Pop Bottles

Whats kickin all, I’m Drew. I’m first going to say I am horrific at typing properly due to a lot of reasons, so I know you’ll all forgive all the unpunctuated and unCAPITALIZED words and whatnot in this blog. I also have no idea what a blog is or how to use it. I study art and will probably major in it because I don’t really care about almost any other subject ive encountered. Art is great for me because I like to be creative and I like creative people and ideas. Thus led to my interest in music for the past few years. As many will say I cant live my life without music and I probably couldn’t. I got really into music a few years ago, and never had any older siblings or parents that listen to music other then a cd here or there, so everything I listen to is purely because I explore it on my own. I love guitar and bass, but really just anyone who masters their craft whether it be any instrument or anything. The reason I am in this class today is because I used to hate hip hop. Nothing about it appealed to me until this past summer I took a trip to cape cod with a buddy for a skim boarding excursion and became addicted to “we make it rain remix” by Fat Joe. It was just so comical to me that we played it probably more than 50 times in a few days. And it was mostly Lil waynes part that cause my attention and interested me. So after that week I got a bunch of GOOD hiphop songs from a friend and began to read some poetry. With instruments it was the technical ability of the musician that I was into, and with hip hop I just became fascinated with rhymes and metaphors and all the things I absolutely hate from English class. It was kind of ironic. So I began to listen to a lot of the rhymes of the music and came across a poet named Harryette Mullen, a black poet with a very unique style. I also was recommended to Terrance Hayes. I have read many of Harryette’s poems and only a few of Terrance Hayes’, but they fascinated me. I tried to blend different styles of hip hop artists and those poets and began to write some lyrics/poetry. Back to the list, I’m from VT and its amazing and terrible. I loved the time there but wouldn’t mind not going back. I am a skateboarder and a snowboarder, a martial artist and now I suppose I write song lyrics, or poetry until I record them with music, but im terrible at writing music so I need to find someone to make beats and I can rhyme over. I’ve had good feedback on my work, but I feel like some of the time my friends were being nice. I can read people fairly well and I know when they genuinely liked my work, and the songs that they weren’t too wild about or that nothing stuck out to catch their attention. I feel kind of cliché saying my influences due to my hip hop interest/style and lack of knowledge about poets and poetry in history. I am greatly influenced by Lil Wayne because of his connections he can draw and his metaphors. He is also good at talking about how badass he is and it humors me. His gangsta money songs to catch my attention too much but some of his stuff I really like. Wu-Tang Clan is another. Everyone in Wu-Tang has great flow. Method Man, Ghostface Killah, and Ol Dirty Bastard are the three of the Clan I know best. However, I am currently becoming more acquainted with the rest of the clan being RZA, GZA, Raekwon, U-God, Inspectah Deck, and the lesser known Masta Killa. Immortal Technique is one of my favorite hip hop artists because of how creative he can be with his “raw” rhymes. He is amazing at freestyling and kicks arse in battles. Immortal is a very political figure and has a lot of strong points in his songs. Deltron 3030 is a huge figure for writing to me because he uses off beat large, intelligent words and metaphors and doesn’t buy into the whole gangster thing even though he is Ice Cube’s cousin. The hip hop influences are too numerous to mention, obviously BIG, tupac, gang starr, sage francis, nas and plenty more. I want to learn about the different kinds of poets and poetry that I don’t know about, which is pretty much everything and incorporate it into my style of poetry. My style being the slam poetry/hip hop type stuff. I believe that if you want to do something, you need to learn everything about it because Robert Frost can influence me to write something in a hip hop style and I think blending styles, and being creative is the key to unique poetry/art. PEACE.