On Hip-Hop

On Hip-Hop

By Nana Aforo



I'd bloom with assurance as flowers grow in my mind

and everything around me would be pollinated but it feels

like fall as my feet stand on cold ground nothing grows

because I'm the middle. When it rains but subsequent sun

manifests no sugar nothings sweet just a little bitter. Like a song

stuck in my head with no heart so I'll replace it with something

else.



Something with a little hopping hippy in the vicinity are you

feeling me? I'll tell you you're music in your face I see your

nuances like notes or inspiring quotes. Come back into light

because I can't see you in bleakness and there's something

beautiful about your darkness.



Codified and expanded. Twist the mind forty different ways as

I see forty different sides of the coin and we've been doing this

since the eighties. To keep children from the click clack with

a little boom bap and that's that, intelligent movement, pensive

groovement



I say as I kick ghosts out of the shell.



No such thing as cliché they just all want to copy you and I call

that bootleg beauty. My minds a vein and you water as you flow

through me so excuse me if I do a little dance. I'm just inspired.



I'll never let them walk on you, like a rug, with dirty feet. You're

swing inspired and a little more funky than most. I'll name you

Hip Hopera El-Shabazz together we'll exit ignorance. How you

going to take the art out of an art form? I'd ask them, but no answer

just buzzing.



It's intrinsic so get with it, I told them. Always a part of me because

we share drums and play beats to move minds and hips at the same

time. The ignorant players be like: I'll William Wordsworth your Franklin

Delano with my Arnold Swanson, and you don't want it son. Catch

a body after you catch the meaning meanwhile I stay scheming. Haha

I'm beaming. That's nothing! Literally! Silly. It's op-ip because it lacks

the hippy. Ya get me? That's my scholarly modus operandi. But then

again be yourself and fuck what I have to say.



Step outside of yourself and paint what you see with lexicon or acrylic.

Like grand masters hip-hop pastors; this is a religious experience and

I'm so damn serious. I can feel it visceral as my spiritual becomes literal. 



It's the realist thing I've ever seen and I call it hip-hop.