Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.
This “Gwendolynn’s Apprehension” by Mick Jenkins:
One of my students introduced this song into our class discussion of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry this week. Mick Jenkins borrows and cuts up Brooks’s famous poem, “We Real Cool” for the chorus of this song, and in the middle of our discussion of that poem, we listened to this song and then continued our discussion, back and forth between the poem and the song. These kinds of moments and discussions are, to me at any rate, a profound part of what the experience of literature and the experience of music are about, and thanks to my student (thanks, Karim!) I can rethink a poem I thought I might have thought about enough. I also have a lot of new listening to do (thanks again!).
