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Primetime poets
In the 1990s author Martin Amis published a witty and incisive short story, “Career Move,” that imagined a role reversal in which poets reaped fame and fortune while Hollywood screenwriters scrabbled to wring measly dollars from their action-filled, blockbuster scripts. It might astonish those struggling poets who smiled wryly at this conceit to learn that there is a place in the world where an ancient poetic art, still surviving, really is that popular: the Basque country of northern Spain.
In 2005 more than thirteen thousand ticket holders crammed into the Bertsolari Txapelketa, the national poetry championship of the Basque people, in the city of Barakaldo.7 Another one hundred thousand watched the seven-hour event live on TV. The championship was the culmination of a grueling, four-year round of elimination contests, many almost as well attended. In the Basque art of Bertsolaritza, dueling poets are given a topic and twenty seconds in which to create an eight to twelve-line rhyming poem that fits both a specific meter and a melody chosen from a stock of three thousand traditional songs. It is a supreme feat of improvisation and gamesmanship—for contestants must also then battle one another directly, twisting their opponent’s words into a clever putdown that will win the crowd’s and judges’ applause. It is the deeply traditional nature of Bertsolaritza, whose origins can be traced back at least as far as the fifteenth century, and its role as a symbol of Basque nationalism, that accounts for its sell-out appeal.8
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I think we can all agree that our bout has ended prematurely with a second-round knockout. 50 Cent, the pretender, is flat on the canvas with his trainer dabbing his face and yelling for the doctor. Homer, the contender, meanwhile, is riding off in the promoter’s limo to party with supermodels and take a call from the president. But if rappers have been shown up as totally wack in the virtuoso stakes, might they still not have a claim to fame in how bad their rap is? After all, rap—particularly gangsta rap—is widely acknowledged to be the most violent, obscene, and irreverent art form to ever grace (or disgrace) the airwaves, isn’t it?
Sorry. Even violence-wise, it seems, modern rappers would have made ancient audiences yawn.
This seems hard to believe, since gangsta rap lyrics are so notoriously violent they have sparked a number of public campaigns to censor them, not least by the Parents Music Resource Center run by Tipper Gore, wife of the former U.S. Vice President (though Gore was even more incensed by heavy metal). Nor were her concerns unfounded—one study found that in a sample of 490 rap songs, 41 featured a murder and 66 described an assault or rape.9 The language used to describe these crimes was also often exceedingly brutal, as when rappers Too Much Trouble sang of one imaginary victim that they would: “Beat her head with the phone until her skull caved in.” Tough (if cowardly) stuff, granted, but it pales in comparison to the body count of Homer’s Iliad. In that epic 105 victims lose their lives, proportionally (comparing by number of lines) four times the rapper’s death list. Nor was Homer short on blood and gore in his lyrics, to wit:
Then Idomeneus smote Erymas upon the mouth with a thrust of the pitiless bronze, and clean through passed the spear of bronze beneath the brain, and clave asunder the white bones; and his teeth were shaken out, and both his eyes were filled with blood; and up through mouth and nostrils he spurted blood as he gaped, and a black cloud of death enfolded him…
The bronze helmet did not stop the spear, but the point of bronze broke clean through the bone, and all his brain was spattered about inside it.10
In such graphic detail were these injuries described that one modern neurosurgeon was able to use them to make accurate diagnoses of specific neurotraumas among the Greek and Trojan soldiers.
Rap does, however, have a better claim for the obscenity of its lyrics. Decency prohibits the extensive listing of examples, but suffice it to say many gangsta rap songs use the word “motherf*cker” at least once; “bitch” and “ho” also feature prominently. One academic survey of sixteen Snoop Dogg songs, similarly, found half of them featured explicit descriptions of rape.11 Homer, it’s true, has nothing to equal this, though the Iliad does start with the kidnap and semi-rape of the beautiful Helen. What erotic references the epic does have are of the euphemistic “melting hearts” and “veiled desire” variety. Yet other Greek authors were not above including explicit obscenity in their works. In one of his plays the famed comic playwright Aristophanes, for example, takes great delight in calling Cleon, the Athenian general and politician, a “wretch and b*ttf*cker in matters of state.”12 He also gleefully fantasizes about a rival poet getting hit in the face by a dog turd. Perhaps the height of Aristophanes’ obscenity, however, is his description of a prominent Athenian citizen, Ariphrades, whom he accuses of inventing cunnilingus, saying:
[Ariphrades] defiles his tongue, with shameful pleasures, licking up foul secretions in the brothels, and staining his beard as he stirs up the nether-lips. What’s more, he writes poetry like Polymnestos, and hangs out with Oionichos!
The last two were, it seems, by far the worst transgressions.
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Latin limericks
Smutty limericks are often thought of as a peculiarly modern art form. This is partially true—although limericks were first created by Edward Lear in the 1840s—it was in the twentieth century that they assumed their current mandatory obscenity. Yet it might surprise those who decry the lewdness of such stall-wall scrawls to know that several Roman classical poets also wrote positively filthy little ditties. Renaissance translators, for example, were horrified to discover that their hero, the poet Virgil, hadn’t only written the Aeneid and the Eclogues: he had also apparently penned a scandalous collection called the Priapea, poems dedicated to the Roman phallic god Priapus.13
Priapus was considered the god of orchards and fertility, so wooden statues of him were often set up in gardens. But he was also the god of male genitalia, meaning those statues frequently featured an absurdly large wooden penis. This gargantuan member often doubled as a club with which gardeners would beat off would-be-thieves, yet Priapus himself could use it to inflict dire punishments, as the god’s threat in one of Virgil’s Priapea poems makes clear:
But when I thrust up thee [robber] my great, thick pole, stretched without wrinkle will be thine a**hole.
Priapus, according to Virgil, even maintained a sliding scale of penetrative punishments (sorry), differentiated according to the age and gender of the thief:
Whoever the robber may be, each has something to offer me, the woman her c**t, the man his gob; if a boy his a** will do the job.
Despite the similarity of tone the Priapea poems are, though, far superior in poetic technique to limericks. One author, indeed, states that the collection “displays the full perfection of metrical art.” In the end, though, it is the sameness of comic sensibility that binds the two forms together. What else can we do, for instance, but laugh at Priapus’s shameful final confession, in poem 51, that all his threats have failed miserably. Despite the inferior quality of its fruit it is his orchard, rather than his neighbor’s, that the thieves continually plunder—it’s his “punishment” that they crave!
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To digress briefly, Aristophanes’ comedy also provides a fitting case study for another modern conceit: that our comedians are more obscene and reliant on shock value than ever before in history. On the face of it, this seems eminently reasonable. Didn’t Eddie Murphy, after all, top off one legendary performance by commanding his audience, as well as an imaginary Bill Cosby, to fellate him—in considerably cruder terms than that? And didn’t British comedienne Jo Brand confess to once using the F word ninety-three times in one show? Add in the fact that the 1990s also saw the development of “male genital origami” as a form of comedy and it certainly seems modern comics will do anything for a laugh. Yet, as ever, compared to their ancient counterparts, they’re just try-hards. Male actors in Greek comedies, by way of comparison, wore huge, dangling red leather pha
lluses for giggles. One leading ancient Greek playwright even wrote a play featuring the Persian king’s supposed eight-month struggle to pass a turd, and some actors simulated defecation on stage to titillate the audience.14 Even these excesses, though, were pale imitations of the antics of some tribal comics. Many of the Plains Indian tribes of North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to illustrate, featured “contrary” clowning societies whose members did everything backward for comic effect. They spoke backward, walked backward, and played outlandish tricks such as plunging their hands into boiling water and complaining it was cold. Zuni Indian Koyemci clowns acted even more bizarrely—biting the heads off mice, tearing dogs apart and feasting on their entrails, and emptying bowls of urine over their heads, to the appreciative laughter of their kinsmen. They also drank urine, sucking down great draughts and smacking their lips at how delicious it was, and ate both dog and human excrement, all for a laugh.15 Famed anthropologist Adolph Bandelier wrote that he even saw Zuni clowns masturbating and sodomizing one another in their attempts to raise a chuckle.
Decency once again prohibits me from stating exactly which body part the above examples show Eddie Murphy has failed to put where his mouth is. But you get the idea.
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Puppetry of the Polynesian penis
Comedians Dave Friend and Simon Morley really started something when their “Puppetry of the Penis” show debuted in the 1998 Melbourne (Australia) International Comedy Festival. The act—in which Friend and Morley stretched, twisted, and folded their genitalia into fantastic shapes such as “The Pelican,” “The Atomic Mushroom,” and “The Mollusc”—was regarded as hilariously original, and soon found a legion of imitators around the world. Yet Friend and Morley were, in reality, too late to claim an original creation—about 350 years too late. Captain William Bligh, of mutiny-on-the-Bounty fame, was disgusted to receive a very similar performance on his first visit to Tahiti, in which one man:
…had his penis swelled and distorted out into an erection by a severe twine ligature…applied so tight that the penis was apparently almost cut through. The second brought his stones to the head of his penis and with a small cloth bandage he wrapped them round and round, up towards the belly, stretching them at the same time very violently until they were near a foot in length…the stones and the head being like three small balls at the extremity. The third person…seizing his scrotum…pulled it out with such force that the penis went in totally out of sight and the scrotum became shockingly distended. In this manner they danced around the ring until I desired them to desist…16
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Returning to rap, isn’t it still true, though, that the hip-hop art form can lay claim to one last unique element: that of the contest? Though Homer, the Slavic guslars, and other ancient poets might have been quicker, smarter, funnier, stronger in memory, more creative, and more violent in their lyrics, isn’t it still the case that modern rappers are the only poets to risk their reputations, and even sometimes their lives, in mano-a-mano confrontations with rival lyricists? Freestyle rap battles such as that of Supernatural and MC Juice are, after all, undeniably grueling lyrical tests of courage, quick-wittedness, and humor. Rappers also face possibly devastating humiliation if their poetic attempts to win the crowd over fall flat. They can even face violence or death, given the hip-hop institution of “beef”—feuds in which rappers attack each other with songs and, sometimes, blades and bullets. Surely no ancient or tribal poets dueled thus, risking their reputations and lives in the process?
The bad news is that some, in fact, did. And the worse news is that when they did, it was more difficult, more violent, and more dangerous than any modern hip-hop MC could possibly imagine.
The nith song duel of the arctic Inuit peoples in pre-colonial times, to illustrate, was an intense battle of words, wits, and wills in which men attempted to outsing one another to settle disputes such as wife-stealing or other insults. Since their object was to win over public opinion, performances took place in front of the whole village, the winner being decided by applause. Combatants strove to humiliate rivals with withering insults (accusations of cannibalism and incest being particular favorites) and witty boasts. They were required to suffer, in turn, the pantomime antics of those same opponents, who might stuff their mouths with seal blubber or blocks of wood to muffle their voices. The later consequences of nith song combat could also be devastating. As one Inuit duelist noted, nith song lyrics were “little, sharp words, like the wooden splinters which I hack off with my axe.” In the close-knit conditions of Inuit life the shame of losing often led to suicide, while winning might well lead to murder. Inuit song duels were, in addition, extremely long compared to modern rap battles (which rarely last more than an hour or two). Not only might one nith dueling bout last a whole day, tit-for-tat duel cycles often spanned the entire winter season, and might even be kept up for years.17
Another lengthy, vicious, and frequently devastating poetic contest was the haló song duel of the Anlo-Ewe people in colonial-era Ghana. It, too, had as its goal the winning of public support, though in this case not for resolving disputes but for marshaling fighting power to better pursue them. Haló duels, unlike nith contests, were fights between villages, and whole communities practiced for months to prepare their lyrical assaults on their neighbors. These practice sessions were usually held in the strictest secrecy, since the lyrics of haló songs were so insulting they inevitably provoked premature fighting once their content became known. In just one song recorded by an American anthropologist, for example, one village’s women were accused of: sleeping with their brothers, with all the men in their village, and with bulls; pleasuring themselves with sticks in the vagina; and setting bushes alight with their flatulence. The men were accused of: having absurdly rotund scrotums, selling their grandparents into slavery, and looking like monkeys. With verbal fireworks like these, and the inevitable violence they sparked, it is no surprise that the Ghanaian colonial police finally banned the ancient art of haló in 1960.18
Lest it be thought such lyrical mud-fights were beneath ancient Western poets, the medieval Anglo-Celtic literary tradition of flyting deserves a mention here. Flyting contests were insult competitions conducted in verse, but their lyrics were anything but poetic. The most famous recorded bout, for example, between poets William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy at the court of James IV of Scotland in the late fifteenth century, has been described as “500 lines of filth.”19 A brief scan of the verses of The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy shows why. Scatological references abound—at one point Kennedy insists Dunbar’s “arse drips with excrement, [to] scrub your bottom tired out ten old women.” He also accuses Dunbar’s loose bowels of almost sinking a ship. And the clever, convoluted rhymes, triple-rhymes, and alliterations of the piece do not disguise its other ferocious insults—insane werewolf, deformed dwarf, spawn of Satan, horse-fornicator, and so on. Dunbar and Kennedy’s poetic duel also employed shockingly violent threats. They happily accused each other of heresy and treason, crimes for which the listening king could have hanged them. Each poet also took great delight in vividly describing the brutal tortures his rival would suffer once his misdeeds became known.
Compared to the violence of this poem, one rapper threatening to cap another with his Glock seems distinctly ho-hum.
So much for violent language in poetic contests, but isn’t it still true that rappers have set a new record in actual violence between contestants? Their “beefs” are, after all, known to frequently end in assault and even murder. Perhaps the most famous example is that of rapper Tupac Shakur, who was shot and killed in September 1996, some believe on the orders of Notorious B.I.G., a rival rapper with whom Shakur had maintained a longstanding beef (and who was also later shot and killed). Even 50 Cent himself was stabbed by rapper Black Child, an associate of Ja Rule and Murder Inc., in one episode of 50 Cent’s beef with them. Yet ancient poetic contests were no stranger to violence between contestants either. Some, indeed,
required it. Combatants in the Inuit nith song duels, for example, sometimes accompanied their ripostes with a savage head butt or straight-armed blow to the side of the head, which their opponent was required to accept stoically until his turn came to return it. Nor was fatal violence completely absent. True, the official ideology of the duel required combatants to laugh off their defeats and depart in good humor, but Inuit society was also strongly revenge driven: one early twentieth-century anthropologist reported that every man he met at one Copper Eskimo camp had been involved in at least one vengeance murder. It seems unlikely, therefore, that no defeated nith singer ever sought to even the score with a later harpooning (the usual method of Inuit murder). Tellingly, nith singers rarely included the accusation of murder among their insults—since all of them were killers, the charge lacked sting.
Physical violence was similarly common in the haló duels of the Anlo-Ewe people. Anthropologists reported witnessing frequent cases where the victims of the singers’ insults broke through the rope separating them from the performers and attacked them with weapons.20 These assaults usually prompted other audience members to join in, resulting in the inevitable mass arrests with which haló duels generally ended. Haló violence was even continued into the supernatural realm, with contestants eagerly attempting to injure or kill one another through the casting of spells and curses. Nor has the Western literary tradition been without its share of accompanying brutality. The reason for the violent language of the Scottish flyting contests was that the contest had originally been a simple prelude to battle, in which contending heroes would shout boastful abuse at one another. Even later, more refined literary disputes, however, also had their violent elements. Alexander Pope, the eighteenth century English poet, to quote one famous example, was forced to carry a loaded pistol and keep a savage guard dog to deter would-be attackers enraged by his popular satire The Dunciad. Given that The Dunciad was essentially a four-book “diss track” humiliating every one of Pope’s rival poets by calling them servants of the great goddess “Dulness,” we can well understand their murderous impulses.
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