narrative than rap does. Much of this narrative was actually true history, as the excavations of archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who found the ruins of Troy in the 1870s, showed. Homeric poetry was also vastly different in motivation and style to modern rap. Where modern rappers compete for social position through boastful insults, ancient Greek poetry recounted the deeds of the Greeks’ glorious ancestors, and even their enemies, in order to pay homage to them. This essential difference is clearly shown by Homer’s noble treatment of the Greeks’ adversaries—not once does he call the Trojans “fools,” “wack,” “biyatches,” or any other favored rap putdown.
Comparing the two art forms is, of course, fraught with difficulty. Value judgments about poetry are notoriously subjective. Given rappers’ boasts about their prowess in the fields of memory and improvisation, though, we do have some objective measures with which to compare. Let’s bring it on, then, by launching directly into round one: memory.
Modern rappers are, admittedly, considered to be excellent mnemonists, or memory experts. They have to be: their songs, focused on wordplay, are much heavier on lyrics than regular pop numbers. Interestingly, this is probably why rappers often make a better transition than other singers into film careers. Rapper Busta Rhymes, for instance, states that his method for learning lines for his movie appearances is to rap them. But how many lines does the average rapper, in our case 50 Cent, actually have to remember? To get an idea I sampled 5 of Jackson’s songs: “In da Hood,” “Thug Love,” “Back Down,” “What’s up Gangsta?” and “Candy Shop.” These average about 60 lines each. To date Jackson seems to have written around 100 songs; let’s be generous and assume he can remember each one of them perfectly. (An incident at the 2007 Black Entertainment Television awards, during which 50 Cent was caught lip-synching, shows he may not always need to.) That makes a total of 6,000 lines. Now consider our ancient Greek poet, Homer. Just 1 of his poems, the Iliad, comprises an astonishing 15,693 lines of text. If you add the Odyssey, that takes his total to 27,803 lines of memorized verse. This is bad enough, but we have to remember, too, that these works are just those that have come down to us. Homer probably had more in his repertoire. Indeed, the evidence of linguists Lord and Parry shows he might have had many more. As part of their study of oral epic poetry, Lord and Parry researched the guslar tradition of Serbia and Montenegro. Medieval guslars were poets who performed epic tales of the Slavs’ struggle for independence against the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Remarkably, the tradition continued into the early twentieth century, and the two scholars were able to meet and interview some of the last guslars. One of those, an illiterate butcher named Avdo Mededović, proved capable of recalling an astonishing 58 epic tales.2 The 13 that Lord and Parry had time to record totaled 78,555 lines of verse, meaning Mededović’s complete repertoire probably comprised 350,476 lines of poetry. If Homer had anything like Mededović’s recall, his lyrical memory would have been fifty times that of 50 Cent.
Mededović’s feats, incidentally, also tell us something about the endurance of modern rappers compared to traditional epic poets. British rapper Ruffstylz claims to hold the world record for the longest freestyle rap at ten hours and thirty-four minutes. This was set in 2003 under official Guinness World Record rules, which allow a fifteen minute break every four hours and as many short breaks (less than thirty seconds) as the rapper wants. By comparison, Lord estimates a full recital of the Iliad would take about twenty-four hours nonstop. Modern academic opinion generally holds that these performances wouldn’t have been given in one sitting, but again, I think that’s judging by our own lax standards. In an illiterate age with very limited recreational options, visits from traveling bards would have been rare and exciting events, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if ancient spectators eagerly sat through an entire reading in one hit. In any case, Mededović’s phenomenal performances prove what traditional bards were capable of, blowing Ruffstylz away in the process—one song of Mededović’s that Lord recorded, for example, filled up one hundred LP albums, or sixteen hours’ solid recital time.3
Memory-wise, then, it seems modern rappers would have had trouble recalling Homer’s laundry list. By now, though, 50 Cent would probably cry foul—his real skill, and one old fossils like Homer lacked, he would argue, is improvisation. Jackson and his fellow rappers are experts at “spitting” on-the-spot lyrics, as their freestyling shows…or does it? Leaving aside the fact that many rappers cheat by pre-writing lyrics, one philological (a fancy word for literary) study of rap also found that freestylers use numerous tricks such as pre-written generic rhymes and stock phrases to help their flow. “Brooklyn” for example, is often paired with “took and” or “tooken” “Illin” often takes the partner “chillin.” Then there are the stock phrases. Even the aforementioned Supernatural, widely considered the best freestyle rapper in the world, was found, in one 254-line freestyle, to use repeated phrases such as, “I’ll tell you what” (11 times), “far as I can see” (3 times) and “it don’t make a dif” (5 times).4 Without dissing rappers’ impressive verbal skills, these tricks clearly reduce enormously the diffi
culty of rhyming on the spot.
More remarkably, however, it turns out that Homer’s poetry wasn’t just memorized, either: it, too, was substantially improvised. We know this because of those memory aids that Parry and Lord found scattered through Homer’s works. The linguists identified two classes of these: formulas and themes. Formulas are those set phrases, such as “the wine-dark sea,” which, because of their syllabic structure, could slot into the end of a couplet and maintain the strict meter of Greek poetry. Themes are longer passages of text that described a key scene—a battle, a feast, the assembling of an army—that were repeated at key points, often in the same words. These show, Parry and Lord said, that Homer didn’t just remember the Iliad and the Odyssey, he improvised them anew in every performance. This is a remarkable feat, by anybody’s standards. It’s also humbling to realize that the preserved copies of the Iliad and Odyssey we have today are simply snapshots of a one-time performance that happened to be transcribed.5
Once again, the Slavic guslars give us a sample of this remarkable process in action. To test how quickly their “modern” Montenegrin guslar, Mededović, could learn a new song, Parry and Lord had him listen to an unfamiliar epic called Bećiragić Meho sung by another guslar. The fact that Mededović was able to turn around and sing the 2,294-line song after just one hearing is incredible enough; even more remarkable is that his version, while still faithful to the narrative, was now 6,313 lines long. Mededović had lengthened it by three times, on the fly, with an improvised “rap” filling in detail about the characters, their actions, and motivations. What modern rapper could possibly duplicate this feat? Other historical poetic traditions also feature phenomenal improvisation skills. On the island of Malta, for example, men have long fought poetic duels called spirtu pront in which 2 singers compete to denigrate each other with improvised lyrics sung to music. Given that spirtu pront singers often sing an average of 5 hours a day for 50 years, ideally without repeating themselves, it’s clear they had, and have, improvisation skills probably even exceeding those of Homer and the guslars.6
Manthropology Page 15