Bookshelves do funny things to time. In a recent clip, rapper Earl Sweatshirt lets FADER TV tour his Hollywood bachelor pad. In a Cribs send-up, he guides the camera through his “hand-crafted closet,” a close-up of his “exquisite trash,” while intervening shots display stacks of records, Thrasher magazines, and clutters of half-spent candles. On his bookshelf are a few volumes Earl brought from the house of his mother, UCLA law professor and critical race theorist Dr. Cheryl Harris, who wrote the seminal article “Whiteness as Property,” first published in the Harvard Law Review. The books are Langston Hughes’ Best of Simple, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, and C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, the three together creating a crooked through-line spanning generations of black thought, wit, and wordplay.
I first came across Simple in a “Harlem Renaissance Literature” course as an undergraduate, and Danticat’s dazzling novel in “Black Women Writers” the following semester. English majordom also introduced me to Countee Cullen’s Color, Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God, and other classics. As a thank-you for a poetry reading/hip hop performance I gave in her class, one professor blessed me a Riverside anthology and an accompanying CD, which included recordings of Claude McKay reading “If We Must Die,” Big Bill Broonzy singing “Let My People Go,” and other devastatingly beautiful black sounds a young person can never unhear. But Earl’s books remind me that I learned so much about literature, first, from hip hop lyrics, from the allusions and summations offered by KRS-ONE, Black Thought, Mos Def, Guru, and other greats.
I first read Chinua Achebe in the wake of The Roots releasing their album Things Fall Apart. No disrespect to the novelist, but, honestly, I was more impressed by The Roots’ album, as were, I imagine, many of my peers. In fact, though I read the Keats, Shelley, Dickinson, Wordsworth, and other Euroamerican writers assigned in my college prep English classes in high school, none were as engaging as Aesop Rock, Paris, Common, Method Man, and other masters of written and spoken word only now gaining recognition in academic circles through the publication of such volumes as The Anthology of Rap (Yale UP, 2010). Of course, it is a bit misleading to say that these artists are simply gaining recognition. The composition of academia is changing: life-long hip hop heads are now growing old enough to become professors, and we are well-versed in both traditional canonical Euroamerican poetry and the most significant poetic movement of the late 20th century—hip hop lyricism.
Bookshelves do funny things to time. Danticat next to James next to Hughes—if we continue this roster on my bookshelf we’d see Saul Williams next to DeLillo next to Dante next to Baldwin next to Millay, a disordered continuum of centuries and locations. Bookshelves warp time and space, hence the pleasure (beyond the obvious voyeuristic aspect) of scanning the bookshelves of other people. It isn’t just that we are attempting to read in that array something about the person, who has in many cases arranged the volumes under the assumption that their arrangement will later be decoded in some way, It is the estrangement from the present, the bookshelf’s defamiliarization of time from our illusive chronological construction of it that gives us pleasure. Amidst his jokes and gags throughout the FADER TV clip, Earl, in all seriousness, holds up and extols M.O.P.’s classic album First Family For Life, on which Lil Fame calls himself “an author like Terry McMillan,” then proceeds to a deliver a revolutionary crime rap gem of a verse, where “the world stops spinning”–an interruption of the historical progressions that build “civilization” and decimate disenfranchised communities, like Fame’s home hood of Brownsville.
Hip hop music and poetry, as Henry Louis Gates reminds us, operate according to the aesthetic principle of “repetition with a difference,” troubling the notion of time as progression, as line, as the unfolding of predetermined and inevitable events. Not that emcees don’t tell great stories (see The Lost Boyz’ “Renee”), but the power of hip hop derives in part from its unrivaled capacity to combine sonic fragments, oral acrobatics, and coded cultural references into a vortex that acts as a portal between generations and seemingly distinct time periods. Earl Sweatshirt, in his rhymes, carries on the slick-talking tradition of wit and bullshit embodied in the Simple stories, the eerie, haunting quality of works like Breath, while very much being of his era, of his culture, perfecting the overloaded meter of wordsmiths like Aesop Rock while infusing it with subtle but perfectly in-the-pocket bounce.
Earl’s “Chum” is a prime example of such a temporal vortex, where he compares himself to the “pendulum swinging slow/ a degenerate moving through the city,” and the second verse begins with a “time lapse, bars rotten, heart’s bottomless pit/ Was mobbin’ deep as ’96 Havoc and Prodigy did.” He weaves in the Poe allusion (get it, “The Pit and the Pendulum”?) with a reference to Mobb Deep’s impeccable opus The Infamous, thus citing the multiple traditions he and his peers have inherited. However, in the broader context of the song, with its meditations on youth and longing and love and its miscommunications, such images of time slowed-down or accelerated intimate that Earl plays with time because human memory, pain, emotion, in a word, experience, also do so.