We Are All Illiterate Preachers

An artist's depictiom of one of the kids from Family Circus and Rocko from Rocko's Modern Life.

Say what you will about the tenets of the internet, at least due to its nature as a sort of enormous octopus that grabs everything in sight and puts it in a massive junk heap, now having odd interests are made much easier. Allow me to elaborate.

A) I love literature.

B) I love hip-hop, specifically Wu-Tang Clan

C) I love clothes and care about them in a fashion that some would call “homosexual”. This could be a whole post, but I’ll save it.

Now, without the internet, these would never coalesce. It would be pretty difficult for them to. But sometimes, there’s a man. And that man is Samuel Beckett.

He got stabbed once, looked like David Bowie with more cocaine, and was mentored by James Joyce, later to fuck his schizophrenic daughter. Kiddies, can you spell P.I.M.P? Cause I can.

Look at those shoes. Pretty cool, right? I indeed like those shoes. It gets better though.

Once, Ghostface Killah murdered the face of a ghost. It cursed him and he is forever followed around by a red arrow pointing to a big yellow bubble showing his feet.

People, the man who wrote a play about the end of the world with people chilling out in garbage cans is wearing the same shoes as a guy who raps about being awesome. What’s odd though is that Samuel Beckett and Ghostface Killah are in some ways kindred spirits. Not only do they both like sick shoes, but they have transcended the labeling of their formative years and went on to create their own works. Samuel Beckett learned from James Joyce; and Ghostface Killah was a member of Wu-Tang Clan. He started off as a good but not fantastic rapper. That first Wu-Tang clan album is really all about GZA and Method, who annihilate every verse on that album and are the only two rappers to get solo songs (M-E-T-H-O-D MAAAANNN). Not to say everybody else wasn’t important, but those two shined the most, so much so that they were first out of the gate to get solo albums, both of which are now considered to be hip hop classics. However, in about two years, Ghostface had truly came into his own and found a style: rapping about things that make no damn sense. Literal word-salads. Not in an Aesop Rock “LOOK AT ME, I WENT TO COLLEGE!!!!1111″ way (disclaimer: I do like Aesop Rock but there are things about him that bug me), but in a complete bizarre fashion where you weren’t sure what meant what meant what and why. You weren’t sure if it was slang (possibly), a master wordsmith having a gay old time (possible), or a guy who smoked copious amounts of weed and just said stuff (possible). Songs like “Mighty Healthy” make so little sense that you have to approach them with an almost religious blind faith, not unlike what Faulkner said about James Joyce’s Ulysses. It takes the same sort of leap to appreciate somebody like Beckett, who I sadly am not an expert on, but know enough about him to know I’m not talking out of my ass.

This post was meant to further illustrate why Wu-Tang has such a cult appeal, but also for me to connect the abstract. Also, shoes. Yay. Thanks to nerdboyfriend for inspiring this post.

And here’s this video to prove I like white person music too.