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BasedWorld UP

BasedWorld UP


Until 1950, the monthly Chicago magazine POETRY, which celebrated its centennial in 2012, emblazoned its back cover with a truth of Walt Whitman's:

To have great poetry, there must be great audiences too.

No living poet commands a greater audience than Lil B "THE BASEDGOD", the 23-year-old rapper from Berkeley with gold teeth. Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear. 

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
   - Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Save us all
Thank you Based God
My name's Lil B
All I can do is speak for what you think 
   - Lil B, "Dangerous Minds"

Raised by a single mother and full-time AC Transit bus driver in Berkeley, the poet born Brandon McCartney has built his borderless fanbase – a half million followers on Twitter, a quarter million on Facebook - by the soundest of means: he's found words for emotions woken in us by music.

"We all sing the same tune," says Lil B, "but I chose to wake up."

No poet in our lyrical tradition has so triumphantly followed Walt Whitman's model of making a god of himself, then declaring that if you be as he is, you will discover your immortal self.

"I elevate myself, level up like the saying," Lil B says, seeding meaning across multiple levels.

Yeah, you know what I mean
The mind is so complex when you're Based
32 levels
Welcome to my world  
   - Lil B, "I'm God"
 
The momentum of Lil B's imagination carries listeners to a common level he calls BasedWorld, an aural realm resembling both Christ's promised Kingdom and Whitman's speculations of "a new-founded literature" in his essay "Democratic Vistas" (1871) – a literature announcing the divine pride of individuals as "the radical foundation of the new religion":
What Christ appear'd for in the moral-spiritual field for human-kind, namely, that in respect to the absolute soul, there is in the possession of such by each single individual, something so transcendent, so incapable of gradations (like life), that, to that extent, it places all beings on a common level.

That such a literature would crystallize in music makes all the sense in the world. Whether or not we read it, we hear poetry all the time: not just in favorite songs, but in contexts over which we have little control, such as radio, advertisements, in-store sound systems, and other ambient intermediaries.

It is music, not print, that tells us what we want from life. We recite song lyrics to each other, not poems; we make mixes for those we love. It was rock-and-roll, not Robert Lowell, that revolutionized the 60s; and it was roots music, not Robert Frost, that gave the radio age its most quoted living poet, Bob Dylan.

When songwriter Jolie Holland (Springtime Can Kill You) was asked by POETRY to contribute to The View from Here, an occasional feature in which "people from various fields comment on their experience of poetry," she responded with a ringing defense of songs-as-poems, including this scorching pronouncement on printed verse:

Just as dinosaurs didn't really disappear but became birds, poems have become songs. I have no interest bemoaning the fact that the poetry most widely consumed these days is oral: the roots of our poetic literature are in Homer, who chanted or sang his words.

The aural/oral tradition is the future of the Word. The chants of hip-hop, like the songs of rock-and-roll, have fulfilled the vision of their old school prophets - cf. Afrika Bambaata in "Planet Rock" - and overtaken the globe. For hip-hop, that vision evolved out of public performances in the Bronx, and has done demonstrably more in 40 years to change the rhythms and metaphors of living tongues than 100 years of POETRY.

Lhude sing cuccu!

THANK YOU BASED GOD

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