BARBARA: And the other interesting thing when you consider what you’re saying and drawing this line from… way back into the past is that anyone, even if you don’t know any of this history, you can hear hip-hop and you can immediately like get it or like it. And there is one final bit, this contains. and understood in that context, of course. And so, Shakespeare is related to that whole politics of the British class system. We're gonna be revisiting the Wu-Tang later, "Wu-Tang Forever" was the first hip-hop album, but we're gonna revisit that a little later, So, as you can see, it wasn't as clear-cut, various things make it very, very difficult. You know, you’re being poetic but at the same time you’ve put these very serious constraints on you but what the iambic pentameter, I think, gives you, it makes it a lot easier to memorize and as we’ve now discovered, you know, we can see that over modern music is a pretty good way for a person to learn how to flow. AKALA: It’s… well, (a) it’s the rhythm of the human heart. “Maybe it’s hatred I spew. In a way, they’re kind of more perfect characters, if you like. AKALA: Of course. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. BARBARA: Well that … let’s talk about that. Who We Are. The English language has not changed as much as people would like to believe. I do think they’re partly just his brilliance but I think they’re also related to, you know, wider issues of politics and culture and all of that sort of stuff. AKALA: Well, he wasn’t from the bottom of the society. AKALA: A hundred percent. Quer ser o melhor vai ser o melhor pra tua comunidadeUm som por semana?Não sou esse tipo de MCEu faço um som por anoE tu não fica uma semana sem ouvirMensageiro sim senhorVagabundo se emocionaPorque sente o espírito dos ancestrais, Griot! You don’t know it, but if you speak English regularly, you’re often quoting Shakespeare. So, sitting people down and forcing them to read Shakespeare… Performance poetry has to be performance first. It has to be rhythm first. This was in a 6th grade class. So, you’re going hip-hop again? His stage name is a Buddhist term for “immov­able”. There’s only five percent that are old words. AKALA: So what we do with that is we take five different verses and we play a beat, any kind of beat and we… there’s… so not all of them are iambic. You know, if you’re 12 how would you understand… the fact it’s even called the “Mystery of Iniquity” or RZA, “12 Jewelz,” he’s gotta rap about physics, right? If you’ve been enjoying Shakespeare Unlimited, I hope you’ll consider reviewing the podcast on whatever platform you get this podcast from. That’s not an easy feat and…, AKALA: Yeah, exactly, right? BARBARA: Well maybe you’ve already answered this question but, you know, every age relates to Shakespeare in a different way, and it’s the cliché to say that every age relates to Shakespeare. Akala suggests that the language used, and the subjects spoken about, in both Shakespeare and hip-hop: a) make it difficult to distinguish between the two. BARBARA: And what about rhyme? First (and free!) I’m Michael Witmore, the Folger’s director and, no, I’m not going to give you the answer right now. You listen to a song like “Preacher and the Bear.”, [CLIP of the Golden Gate Quartet singing “The Preacher and the Bear.”], Lord, look here, you know you delivered ol’ Daniel from the lion's den.And you delivered three Hebrew children from the fiery furnace, and then…. I have a problem with that being the only voice that cuts through and being seen as the dominant perception. ← [CLIP from Akala’s track, “Comedy Tragedy History”]. I think there’s something about Shakespeare as a brand, but I think that comes as much from what has been written about him as what he wrote. Our main building is closed for a multi-year renovation. Like playing… being a virtuoso classical pianist or playing violin or being a great actor. All rights reserved. Ninety nine percent of England doesn’t actually talk that way. Cause they’re not that interesting. and interactions with these institutions, DJing, MCing, break dancing, graffiti art, how those musical oral cultural traditions. AKALA: And spending time with him and hearing him rap, in Brazilian Portuguese, I was like, “the rhyme is not the same.” What I would hear audibly as a rhyme in English isn’t exactly what a rhyme is in Brazilian Portuguese. Yeah, so if you’ve got a four bar beat but you’ve got ten clicks of the high hat across those four bars, that’s sort of the way I would visually insert what your voice is doing and what the syllables are doing rhythmically within the kind of pattern of the drum structure. BARBARA: Okay. Since 2009, under the auspices of his “Hip-hop Shakespeare Company,” Akala has been going to community centers, prisons, and schools in immigrant and underserved communities, using the tools of hip-hop to spread an understanding of the relevance of Shakespeare’s poetry. Well done. I don’t think we can divorce Shakespeare’s global success from British imperialism and if India colonized the world, would we be reading the Mahabharata and the Rāmāyaṇa and these wonderful texts of Indian spirituality in the way that we read Shakespeare, as universal human text? We had help from Joe Philip at Covered PR, from Mariama Abudulai, and from Ryan Pate at the Dub Room Studio in Los Angeles. No one feels intimidated by Bob Marley, though. Hip hop artist Akala is a label owner and social entrepreneur fusing rap/rock/electro-punk with fierce lyrical storytelling. It really helps new people discover the show. So, if you come to England, you’ll hear more people that sound like me but that way of speaking, Received Pronunciation, so-called Queen’s English, did not exist in Shakespeare’s time. MICHAEL: Akala works for the most part in the UK but recently he was in Los Angeles and stepped into the studio to talk with us about his work. AKALA: Yeah, I mean he is an icon. I mean I hear… I hear and I respect this message that Shakespeare is kind of the ultimate virtuosic hip-hop artist, that you really kind of see this connection between the two. Hip Hop Shakespeare TedX talk from Akala. BARBARA: Yeah, certainly not in class terms, yeah. And I was like… so people would hear a rhyme differently in different languages. And when you hear a song, same thing. And any good poet of any era employs similar themes and similar techniques. LAUNCH VIDEO FEATURING AKALA TRANSCRIPT Advertising Amazement Bandit Bedroom Blushing ... Fancy-free Gossip Green-eyed monster Hob nob Etcetera Etcetera Etcetera Shakespeare invented over 3000 words and 1000s of expressions that we still use today, and his language continues to have a huge influence on art, literature and music. And it’s ‘cause it was “mood” and “blood” or “loins” and “loins,” which means loins and lines. The examples are taken from the extraordinary talk MOBO award-winning Akala from the Hip Hop Shakespeare Company gives to TedTalk. Maybe it’s food for the spirit.” Wait, is that Shakespeare? Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed;And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.But thy eternal summer shall not fadeNor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Nasir Jones. Previous: Creating TNT's Will | Next: Shakespeare's Kitchen. From the other side, what you see: a bunch of nonsense. So, in a lot of… so our last production as a company was of Richard II which was, we did essentially a concept, rock opera, if you like, think, you know…. But it’s the consistency, I think. BARBARA: Okay, I gotta file that one away. I'm Capulet, you're Montague, I ain't feeling. The Mystery of Shakespeare’s Identity from Time. So, when I came to Shakespeare, I was starting from a radically different point to anyone in my class because I’d grown up with… equally with the tradition of theater and with the Jamaican sound system. I mean we’ve got hundreds of these that we do. BARBARA: I don’t think that’s Shakespeare. But mainly it’s to challenge people’s perceptions. As someone who grew up listening to KRS-One and  Lauryn Hill and The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and that whole incredible tradition of the music of the African diaspora in America, for me, I never had that problem. So the point is to just show you that once you remove the baggage of what you think Shakespeare’s about and what you think hip-hop’s about, the… all of a sudden it becomes much more difficult to differentiate. A digital anthology of early modern English drama, Transcriptions, metadata, and images of manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I’m gonna say that’s not Shakespeare. And even he got a couple wrong. So when I reflect on my path, I feel as if I can legitimately say that I went from helping people become conscious to helping people become unconscious. You don’t have to like Shakespeare and you don’t have to like hip-hop, either. [CLIP from the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”], So after school, I take a dip in the pool, which is really on the wall.I got a color TV so I can see the Knicks play basketball.Hear me talking 'bout checkbooks, credit cards, more money, than a sucker could ever spend…. I mean this is…. Obviously, he added stuff that is incredibly original. So we give people all different sorts of verses to show how versatile Shakespeare was and how much he experimented across his career. Transcript. No, thank you very much. This doesn’t belong to you. 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