dropthebeatonitFor me Kyza is the best UK emcee out there. In terms of flow, he’s pretty much untouchable. The way he can switch cadence and rhythm half way through a verse and knock the beat on its head but still keep completely in sync with the tune is Biggie-esque. Ridiculous.
Below is a great example. A tune by Klashnekoff and Skribblah and the great man himself. The whole tune is amazing, but it’s at 2:38 when Kyza comes in that shit starts getting all Bikini Atoll in the booth.
I once told him as much.
This morning got me thinking…
Could Yeats take Biggie in a battle.
Today the sun shone like a soul on fire, baking the leaves as they two-stepped in the breeze. The colours were so bright the blind could sense them, a day when smiles were the currency of strangers. None of which mattered to me because I couldn’t get out of bed. A glass half-empty day. A glass completely empty day. I didn’t even have a glass by my bed day. I woke up fully-clothed today. A day when people unbeknown to me took on the strength of Supervillains. Today a look in the eye of the Tesco’s lady cleaved me in two, landing flush, the look that made me hit the canvas. I thought I’d come out fighting. But something in me plugged a thumb over the end of my snorkel. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Suffering makes the heart grow stronger. What if tomorrow is not another day. What if it’s the same.
On days like these it’s L’Oreal Men Expert Hydra Energetic.
Time got lost today. Took a wrong turn and fell off a cliff. Days like this go on forever. All noise was music. The sirens and the horns and the bickering in the supermarket isles. Sounding seamlessly in time in an unending hymn of praise. Today my iPod shuffle could’ve manned decks for eight hours in Amnesia. Today I threw shapes on lampposts, singing in the rain while it splashed over my face, a horizontal rain that gushed from the clouds but the clouds were other people and the rain a strange kind of water I’d not felt before, chemical composition good vibes. Today all the courage I so coveted was an unused sub, warming the bench looking forlorn. What use is courage when there’s nothing to be afraid of. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is King. Today I was everyone. And everyone was me.
Today screamed L’Oréal Men Expert Pure Power.
Today the glass was twice the size it needed to be. Watching snooker in black and white on a state of the art Hitachi. Should I have been under water I would not have kicked to come to the surface. Sadness and happiness held no sway today, written in a language I couldn’t understand. If I was suffering I would’ve learnt. But I don’t think I was, and I don’t think I did. Not good, and the opposite of evil. These days are days to be afraid of. These days will make me old. Because I won’t remember them.
L’Oréal Men Expert Wrinkle De-Crease days.
Peter on pills.
Shake wiggle wiggle.
He asked her, but he needn’t have.
She would’ve held on anyway.
*
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer ‘yes’ without having asked any clear question.
Albert Camus 1913-1960 writer, my Gee
There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and can reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and the most foolish failing there is.
Stephen Fry (1957 – present)
Seasons change mad things rearrange.
Swiss artist Ursus Wehrli and his collection:
The Art of The Cleanup.
For the OCD mandem.
Perhaps the reason we love the sound of Big Dave’s voice…
is because we clock he’s about to remind us of things that have been going on for millennia beyond the realm of our foolish daily TikTokery, and we also understand despite forgetting all too often that being reminded of nature and its might and its cleverness and its wisdom brings us peace, because we understand our unimportance, removing us for a quiet minute from ourselves and our silly self-obsessions.
Somewhere right this minute the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Look at us the big-brained apes with our eighty year priorities so clever we made ourselves cruel and we make ourselves sad and believe our superiority and press lego blocks into a huge heaving 6 billion year old sphere floating in something so terrifying we can’t bring ourselves to think about it.
What would you like to tell people?
I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.
Andrei Tarkovsky 1932-1986 soviet film-maker
It’s a sad fact that forevermore, the old market town of Stoke Mandeville…
will be synonymous with one man.
Rattling through Buckinghamshire this weekend as the drizzle fell upon the verdant Chiltern hills, for two minutes the train stopped at the sleepy station in question. And one could have been lulled into thinking that with Jimmy now six feet under, his murky past might also have been laid to rest.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed then…
that Jimmy hasn’t found physical form…
in anyone else.
On my 32nd birthday I went to the Royal Court and saw Kae (then Kate) recite an entire book of her poetry off the top of the dome.
I like this one.
It’s called These Things I Know
Language lives when you speak it. Let it be heard.
The worst thing that can happen to words is that they go unsaid.
Let them sing in your ears and dance in your mouth and ache in your guts. Let them make everything tighten and shine.
Poetry trembles alone, only picked up to be taken apart.
Instead of an elephant, roaring and shaking its ears, it’s one of those handbag dogs, yapping and scared of the rain.
The clever folk talk in endless circles and congratulate themselves on being so untouched by passion. But since when did the clever folk ever know anything?
Sometimes things are as simple as they seem.
It’s as much about instinct as it is about intellect
And if you feel it, it’s alive.
Let it be magic.
These are not engines we’re making.
Wherever you come from is a holy place.
Do not love the idea of life more than you love life itself.
The world is a terrible place for sensitive people
but the closer we come to losing our minds, the harder we’ll work to keep them.
If you’re not fighting for it, you don’t want it.
Taking things for granted is a terrible disease. We should all be checking ourselves regularly for signs of it.
Sensitive people are frequently beaten up by things insensitive people can’t see.
If you’ve been beaten up, good for you.
If you’ve never been beaten up, good for you.
If you get beaten up all the time, you should take up boxing.
It’s ok to feel alone.
Usually you are.
That’s what poetry’s for.
It’s good to care about things so much you feel exhausted.
Don’t read women’s magazines. They’re bad for your stomach.
You’ve only yourself to blame when someone half as talented as you ends up achieving twice as much.
If people judge you badly and misunderstand you, it’s good for you.
Fame is the worst thing that could happen to your reputation.
If you want to know your worth, ask your lovers. Especially the ones who don’t talk to you anymore.
You can’t be a good person and treat your lovers badly, no matter how much you give to charity.
Better to have been a dickhead and seen it,
than a cunt all your life and not know it.
A thousand fans screaming your name is nothing compared to one lover who whispers it and knows what it means.
Although of course both would be nice.
The world is getting stranger every day; you’re not strange for noticing.
You don’t have to be young to be good at what you do. You just have to be good at it.
There’s nothing wrong with dogs being dogs and baring their teeth at each other.
The pain of having fucked things up so bad will never leave us.
If you say something funny on Twitter, it doesn’t matter.
If you’ve been an arsehole today, acknowledge it.
Try not to be one tomorrow.
Never underestimate how nice it is
to make someone a cup of tea without them having to ask.
If you have a shit job and you don’t love your girlfriend and your life is killing you, take a fucking risk for once.
If some people don’t hate your work, you’re not doing it right.
Having a kid must be a trip.
All-time great of the UK rap scene Kyza seems to think so.
Watch this dad’s reaction to his son getting his exam results.
A film we made about cycling the length of GB, fast.
Robert Frost once said:
Sometimes the only way out, for the time being, is out.
In times past, when I’d feel a well of sadness rising up inside me, the tonic I’d spring for was a bike trip on the continent. It’s not like I expected answers to magically appear over the crest of the next hill.
More than anything I was looking for the space to ask the right questions.
To this day there isn’t much in this world I like more than a pootle around France on a touring bike.
Col d’Izoard 2306m 2014
Who this cool cat.
Victoria Park weekends, all the fun of the fair.
Bagels in the week yo.
What door number you fam?
Blud, just get to the end of my road and hollar.
You can see why manlike Vladimir likes to unwind by taming grizzlies and going for a trot.
In office hours he has to preside over this lot.
I woke up this morning and figured I’d call you, in case I’m not here tomorrow.
Graffiti scrawled on the wall of the loo in Rough Trade East.
Amsterdam photographers Blommers and Niels Schumm blur the lines between still life and soft porn in a shoot for Baron Magazine.
When asked to comment they said, ‘It’s nice that people feel like perverts, looking at these boring still-lives’.
Bruh that’s further than I’ve got in months.