Shawn Kemp's Offspring

by Tariq al Hayder



"For you to write new rhymes it is a must
But I come off with rhymes old as dust
Even as a speck of dust it existed
Ya got that?
Forget it, ya missed it"

- GZA/Genius

OK, it would be cheating if I just came out and declared that GZA is my favorite rapper. I have to take it back... See, back in the day, my boys and I were Westside-for-lifers, whatever the hell that means.

In fact, let me take it back even further: to 1995. That was the year I first heard Snoop's Doggystyle. To say I was blown away is like saying pre-pregnancy Jessica Alba was not THAT ugly. I don't know if it was Dre's funky beats or Calvin Broadus's laconic flow or both, but I was transfixed. Everyday after school I would fire up my Super Nintendo and listen to Doggystyle until nightfall. Occassionally, I did homework. I pledged my alleigance henceforth to all things Death Row. I wasn't alone, either: all my boys and I greeted each other with fingers twisted into W's. Geeky, I know. What can I say...fuckin' teenagers. But it was good that others shared my nerdiness: Bashar, Rio, Firas, Ahmad (aka Batman) and especially Dodi.

See, Dodi and I were more hardcore than the rest. We bought Laker jerseys. We rooted for the Raiders. Westside, baby. Dodi would take me aside, and with a mischevious twinkle of the eye tell me about the Clubhouse. The Clubhouse was a fictional place where all true Westsiders hung out. It was basically the two of us, Tupac, the king of all music, Snoop, Kurupt, Daz, Dre, RBX, Warren G, Stretch, a young Lamar Odom and Cesar fuckin' Sampaio, for some reason (remember him, Alan? #5 with Brazil? Dodi is not mentally stable). Basically, the members of this imaginary Clubhouse (us included) spent their days smoking weed, making gangsta rap, playing dominoes and cards, "entertaining" lovely females and drinking Alize and Hennessey. And Dodi would sometimes speak of the Westsiders in mock-exasperation, like thus:

Dodi: Man, the guys are pissed at TQ!
Me: Why? Dude is cool, man.
Dodi: It's just that all he says is "Westside!" Like the other day Kurupt was preparing a DMX diss, and Snoop and Lamar Odom were playing Tekken, when Cesar Sampaio said: "Hey, senors, we need to get some grub!" and TQ said "Westside!" So Snoop suggested Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles, but 'Pac wanted In n Out. And for some reason, Omar Epps stopped by and insisted on getting take-out from the Ivy. Finally, we all settled on Arby's, and when we asked TQ what he wanted to eat, he just kept saying "Westside" like a fucking parrot. Overkill, man.
Me: I meant to tell you...we need to let Tim Brown into the Clubhouse.
Dodi: Westside.

So yeah, we were all about the Westside. And I HATED Biggie. In fact, I hated EVERYONE 2Pac ever dissed, which means I hated 93% of the population of the Earth. And then I heard "Triumph."

Thank God Pac was cool with the Wu. That song changed me, musically. The song my boys called "I Bomb Atomically". Inspectah Deck's opening verse was especially intriguing; I mean, a dude was rapping about "Socrates philosophies"? Wow. Ear-opening. And slowly, the Westside's grip on my soul began to weaken. I even liked Biggie's "You're Nobody Till Somebody Kills You", which killed my soul a little.

New rappers began to enter the Clubhouse. It wasn't just Westsiders anymore. Even Jay-Z got a pass when he dropped Blueprint. Eminem was allowed in, but both the Batman and Dodi argued that his membership be revoked after his duet with Elton John. I begged that they forgive his transgression. Batman said he didn't really care as long as we let in Bone Thugs N Harmony.

I was in love with the Wu. Method Man was my favorite. I would drive around, eat Chicken Flamers from Burger King and listen to Enter the 36 Chambers. To this day, I associate Meth's gravelly flow with grilled chicken sandwiches with extra mayo and pickles. So where does the GZA figure in? Well, to quote the man himself, I guess "with age and experience my reason ripens".

See, I realized that lyrically, GZA may or may not be the best battle-rapper out there, and he may or may not be the best story-teller out there, but he had a peculiar relationship with words. To illustrate what I mean, let me take it all the way back to pre-Islamic Arabia. The ancient Arabs had markets where poets came to perform. The really bad-ass poets became judges, and they decided which poets won and brought honor to their tribes and which ones 50-Cented up the joint.

One prominent judge was nicknamed, fittingly, the Genius. One day, two very skilled poets came to do battle in front of the Genius: a woman named Khansaa' and a man called Hassan. Both were supremely talented. When they delivered their verses, the Genius looked at them both and then turned to Khansaa', smiled, and calmly uttered: "No owner of ovaries has ever impressed like you have."

Khansaa' smiled and replied "You'd do well to find someone with only two testicles on my level!"

The Genius laughed, but Hassan saw this as an insult directed at him, so he shouted "You know what, Genius, you have no right to judge us, because I'm a better poet than YOU!"

The Genius smiled, put his arm around Hassan's shoulder, and whispered "Nephew, perhaps you CAN surpass me one day, but let me ask you this, can you match this:"

And then he dropped a single verse of poetry, off the top of his head, which only maintains a faint glimmer of its majesty in translation:

You are like the night, which will inevitably reach me/ Even if you perceive a vast schism between us

Hassan dropped his head and moved along.

This struggle for verbal beauty, for aesthetic perfection, is inextricable from the Arab psyche. In fact, when Muhammad came with the Qur'an, one of the reasons so many people eventually embraced Islam was that it was widely recognized that it was IMPOSSIBLE to produce a literary work in the Arabic language which could even rival the Qur'an aesthetically. Even Muhammad's enemies conceded this point. And they took a strange approach: they urged people to fill their ears with cotton, because Muhammad's superior words were "sorcery". How else could an ILLITERATE man produce a work of such beauty.

Poetry, the love of words, is so ingrained in Arab culture that even Osama bin Laden tries to pass himself off as a poet (He's a very bad one, incidentally).

But I digress.

Anyway, back to the GZA/Genius. He reminds me of the other Genius. I feel like he's an old man who collects words like seashells. You see him alone on the shore, and you think to yourself "What's wrong with this dude?" But if you inspect him closely, he picks up a shell, twirls it around for you, and shows you part of a living creature, when all you noticed before was a pretty rock. And he does this by structuring an entire album on a chess metaphor (Grandmasters), or by playing with words for whole songs, whether those words are the names of celebrities ("Fame"), record labels ("Labels"), animals ("Animal Planet"), NFL teams ("Queen's Gambit") or magazines ("Puplicity"). Just look at these sample lyrics:

Puplicity:


"Rap lords, swing swords, SLAM microphones, shatter BILLBOARDS" (SLAM mention!)

Animal Planet:

"The owls are private eyes that watch from the bark
Black panthers are the militant who strike in the dark
Porcupines had a rep' for sticking everything that moved
In areas that the rhinos and hippos approved
And the giraffe was a look-out for gorillas in the mist"

Fame:

"Paul +Pierce+d in the heart as the crowd pushed
Acting alone... Drew +Buried More+ bones
of the victims, three blocks from Jim's +Brownstone+

Queen's Gambit:

"Her ancestors were CHIEFS, who ran with running deer
On the sail with the SEAHAWKS, who battled the BUCCANEERS
The REDSKIN garments, was suede coat liners
Held rare coins, frequently sought from gold miners
They were hard working warriors, we call over timers
Shot plenty arrows at COWBOYS and 49ERS
Her interesting background, but quite unusual
great for a script, but out of bounds for a musical
She told me to call her, if I came to town
I started TEXAN her, soon as my plane had touchdown"

And sometimes it's not even that complex. The Genius himself recognizes that "the significance was not the vulgar applause on entrance, but the feeling at exit: COMPLETION OF A SENTENCE". Sometimes it's simple; just raw metaphors and similes:

"My enemies get cooked like eggs when they scramble"

"I slash like a hyphen"

"Lyrics are weak like clock-radio speakers"

"They're stingy, like they got short arms and deep pockets"

"Unbalanced like elephants and ants on seesaws"

"It's a wide entrance, small exit like a funnel/ So deep it's picked up on radios in tunnels"

So when it comes to wordplay, GZA describes it best; he's an athlete:

"Run on the track like Jesse Owens
Broke the record flowin, without any knowin
That my wordplay run the 400 meter relay
It's on once I grab the baton from the DJ
A athlete wit his iron cleat in the ground
Wildest nigga who sprint off the gun sound
The best time yet still 7.0
Swift flow made the cameramen clothes blow"



Thank you, Genius.