The 2019 Para Site International Conference was a summit held from October 10-12, 2019 at Miller Theatre and The Hong Kong Jockey Club Hall in Admiralty, Hong Kong. Hosted by the Asia Society Hong Kong Center and open to the public, American rapper Lupe Fiasco spoke on the first day about his education guild, Society of Spoken Art (SOSA).[1]
Date[]
| Date | Time | City | Venue | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thurs | October 10, 2019 | 5:30 P.M. | Hong Kong | Miller Theatre |
Transcript[]
| Year | Title | Video |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | "PS.Conference 2019 Lupe Fiasco: Society of Spoken Art" | |
| Storytelling is at the core of our existence. A true lyricist must master the core principles of storytelling and language as a whole. Established by some of the leading rap artists of our generation, SOSA embodies this ideal. Our curriculum encompasses the fundamentals of linguistics, semiology, poetry, and has been curated with the help of scholars from institutions including Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. Since rapping starts with reading, members will be expected to complete an extensive list of recommended reading materials in addition to our activities, discussion panels, and networking programs. Every aspect of SOSA is designed to inspire and cultivate creative skill sets, and to help members enrich their lives beyond music. | ||
| Lupe Fiasco | All right, where do we start? Hello, everyone, please stand up. Seriously. Everybody up. Yeah, we'll begin like this.
Okay, so one hand up in the air like this. Doesn't matter which hand, just a hand. If you don't have a hand, I apologize for being so. I'm just gonna do like this. There we go. In unison though, like follow me. Great, great, great. Okay, we got that. Keep the hand up, same hand. This next one we goin' left, right, left. In unison again, yeah. And the next one, put the other hand in the air like this. Face the palms inward like this. Relax, relax your shoulders. Alright, clap. One, two. Wait. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight... Yes. Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely. |
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| Lupe Fiasco | As an audience in a hip-hop crowd, that's all you need to do. We call the first one the big bah-bah, it's like bah-bah. Second one we call zero to one hundred, you might know it as "throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care." That's that one. And this one, we don't know what this is called, this is the claps.
So, kinetic. Movement. One of my grandmasters of hip-hop rap music—you all can sit down, apologize. Apologize for that part. One of my grandmasters of hip-hop by the name of KRS-One from the Bronx, he gave a definition of hip-hop. Hip-hop's definition has changed throughout the years, I think he gave the most definitive definition of and it's the definition I use when I perform. He says hip-hop is a mixture of knowledge and movement. So, intellect and the kinetic blended together to create these things. And what these things are, hopefully we'll get to to this. So before we get into SOSA, Society spoken Art... |
| Lupe Fiasco | A little bit about me, to expand on what Cosmin, the introduction that he gave. I started rapping actually in duress, in protest. I wanted to play jazz, I saw the Benny Goodman story, played the clarinet, I wanted to be a jazz musician. This was when I was maybe eighth grade, I don't know what correlates to here in Hong Kong in terms of school systems. But I wanted to play jazz. When I got to high school, I said okay, I'm gonna go to the band, and I'm gonna go to the band director, and I'm gonna say hey, can you teach me how to play the clarinet? And he said no, if you wanted to learn how to play the clarinet, you had to go when you were in grade school and ask them to teach you. Here, we only take people who already know how to play.
And I was heartbroken, I was destroyed. I was like ah, what can I do? I still want to express myself, I still want to be creative, I still want to put interesting concepts and things together, and I still wanna be cool and get the girls and make a lot of money. And I was like rap! You could be a rapper! And I was like oh, you could teach yourself how to rap. All you need to do is just get some beats and get some words and then just put those beats and words together and then you can become a rapper. And so that was my education. I threw everything else away. I threw away college, I didn't take any of my college exams, or the preparatory exams to get into college. Banished any hopes of having any type of career, crippled myself socially so I wouldn't fit in any organization in any capacity and basically burned the bridges, burned the boats, and threw myself fully into rap. A few of my friends joined with me and we made the pledge that we were either gonna be rappers, or we're gonna work at the post office. And we came very close to the post office. Luckily, around time, maybe a senior, junior in high school, we started to record. I built a studio in my basement, and we recording little actual mixtapes on tape and one of my friends remarked, he said, "you know, you really sound like you can do this for real." Like it doesn't sound like an amateur hour, it doesn't sound like you're trying, it sounds like you can really do this. And I was like, okay, so I guess. All right. The next story is all luck. |
| Lupe Fiasco | One day, in my home studio, with my father. He bangs on the floor. He says hey, Wasalu—at that time, it wasn't Lupe Fiasco yet—he says hey, I want you to go to the West Side of Chicago, pick up your little sister, and bring her back home. I was like all right, so you get on a bus. Take that bus to the train, take that train to another bus. But then got a choice when you get off that second train, where you can either get on the train or another bus. I decided to get on the bus. All this is gonna make sense very shortly.
Because I got on the bus, which lets you off in the front of my mother's house, as opposed to the train which will let you off in the back, I happened to be on the front street. Walking down that street, a car pulls up. Full of guys, who I met prior, who are either record producers or rappers and they said "hey, you rap, right?" I said yes, I rap. They said we're going to this showcase with Aftermath Records which you may know from Eminem and Dr. Dre. I was like, I'm all in. Forgot about my sister, that went out the window. Jumped in this car of semi strangers, went to the studio I'd never been been to before, and lo and behold, there was a representative from Aftermath Records. Another person who would go on to be my business partner, and my manager into this day. And a bunch of other rappers and we just started to rap around his table in this nondescript conference room and got a record deal. And it was really that bit of luck, if I took the train I would've been on the back street. They would have passed, I would have never seen them. I would be working at the post office. And from there, my career starts. I'm in high school with a record deal. Shenanigans, more shenanigans, dot, dot, dot. Get my first solo record deal and that first deal was with a group. Get my first solo record deal in maybe 2004 with Atlantic Records. First one goes very smooth, we get four Grammy nominations, win the Grammy. Second one goes very smooth, we get another set of Grammy nominations. It becomes this cult kind of classic album, it's called The Cool. Third album comes around, things don't go so well. Things don't go so well, things do not go well at all. Turmoil with the label, the classic artist becoming, learning himself. The label seeing that the artist has a certain level of visibility above and beyond what the label can control. The label wants to control that, the artist resists. The label starts to pull the resources from the artist. The artist is kind of left to his own devices. Luckily, his fanbase that he's developed is ravenous and sort of a little maniac group. They decide to stage a protest in front of the label to get said resources released and release dates and things that thing brought to bear. They do, it happens. Because of that, you become this figure of sorts. The label hates you now, so now you're an enemy of the state. You put out this album, it's your most successful album—second most successful album. But, you know, the label hates you, the fans love you, etc. That hate relationship at the label just deepens and gets worse. And around those times, I started to have these thoughts. I said who can I reach out to, to help with this situation? Who would care? Reach out to a lawyer, lawyer's best interest is lawyering. There is no real place or situation where artists can commune and have real dialogue about circumstances without it being solely about the arts. Which wasn't the case for me and for other artists. It's not about you're not making good enough songs, it's other more structural issues that need to be addressed. There's no place really for family to come in and intervene, there's no place for interventions, so to speak. So I was like man, I wish we had something like that. I wish we had a union so we could bargain collectively. Haha, [?]. Yeah, I snuck [?] in there and collectively. But I wish we had that. Those thoughts kind of sit, they germinate over time. And start to think, what does that look like? And start to sit back and asked myself serious questions about formulating something like that, and building something like that, and what's the best way to do it, best way to go. The legal business angle kind of fell on its face because there were so many different ways that people express the best way to do business. A lawyer has one way, a manager may have another way, the artists may have his or her own way about doing things. And it's just too much noise to try and build something based on business or negotiating contracts, or anything like that. And it's a lot of money in that and you know, most artists are broke, unfortunately, so we kind of lose most of our court cases. So we said, okay. Business is not the place to build it on, then I went to what about just the music? The love of the craft. It's kind of that's—again, it's too amebis. Right, there's not enough structure to that, it's too subjective. What I think about your song versus what you think about my song, at the end of the day, that's the end of it. It really has no objective meat or weight to it. So then it became, okay, well not business. Not just for the love of the craft because we already have that, that's not working. What if we built it upon something else, what's missing? What is missing? And so we get to SOSA, Society of Spoken Art. |
| Lupe Fiasco | Slide two. Aristotle said that the greatest—allegedly. Allegedly there's an Aristotle, and allegedly that allegedness said this allegedly: "The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." You sit back and you look say well, what do we do as rappers? I say ah, we're masters of metaphor. Even the most basic rapper—the wackest, as we call it, the most garbage rapper—is still a master of metaphor, in some capacity. Engaging with it, building them, blending them, breaking them apart, twisting them, attacking them, defending them. So there's something to that. Hold that in your mind. Remember I said we was trying to figure out what to build it upon?
And so we got to sit back and ask questions well, what is the state of the art? You say rappers know how to do it, but they don't know what they are doing. That what is important, that unknown is important, and that it is important. What is the it? It is rapping. What is the what? And that's where things get interesting. The other piece is, rap is mostly learned and refined in the wild. There is no real structure or structural education in rap. There's pieces and there's people that attempt to do it, who turn out not to be rappers. And so they mostly deal in the contextual things, not necessarily the content aspects of it and definitely not the structural things of it. They deal mostly in what the raps are talking about. And it says rap is mostly engaged as a commercial exercise, commercial exploit. You talk to any rappers, most rappers—most of them—they want to make money off what they do, they want some type of capitalization moment in what they do. No matter how small or how big, that's what they want. It's how can I put out this mixtape, what's the best way to do this song, what's the best way to do that? And that commercial exercise, commercial exploitation part may seem very subtle but it is very, very active and all the way down to the length of a song as we know it is a commercial exercise. Having a chorus in a song is a commercial exercise, is an example of corporate exploitation. We just take it for granted because we don't have a structure to analyze it properly and dive deep. So that was the state of the art, still is the state of the art, and will still be the state of the art. How do we address that? |
| Lupe Fiasco | I'm sorry, there's a, is there a slide missing? Maybe. Yes, there's a slide missing, I'm sorry. Alright, I'll just do it like this. So rap, the other question which should have been here is rap, what is rap. Anybody know what that is?
You, Sir, what is rap? Yeah. See, there we go. What about you, what's rap? We're waiting. Destroy us with your intellect. Ah, here we go, rhythm. Okay, what about about you in the back with the fan and the flower, the beautiful lovely flower. What is rap, take a shot at it. What is rap? Poetry, oh that's good, we starting somewhere. So when you sit back, you think about, you say well what is rap, literally that what again. Coming back to that what, what are we doing, what's that unknown? And you say well rap is rhetorical, it's anthropological, it's philosophical, and it's a structure. All taking place in the cognition, in the cognitive space. So raps are rhetorical, anthropological, philosophical structures. So now being a rapper, what are you doing? I say ah well, I guess I'm being rhetorical anthropologically, using these philosophical structures with my cognition. And they'll say, ahh. You've just had your rapper mind expanded, emoji with the head blown up, that one, right. Expanding the rapper mind, first we identified that there's a rapper mind. You have a rapper mind rapper and it's not just to entertain. It's not just rhythm, it's not just poetry, there's other pieces and parts that are connected to it that you activate every time you put together a metaphor. Every time you spit a verse, as we say, the language that we use. But it's not just entertainment, it's not just for commercial exploit, it's something deeper, something more powerful, something there's a mastery of something happening at Aristotle said allegedly. So SOSA. It isn't business, it isn't just for entertainment, it's not about just the love of music. It became a educational guild that seeks to formally introduce rappers to the fields of linguistics, semiotics, classical, contemporary, and computational communication, poetic theory and application, literary analysis, and criticism, cognitive science and rap history, theory and application. Wow, there's a lot hold on. Let's pause on that to reflect for a little bit. Formally, first. I've seen Cosmin on the way to the restroom and I said now I feel bad because I'm one of the only ones that's talking about formality, right? The other two, my brothers and sister speakers, were like yo... anarchy! I was like no, no. We need a formal system. We need some accountability, we need responsibility, we needed to have metrics. We need to be able to sit in a studio and talk about things that won't change tomorrow. Because that level of chaos was just anarchy, it's way too much because rappers are being abused. Artists are being abused and because we don't have a place to really understand the power of what we're doing. We don't have that power, we don't even have soft power. Even arts is a soft power, but since we can't even recognize it, we don't even have that power. We just replaced and used and thrown away and used and thrown away and at the mercy of donors and patrons and other things. It's like man, that's cool up to a certain extent, eventually you want some type of agency of your own. So the formal part is a formal education. I'll get into more on that in the next slide, but why linguistics, why semiotics, communication theory, the study of signs and symbols? How many rappers know about SOSA and the process of signification? They don't. I know, 'cause I didn't. And none of my friends did either. And none of my rapper friends knew, and we didn't know what semiotics was. And we didn't know how important it was to what we do. Why go all the way back to study and read poetics, the classical poetics? Why study George Lakoff in contemporary metaphor theory? Why? Why teach rappers how to code? Why introduce rappers to coding in the coding space, why's that important? Because 99% of what we do in the modern space with rap is expressed in some way are built with a computer. And most rappers do not know how to use a computer, let alone how to code a program within a computer. But everything you do is invested into a computer and built into computer. You should be at least aware of what that looks like, what code looks like. What Python looks like, what DOS looks like, C++ Java. We need to know what that looks like, even if we don't know how to use it. We need to be aware of what that is. |
| Lupe Fiasco | Political theory and application, literary analysis and criticism, who determines what is good and what's bad? What are they using as their reference points and their basis to tell you that your rap sucks or that's your album is trash and give you two stars. Or if Pitchfork, the worst publication in the world likes to do—I don't like them. Gives you a four, when an album should really be like an eight, a solid eight, they give you a solid six and a half. What is your basis for that? Can you challenge them? Can you really speak to and stand on what you were expressing was some type of objection to Russian formalism with your album? And there's seams of that in the album but it's just. Once you get past the ass shaking, it's right there. That's my objection to Russian formalism.
But if you don't know that that school exists, you can't really challenge them on that. Should you be challenging them at all? It's a different discussion. But if you do challenge them, deeply challenge them to the point of no return. Educate them on what it means to criticize, and how to criticize and not just criticize but to be critical, which is different than criticizing something. Can you analyze the text, are they really analyzing your text properly. Using the proper literary devices and examining things in a real, real, concise objective way. Or are they just winging it and going off what they feel? Which is fine, if you can justify. You should be able to justify your feelings. Why? Because you should be able to. Simple as that. Cognition, cognitive science. Why do we do that? Because our brains are what we are, and we don't understand how they work. And we should try. And maybe if we do that, we can make better raps. For us, as rappers. That's the way we look at it, if I can teach you how the brain works or introduce you how to brain works at least functionally and structurally, if not totally the way consciousnesses built but at least give you an idea or present to you that people don't—the way you think about the brain is not the way your brain works. That's just something that your mind invented to help you kind of think about how your brain works. But that's wrong, too. You need something different. You need to be able to be able to look at an EKG and understand what that means as a rapper. Not as a scientist, as a rapper. As a person who communicates, you should know how these words and these phrases are built and expressed through your cognition. Rap study, rap history theory and application, most rappers because they learn in the wild. They learn through their biases, and when I say rapper, I mean me. So you can replace Lupe with rapper. You learn through your biases, if you don't want to listen to rappers from the South because you're from New York you're just gonna listen to rappers from New York you're gonna miss all of that beautiful pool of references and slang and opportunities for creating things with Southern twang and Southern drawl because you're biasing. What we do, we build a curriculum that was introduce a rapper who might through his or her career listen to, maybe seriously listen to maybe five or six rappers. When I say seriously they're actually listening to them to learn how to rap better. What if I introduce you to 50 or 100 rappers? The best in their fields, with no bias, no prejudice of where they're from. Ethiopia to Tokyo to Atlanta to L.A. and talking about everything. Talking about murder, violence, cognitive science... What does that do for you when you're introduced to that? And not only do you have to learn it, not only are you aware of it become aware of it, you have to mimic what they do. You have to do what they do. And that starts from 1979, first commercially released rap records, all the way up to now. So you're this backpack rapper who's all about overthrow the government and you don't like the Man. But can you get the party started? You can't, Sugarhill Gang for you sir. |
| Lupe Fiasco | So that's what SOSA is in a in a big ass nutshell, right, a coconut shell. So technically how do we do this? How do we do all of that? It's a guild. That's our first apprentice class right there. They called themselves Lux Primus, we have a thing with Latin for some reason. That's our first class.
If you could see—her. In that picture, she's 12. She's the youngest apprentice, name's C Bleu IT. She's one of the best rappers I have ever heard. Actually, everybody in that picture are some of the best rappers in the world. Matter of fact, all of the founding members of SOSA are literally the best rappers in the world. They might not have sold the most records, but some of them sold a shit ton of records. I did okay. But in terms of the craft, they're some of the best. Hands down. And so we tried to attract best. So anyway, get back to that yeah 'cause that white guy right there? Him. He's gonna be important in the next slide. But the structure of it, it's a guild. Similar to kind of guilds of the olden age: furniture guilds or artistic guilds or what have you. We have apprentices, they're an apprentice for two years. Most of this happens in the apprentice phase. We do a journey folk phase, which lasts for eight years. Master is ten years, and grandmaster is 20 years plus. Again, most of the work that we're doing now is pointed at this apprentice class. Our apprentice program, that's our first year, we're doing our second year now. This class is in there, they're about to graduate into their journeyman, journey folk phase. We're doing another class, they're finna go into their second year of their apprenticeship and just a couple days ago we closed our application front process for our third apprentice class. So we're three apprentice classes deep. We've been running this program for about four to five years. The journey folk, we're still figuring out what that is. But it is basically a little bit more the things that they learn in this apprentice aspect, applying it, going out into the world. Journeying as they say. The masterpiece is people like me. I'm a master. I'm actually about to turn into my grandmaster, I actually have to do my thesis. It's a reconstruction of Akita, the entire film in rap. Like a silent film but replace with raps. To transition from master to grandmaster you have to do a project of some ambition and so that was the one I chose. And the grandmaster piece, people who have done things in the space of rap that have been pivotal or have done things like people rap, I wanted to rap like that guy or that girl that woman, excuse me. So it's arranged, but that's kind of the structure. IT, it's an entrusted network. We have a big sense of privacy and trust, so we refer to each other as ITs. Entrust. That's the structure. And so these people, you'll see in this picture. How do we get this into them? And we do that through this. So our curriculum. We take advantage of something called Academics in Residents, AIRs. And the AIRs are that white guy. That's Dr. Nick Montfort IT and IR. He's a computer scientist and a computational poet who teaches at MIT and he's one of our Academics in Residence. Funny story about him, is he actually wanted to be a rapper. So he came into SOSA as a rapper and our second-year apprentice class. So he's actually an IT and an Academic in Residence. And that little lovely white lady that's next to him, her name is Shep. Call her the hip-hop mom, she's based in Denver. She was an English teacher for 40 years at Denver Public Schools and is a rapper, she raps and everyone in the hip-hop community loves her. And she's one of our Academics in Residence. So what is an Academics in Residence? Academic Residence are professors, teachers, writers, thinkers, workers in the field we are interested in becoming aware of. So if it's cognitive science, we search our cognitive scientists. If it's computers, and it's computation, we search our computer scientists. And we actually have more computer scientists as IRs then we have anything else. So working at MIT, working at—where's Jahav? Jahav actually was here at the University of Hong Kong, is that a thing here teaching? And our rap studies curriculum was built and designed by a brother named Kevin Beacham, who wrote an encyclopedia of hip hop rap releases. So he basically knows every single rap song that's ever been released from 1979 to 1989. And then from 1989 to 1999. And after that, he gave up, because he said it was just too much. But every single release. So he can tell you when the first ad-lib was done, he can tell you when the first backing vocal was done, he can tell you just all these amazing facts, but he's not a rapper. He just loves the thing that we do and put himself to work in that capacity. Basically we look for people, again, that are heavyweights in their field. I remember I had a talk with LL Cool J about SOSA and I remember telling him like yeah, you know we're doing this thing. We're putting together this curriculum in this course. I was like but look, we gettin' real professors to come in and give us the curriculum because I don't want people thinking that we some professors now. We're gonna stick to what we do, which is rap, and we're going to go and source the curriculum of the things that we're trying to learn from, the actual legitimate sources as high as we can possibly go. And where that takes us is interesting. Sometimes it's to universities, sometimes it's to businesses. So there's a couple IRs that are actually just CEOs of companies because they're interested in other relationships in the corporate space. And so they helped us, entrepreneurs. So we have entrepreneurs in residence, so to speak. Where do we get these people from? We have people from MIT, we have people from University of Pennsylvania, Denver Public Schools, and beyond Harvard you know. Throw up, we've been there. Whenever there's something we want to know, we use our rapper abilities and leverage our kind of visibility to get into places where we probably wouldn't be. Such as Para Site. But we're constantly searching, building out this curriculum. Everywhere for relevant material and other AIRs. So if anybody is interested in possibly helping us build this curriculum up, we're interested in all the fields that I mentioned. Visual arts, architecture, everything. So if it's as little as suggesting a book that we could possibly read to your thesis' or your papers, or pointing us in the direction, we're open to any assistance that we can and refining and building the curriculum that we have. Where does it all take place? We have online MOOC, so just the online kind of message board. We do a teleconference and lecture every Sunday. And it's normally hosts about two or three AIRs and myself leading a lecture in some capacity. Then we do discussions so it's just a continuous, full thing. Just a little bit about the apprentice program, it runs for two years. You have to apply for it. We go through about a hundred, two hundred applications every year, this year we went through 100, last year we did like 275 or something like that. And we get that down to 15 and then they run through a two year intensive program. There's no holiday breaks, no Ramadan's, no Christmases, knowing you're on the calls. Really driving it home. So that's that. |
| Lupe Fiasco | What is this stuff? FUV. So, these are guiding principles. We wanted to make sure that when we set up SOSA that it was built on solid principles.
And where did we go for those? The world of architecture. One of the first things when you do your application process at SOSA or try and come into SOSA, you have to read Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime, which is a text that he derived it from going to I think Chicago and looking at Louis Sullivan's architectural work. And Louis Sullivan prided himself on form follows function and using certain principles which are classical principles of architecture which things have to be solid, they have to be useful, and they have to be beautiful. So we take that FUV—firmitas, utilitas, venustas—and kind of put that as the guiding light for all of our ITs. So if you're creating something, make sure it has a solid foundation. Make sure that it has a high-level utility and purpose that you're not doing things just to do it and that it is beautiful. But what is beauty? What is it? For some, beauty is protection. For some, beauty as a shield because it distract. It keeps you from being distracted by other beautiful things. Really weird, right, but for some people beauty is amorphous and it can't be defined. But elegance maybe can. So, make it elegant, make it impressive, make it jaw-dropping, make it shocking. Whatever beauty is to you, but make sure that it's fucking in there. So those are kind of the guiding principles firmitas, utilitas, venustas, and hopefully leading in unite those and use unitas as that. So you hear FUV thrown around a lot, does your work have FUV in it? We'll ask a lot of ITs that and they know what that is. Like all yes, and they can explain what, yes, it's solid, it works, if you repeat it. It's not just to my tone. So if you repeat the same thing that I wrote, it'll be just as amazing and just as impactful. Does it serve a purpose? Is it a didactic, is it instructive? And then again, is it beautiful? |
| Lupe Fiasco | Results.
What have we accomplished with all of that up 'til now? One of the things is OURAPO. I don't know some of you familiar with Oulipo. Oulipo is the workshop of potential literature. It's a French writing group experimental and that spawned a bunch of other groups, Oulipo groups so we decided to start OURAPO which is all about taking rappers and getting them to do and accomplish amazing, impossible things with rap. One was writing a rap that you could read in every single direction. Whether it was up, down, inverse, in front of you. So it's kind of like a crazy palindrome thing and it took four of us to do it. Another was social athletics. What does it look like if rap is not just this entertainment piece, but it becomes a sport? What does that look like? We have something called the Barbarian which is basically like CrossFit meets rap. Yeah, there's that. Murder boarding, which is battle rappers just have to battle each other. What if we got battle rappers to battle products? What if we've got battle rappers to battle institutions? What if we got battle rapper is to battle... whatever you like. But actually the best battle rappers in the world. What does their research process look like, how do they dare data, what does their rebuttal process look like, can you formalize that and can you package that and take it to company X to really think through and solve your problems or your issues? Or your community X? Corporate workshops, we just finished one with IBM which is really successful, which we're really proud about. Talking about communication, taking the things that are special about the rapper mind and applying it to corporate problems or social problems. Building a community was another one that we achieved, which is really good. Now there is a place where rappers can go that is their home that isn't worried about how many records you sold. Where your work can last for 10 years, and somebody's there to get it, and understand it. You can make a song that's three hours long and people will listen to it. Radio is not the end point for you. You can publish a paper on it. The SOSA field manual, all of this curriculum, all these disparate parts and books and things that we pull in the library that we have we're squashing it down into one book which would be available to you hopefully soon. Maybe next year, we'll be finished with it. But it's taking all the things that we learn and putting it in one place so it's not just scattered all over the place. Data-driven arts. Right, art just not based on feel but actually I want to have the optimal experience and create the optimal verse to solve your problem. What does that look like? I'm tired of shooting in the dark, I want to be at access data, assess it, process it, and then create from that. So rapping has a little bit more of a drive and then question mark, question mark, question mark, we don't know what. But we like that, we don't know what else there is to do and we're constantly exploring and planning and hoping that we'll crash into those things and das es fin. It's like three languages to say 'the end.' Thank you. |