DannyL

Wild Horses
I'll give you a first impression now - how hard I find to understand it. I've been listening to MC music of every sort since I was 11. And I find this stuff super-cryptic on first listen. It reminds me of listening to fucking Supreme Clientele for the first time. So dense and hidden. Like a lyrical allegory for the masking up.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
when i played drill to my mum she did the classic middle class mum move of going "its shakespearean".

to be fair she'd probably say that about anything, but it is true. in school when they do sheakspear you spend most of the lesson just deciphering all the metaphors and all that.

"shakes from the spear like william"
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
"Mash house with Miz, Misch, Mash (Mash, mash)
Pengting brown like sauce, she covered in Mac (Mac, mac)
Ten toes with Blancs, two shanks like I ain't tryna lack (That's steppin')
Peng one man rent for the winter, I ain't tryna bash (No way, no way)"

come again?
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
IIRC, the origins of rhyming slang were apparently to be able to talk and not be understood by police and informants.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i remember first getting into uk drill (and probably at the point where i hadn't managed to separate the chaff from the wheat) where it was so simile-dense. everything was "like" something else.

not in a sophisticated way.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Hard to see it now through a fog of faux-mockeny Guy Ritchisms and Dick van Dyke, but maybe rhyming slang carried that same sense of cryptic threat bitd.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
IIRC, the origins of rhyming slang were apparently to be able to talk and not be understood by police and informants.

i've compared it to cryptolects before. polari's the same.

they also do this thing of replacing the names of victims or descriptions of violens with "shh". "when shh get shh".
 

luka

Well-known member
Barry's always going on about polari. He first used it to describe the way me and Craner talk to one another
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
i've compared it to cryptolects before. polari's the same.

they also do this thing of replacing the names of victims or descriptions of violens with "shh". "when shh get shh".

That's part of the paradox isn't it. How to be public when discussing illegality? Reputational advantage in conflict with self-incrimination. It's crazy interesting. There's something there also about stategies for negotiating the open spaces of the internet. When everything is open, how to keep something closed?
 

luka

Well-known member
There's all these amateur crime reporters that work the drill beat now. You must have all come across these scarcity ones

 

luka

Well-known member
The whole thing around 'realness' is interesting. We do have a hunger for 'the real' as much as we might enjoy the simulation. But not the real as mundane. There's no appetite for that.
 

luka

Well-known member
That awful man with the beard who sings those tuneless dirges about anxiety and going for a jog to help with his depression. That's disgusting. That sort of real is rubbish.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I thought Barty's point above about social realism was spot on above.

We should drop Ken Loach a line, get him involved. Guaranteed to turn up at all the trials offering to be a character witness while his house gets burgled.
 
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