The following is the first installment in a lengthy, madcap investigation of how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation. Prosodists, sharpen your metrical pencils.

She said, she said:
“Nothin’s wrong—and I belong on stage…”

—Ted Leo, “Hearts of Oak.”

Songs aren’t always satisfying poems when read on the page. Many songs lean heavily on the voices of their performers—how their performers breathe them forward into time, meter them into space, packet of sound-information by packet of sound-information, toward our ears. The signs of the song march along, one by one, and we assemble a meaning that is not purely textual (signal, verbal) but also sonic/phonic, playful, almost religious.

In some cases, however, the written song meanders back and forth between poetry (decent, if not mind-blasting) and something else entirely—prose that’s simply being fed to us at a certain clip.

This is one reason I like hip hop so much. It doesn’t try to achieve the lyricism of a great written or spoken poem. Let the rockers try to match Dante. Rappers ape another form entirely. Their songs are often political, usually essayistic, and almost never anything but prose, spoken in a quasi-meter, with a few forced rhymes to keep up the illusion of “song”-ness.

This isn’t a criticism of my favorite genre of music. Hip hop’s strategy of not having to be poetry pur sang is brilliant. It’s freeing. Hip hop sounds more powerful, not less, for giving back to the page the powers of the line, and giving back to the metric breathers the power of the rhyme and the accented/unaccented syllable.

What does hip hop retain? The ordered flow of signs.

Consider one favorite of mine—“Throw Your Hands Up” by 8Ball & MJG, featuring Outkast, an epic and wry anthem which steers an ostensible call-to-have-a-party back again and again into the political. Sure, the people should party, the song says, but they should also examine their roots, and how they’re allowed to communicate with/in the larger world… Leaving aside its grander themes, I like this song as a song. I wouldn’t want to read most of it in a book. But there are exceptions.

First, of course, there’s MJG’s immortal couplet: “Ham sammich in the driveway—drop top, / naked women in the den, playin—hopscotch.” Wow. Talk about an image that perfectly fuses effortless cool (eatin a sandwich, ignorin the party) with money (got my cool car, dropped its top, probably put some Ds on it) with sex (the women are naked, playin around) with jeu, the game, the perhaps unintended metaphor for hip hop (hopscotch—a jumping game, a game of metered movement, accompanied by sing-song, by proto-rap).

This couplet is strongly metered and so isn’t a great example of hip hop’s prosaic-poetic style of rhetoric, but it does strike at the heart of image control. It moves us sign by sign, image by image, toward a picture of MJG, a mosaic of the generic (post-jaded/post-carnival impresario, laid back southern rapper, sandwich aficionado) and the specific (MJG—who else rhymin about sandwiches?).

But the ruckus gets brought with André 3000’s verse:

You wouldn’t understand, if you stood under it—(Oooooh)
It’s like the more that I talk to you, the dumber that I get—
The closer that I walk to you, the further that we stand,
apart, distant. Nobody has the upper hand, but my body’s resistant—
So now, throw your phalanges in the ground.
I’m still abound. Unbelievers stay from hell around.
I found negatives n*ggas, they only keep you down.
Transmitting from Native American burial grounds,
I carry around the weight of all worlds on my shoulderpads.
I’m s’posed to blast space invaders: I’m somebody’s dad…

This is complex imagery laid out complexly, via enjambment (spilling over, line to line). There’s almost no song-like meter (meaning the meter of the song is the natural meter of English prose)—at least, so far as I read these words on the page or screen.

The rhyme scheme is simple, and it’s nicely buried by enjambment and echoes and the effect of the images, which concatenate, compiling future and past (video games and Native American burial practice), to create a moment-by-moment, modern consciousness—a fully realized portrait of a writer bound up in details and vexed by many of his listeners’ failure to reform their lives in full honor of his words.

The imagery speaks prose-poetically to this frustration of the generator at his consumers: First, let’s ask ourselves what it means to be “abound.” Wiktionary gives us a hint: “To be plentiful; to be very prevalent; to overflow.” And: “To be copiously supplied; to be wealthy in; to teem with.” The example given, “Where sin abounded grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20), is enlightening in that it situates the word in a religious context. André likewise compares himself to “unbelievers.”

We also have “abound” emanating out of “abounden,” from “abonder” (Fr.), “abundare” (Lat., “to overflow”), all the way back to “ab” + “unda“—the latter meaning “wave” (think of the water-spirits called the undine). We have the verb of abundance overflowing out of the simple sign of the wave. Then we have this ultra-abundant verb being frozen in noun form—indeed, in the form of a living dude—by the frustrated writer. He’s still abound. He’s vexed but still the generator, still the verb, made flesh.

Beyond the incarnate verb, we have the notion of the world’s weight, of Atlas’s burden (the mic—mediality—gripped by titanic phalanges), which speaks to the flipside of stardom: When not eating sandwiches with fine women, the rapper is a target, abandoned continually by his shifting, gadfly fanbase. He is, to boot, in the end, a father as well—a real man, as complex and human as he is simplistically in control, generator and “overstander.”

Throughout, the cadence of the words—long pauses devolving into fast runs, runs carried over into the next lines—guides us from thought to thought at such as speed that we can read the words any number of time without being able to settle on a center or focus.

This rap is flat, merging with what comes before and after it (the chorus—heavily metered, political, a chant, a beautiful thing to listen to but in a different sphere of art from this prose-poetic verse).

The words here merge seamlessly with the chorus even as the chorus demands that we throw our hands up in appreciation… appreciation of a verse about how we’re not getting it, we’re wrapped up in the wrong things, trapped by the wrong signs… Let’s give the guy an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

In the next 100% FREE future golden American ambitious installments of this pseudo-column, Reading The Song, we find: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” indie rock, Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” Iggy Pop, the early and impeccable Jigga, & much, much more…

Bob Dylan is from another planet, a distant heavenly sphere on which it is always Christmas. He earns an Honourable Badge of Merit for this festive gem of festive gems, a very merry polka-zydeco chase sequence:

Now back to my regularly scheduled fare of Shostakovich, hip hop, and electro from other dimensions. Advised listening:

“Hold the Line” - Major Lazer

“Deadbeat Summer” - Neon Indian

Flying Lotus’s impeccable remixes of Lil Wayne

“Popular Demand” - Lupe Fiasco

Happy Festivus from Atlanta.

The front matter is the stuff before the stuff. You open a book, but it doesn’t start right off. It starts with some weird crap about how happy the author is you picked it up, what edition it is, why he wrote it, and blah blah blah. What up with that?

I’ll tell you.

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First of all, front matter, back matter, cover, and illustrations comprise a text’s paratext (”side text”), meaning frame or way-into the text pur sang. The text isn’t just, say, a novel; it’s an experience: A sexy cover catches your eye; a screaming title and subtle subtitle play with your naughty lizard brain; a table of contents or epigraph or short foreword make you want to learn more.

Paratext helps you ease into the text. Even the dullest novel benefits from a title which refracts its principal themes. And, yes, texts benefit from illustrations, and they always have. (Remember the weird spermazoid line in Tristram Shandy?)

Each piece of front matter has a specific paratextual purpose, often simply to delay you as you flip towards Chapter One (”Eating Better: Weeping Best” or “The Cowboy Who Was An Indian!! Part One,” perhaps).

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Often comprised of a poem or a few lines therefrom, an epigraph is a quotation at the beginning of another piece of writing that serves as an introduction, a summary, an ironic or admonishing counterexample, and/or a link to a wider literary-historical continuum.

The epigraph frames the rest of what follows. If it’s doing its job, you should forget it, in the moment, but continue to munch on it, in your back-brain, as you read the rest of the story or book. When I hear the word “epigraph,” I always think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

—Dr. Johnson.

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Preamble is primarily a legal term. A premable introduces a document, explaining its purpose and the philosophy underlying its writing. You hear this word used often in conjunction with the constitutions and other important, top-level legal coda of sovereign states. Just remember “We the people:”

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

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A foreword is short, comes before the author’s introduction, and is written by someone other than the author. This is as opposed to the preface, which is written by the author. The writer of a foreword may describe how he came to know the author of the book, or why he was asked to write the foreword. The foreword may explain why the current incarnation of the book has been printed. (”Errors was made. But we fixed em,” e.g.)

In the foreword to Umbrella Academy: Dallas, Neil Gaiman merges his praise of the soon-to-follow graphic tale with a warning of the conflict that is already happening, in medias res, in that tale—thus collapsing the narrative distance between the reader and the text unexpectedly. Postmodern forewords by fictional critics accomplish the same trick, usually with less Abraham Lincoln. See: Pale Fire, &c.

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A preface is an introduction written by the author, in which he typically outlines the Grace-guided genesis and pothole-challenged actual-writing of the text, sometimes (but not necessarily) acknowledging his immense debts to the people who’ve supported his broke ass for the last five years as he’s scribbled page after page about telepathic monkeys, or whathaveyou. A book’s preface follows its foreword and precedes its introduction and its prologue.

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An introduction or prolegomenon is, broadly, any initial piece that explains the purpose of what follows. All introductions should be engaging. In literary works, an introduction follows a preface and may speak to the work’s goals, when a preface sticks to its origins.

“Prolegomenon” sounds more formal, as them big-ass Greek words are wont. A prolegomenon may ask you to interpret what follows in a certain way.

One strong “prolegomenon” is the Greek title of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, which sets forth many of the logical, methodological, and philosophical errors historians can make when writing history; suggests history can be viewed through the lens of various class and economic conflicts; and in other ways predicts, from across a gulf of seven hundred years, modern historiography.

In a sense, Khaldun, in his Prolegomenon, asks us to interpret not only what happened up until 1377, but all of history afterward through the lens of the book: His book is a prolegomenon to the greater Book of time.

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A prologue precedes the main story but is told in the voice of a character or omniscient narrator, as opposed to that of the author. (In some books the distinction is meaningless.) A prologue is, in some way, part of the “the plot” of the book. Often, events in the prologue take place years before those of the chapters that follow.

My favorite prologue is the title of Harry Mathews’s The Sinking Of The Odradek Stadium. The title forms an important plot element—one whose importance only comes into focus, however, on the last page of the book, making it recursive. To end a reading of the epistolary madness that is The Sinking is to begin again, at the end of the plot, with the title…

For this feat of front-matter manipulation, and for many, many other writerly acts others of note, Mr. Mathews receives today’s Honourable Badge Of Merit. Happy Monday, all.

Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty win an Honourable Badge of Merit, not for chiding us that our handwriting is spastic, nor for implying that this is due to a degenerating decade and a half of instant messaging and texting, but for finally explaining to me why the fuck it’s so hard to read traditional “cursive,” or, as I think of it, confusing word spaghetti.

The answer is that we read the tops of characters to determine their meanings. We don’t read the bottoms. Loop all the tops together, and you have a senseless bird-language. Write the upper halves of letters cleanly, and you have the language of Samuel Johnson, bell hooks, and fictional wise-acre Peter Griffin. (Loop the bottoms of words together, and you may have ill graffiti. Depends on your handstyle.)

Traditionalists may see the death of old media and the fracturing of style as threats to time-tested systems. Old writers likely want people to read books, dangit, and books written within clear limits of genre, even if those limits have only existed for a few decades. Each medium wins its hawks, and so each medium has mourners to bemoan its inevitable death.  But how much gladder am I to laud the comings of a form, the birth of a new literature, a new system of meaning, one made of transparencies and Japanese music videos…

These musings are really just to say: My friends P. D. and M. R. of What We Know So Far have been presenting for the last year or so a series of simultaneously low-fi/hyper-current lecture-operas about, among other rhizomatic topics, the internet—what it means, where it’s going, and how quickly information in general is mutating in the Twitter era.

The other night at 3rd Ward they presented a series of short… lectures (?) and videos, some of which I’d seen in earlier, less-polished (but always entertaining) rounds of composition. To sum it up quickly and perhaps badly, WWKSF’s work blends the words of Baudrillard and the images of ICanHasCheezburger seamlessly, so that it’s afterward surprising that the great French de-thinkers of the twentieth century weren’t inspired by the internet, but somehow prefigured it, perhaps by doing lots of awesome drugs, or by being really smart, or a mix of columns A and B.

For What We Know So Far’s bold and hilarious efforts to probe just what we know and how we know it, in toto, they receive this week’s Honourable Badge of Merit.

In related news, (i.e., the news of cat memes on the internet), I found a new favorite sentence of the summer, from the New York Times:

No group, from the mostly white soldiers and bureaucrats who corral and abuse the prawns to the Nigerian gangsters who prey upon the aliens and exploit their addiction to cat food, is innocent.

This sentence claims to describe a movie, District 9, which I hadn’t really wanted to see until reading about the Nigerian cat-food gangsters. I wonder now, rereading the sentence from beyond the stars, if the c.-f. gangsters ever heard of Athanasius Kircher’s anti-mellifluous cat piano, and if cats like aliens, or if aliens fall into the same category as other cats, vacuums, mops, twine, roaches, bees, human toes, and floss.

In “D.O.A.,” Jay-Z seems to ask of abusers of Auto-Tune, “Have you left no sense of decency?” We applaud him for his demanding that hip hop not devolve into a succession of fads, each one geared more blatantly at tween girls and their ringtone-money.

The Times points out that Jay-Z’s song has, rather than killing Auto-Tune software, helped spur it to record sales. Hova alone is not to blame. The “Auto-Tune the News” guys and Vimeo are also responsible, as are hordes of wack MCs and would-be humorists with access to Auto-Tune, Flash, and the interwebs.

And yet the Auto-Tune debate isn’t just about fad-ism, I think. Whether or not certain artists use Auto-Tune will be largely irrelevant in a few years. What counts, at least to Jay-Z, is that everyone care what Jay-Z thinks. In his role as the living avatar of hip hop (a role I acknowledge even if Dre3000 is a better rapper, or DOOM more adaptive and fun), Jay-Z must fight for tradition—for any tradition. Public figures must generally either court controversy (as does Eminem) or play the role of the conservative mother-father, the defender of good ole-fashioned common sense about subject X, whatever it is.

(Ever a step ahead of Jay, the incomparably paranoid and too-often-hated-on Nas, with Nick Cannon, recently released this bizarre video trumpeting the upcoming End Times of hip hop, when all rappers will have sold their souls to their corporate overlords.)

But part of the fun and challenge of being public figure in America is straddling lines. How do you come off as a defender of tradition without being stodgy, and how do you challenge norms without annoying your audience? Can you have it both ways?

Jay-Z and all current celebrity artists and thinkers should take a page from another great American publican, a lady’s man with a burly-chic, an avant-garde businessman, a powerbroker with unimpeachable (cobblestone) street cred who went by the name of Bennie “Almanac-Mackin” F-lin. Bennie’s roundly and deservedly honored today by Maria Kalman, who earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

By way of coda: Writing of the Almanacker makes me think of another portly, famous public figure, one not so deft at juggling conflicting images as Franklin or Hova. While Franklin or Hova might get nasty on mulled wine or designer drugs, they’d probably keep it a secret. They’d support liberal politicians and attack wack new sounds, be those sounds pressed to wax cylinder or MP3.

Orson Welles, on the other hand, blazed too quickly, spending his cultural cash early in his private war against William Hearst, and ending his life a crazy-eyed drunk, like a slurry, overweight Dracula. I love the man, but really. The footage speaks for itself.

And it went something like this. (Thanks to my brother G for the recommendation. I love true history. And cussin’, oathin’, &c.)

In other news, I have updated my own Vividly Unimagined Irrealities index.

In still other news, Pink Tentacle wins this week’s Honourable Badge Of Merit for his coverage of the strange and often powerful popular arts of Japan. If only I had the time, manpower, and paint to turn my own rice paddies into giant two-dimensional samurai…

Friend and writer-adventurer Mr. Dylan Thuras (of the Atlas Obscura) recently brought to my attention the work of one Mr. Colin Low, author of both the best history and counter-history of the Necronomicon on the net.

Read in succession, Low’s Anti-FAQ and apologia for that Anti-FAQ explain what the Necronomicon is (H. P. Lovecraft’s recurring MacGuffin-grimoire, full of all sorts of evil gnostic gossip from beyond time and space), what it isn’t (real), and why so many would-be readers, myself included, care.

For my money, Low nails the book’s allure here:

I believe the importance of the Necronomicon is twofold:

• it is believed to reflect a modern consciousness of reality
• it is believed to be authoritative

As a lost evil text from another dimension, dictated to a mad Damascene before the First Crusade, the Necronomicon does not exist. But the possibility of its existence and the role it continues to play in literature, religion, and the rhizomatic maze-tunnels of the internet give it a special power over its would-be readers. One of the most talked-about artifacts to have never existed, the book’s form and content are indeed shaped by those who talk about it, making it a truly postmodern, truly potential text.

For those interested, various translations of the book exist. Versions based on the movies of Sam Raimi and Lovecraftian versions probably differ in the style and substance of their bulldada, but both will seriously up your hinter-culture street-cred.

In any event, hats off, Mr. Colin Low, to your exhaustive study of a fake book. You earn this week’s Honourable Badge Of Merit, the first to be given on this website.