Twice Inna Lifetime (Track 13) and Conclusions about Teaching

[This is the final part of a longer series – previous track – “Thieves in the Night”]

Reaching the end of these posts I’m brought back to the beginning, the first time I listened to Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star. I got to “Twice Inna Lifetime”, about 4.5 miles into the 5 mile early morning run I started with, and it was just as terrible a time for the world as it had been when I stepped out my front door. My Chicago neighborhood was still in a sort of double double-lockdown (though not nearly as badly as other south side neighborhoods): COVID lockdown yes, but also post-George Floyd urban unrest national guard barricades, police SUV’s positioned for 6 months 24/7 in all the downtown parks.

…I am finishing my run, passing by temporarily but (soon-to-be permanently) closed restaurants in my neighborhood, and the commuters who would usually be hurrying past are still nowhere to be found – but now, at least, my mood is different. I’m feeling good, because I’m at that point in the workout where my body has somehow stopped complaining and is almost euphoric, and also, this album has carried my mind, my heart and my soul in so many different directions. As I hear the opening moments of “Twice Inna Lifetime”, they immediately devastate as I hear what sounds to me like the central chords in “Go Down Moses,” the simple three-minor-chord progression that harmonize underneath “let my/people/go.” From somewhere deep inside me emerges this overwhelming, religious, spiritual, historical, political chain reaction, and my soul instantaneously ranges over the 45 minutes of music on this album I’ve just heard, and then that phrase (not spoken here, only referenced by the chords) “let my people go,” I think about the title of the album (“Black Star”) – and only then think of Marcus Garvey, and then my mind ranges of all the other allusions I haven’t event really noticed yet, only felt – to Nina Simone, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, John Coltrane, Slick Rick, Tupac and Biggie, break dancers and graffiti artists I have never heard of, Cabrini Green, Rudy Giuliani – all of it. And as cumbersome and intellectualizing as this explanation is now becoming as I write it, what I want you to know is it was 100% emotional and intuitive at that moment when I experienced it. Like the whole political and cultural history “from slavery to freedom” (language used in both my family’s Passover seder and as the title of John Hope Franklin’s massive history of African Americans) had all been crystalized, not in a word, rhyme or clever allusion, but just into those three chords – like you can hear the movement from slavery to freedom all right there, without even needing words. Warm tears really did stream down my cheeks as tremors of unprocessed emotion overtook me, as I stopped running and put my hands on my knees, at once out of breath and also supremely invigorated like I haven’t been before or since.

I also felt strangely calm, I think because here I had just experienced someone else representing this vast history, this political stance – as art – like Mos Def and Talib Kweli had contained all of it, represented (re-presented) all of it, which doubling I think makes sense of the opening moments of the song:

Yo, we been through this before, right? (Word, word)
So we figured, if we gon’ do it, we gotta freak it
You know what I’m sayin? (True, true, true)
‘Cause, everythin’ gotta go up from here, right?
So Hi-Tek, turn it up a notch

I think literally this is a reference to the idea that this song is the second version of an earlier track called “Once In A Lifetime” that, according to Kweli’s autobiography, an earlier incarnation of the group had created.

But at another level, it’s speaking to the depressingly repetitive nature of American history – in Kenneth Clark’s words following the 1968 riots:

it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland – with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.”

Through all of that, Black Star attempt a re-presentation – a re-definition – it’s not once, but twice in a lifetime.

After those few moments, I hear Jane Doe start her verse:

Hail Mary — matter fact, hail Jane
N****s take my name in vain like I was cocaine
My affirmations kill MC’s like assassination
Bringin’ you pain until you wish you had a vaccination
Or vaccine, I shine like Vaseline…

She goes on for like 30 more lines and the whole time, the allusions start firing more synapses – “Hail Mary” as a catholic prayer and also Tupac, the double entendre of “name in vain,” reading as religious until you hear the simile “like I was cocaine,” making you realize “vain” is punning on “vein”… and it keeps going. My intellectual mind obviously knows that in 1998, she wasn’t thinking about Covid, but if you remember from 2020, all the dread, health anxiety, masks, medical minutiae taking up huge amounts of emotional bandwidth, phrases like “positivity rate” that I can’t even fully remember what they mean anymore – when I heard Jane Doe announce that she will make me feel that pain “until you wish you had a vaccination”, it’s like, she was articulating an entire world’s condition – even though she’s really just making a cleverly boastful rhyme. This song is a collaboration of more than five minutes of that sort of lyricism, sometimes critically directed, and more often, just for the sake of its own playfulness. The tears came on even stronger as start up again and listen through each verse, extending past my planned distance so I can catch everyone one at that same metabolic rate – all of this sadness joyfully mixed with that runners-high euphoria and the elation that only an endless stream of perfect verbal acts of hip-hop creativity can produce.

No student has ever taken on this song in my podcast unit. I had one conversation with one student once – Jonah (again, not his real name), white male, a self-identified hip-hop and break-dancing enthusiast (the kind that’s always coming in with new tracks to add to the class playlist), but his verdict on this song is that it seems tacked on, “like a bonus track,” doesn’t see what it has to do with at all. Which was disappointing to me – a big part of me had wanted him to like it, to see it for the apex of creativity, the exclamation point to the already virtuosic album that I know that it is. But I also heard what he said- “bonus track.” In a literal sense it sounds like it may have been an afterthought, repurposed for this album.

But of course, this WHOLE ALBUM has been about re-purposing, re-defining, re-interpreting and the paradox of the originality that copying can create (and the corollary differences between appreciation and appropriation, emulatio and imitatio, Black and white culture, freedom and oppression, life and death, and on and on and on). Seen in that light, this really is the perfect capstone of the album. This song IS the realization of Mos Def’s earlier dictum: “a cypher will complete us as we come through your receivers.” This song is that cypher – 5 hip-hop artists in dialogue with each other. This is the performance that “shine[s] light into the darkness” – a posse track composed of almost-freestyled rhymes, puns, disses, allusions and punchlines. It finally is the performance of that freedom they’ve been articulating the whole time. Just like in “It is also “Sonny’s Blues,” when Sonny and his band have a “dialogue” while they play “Am I Blue?” while his older brother looks on, tears streaming down his face, “the only light in all this darkness.”

What Black Star Taught Me About Education

In her Nobel Prize Lecture, which also begins with a children’s story, Toni Morrison lays down a fundamental truth:

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; it does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge

The five-way cypher that completes this album – its liberating language not only represents love, it is love, not only represents (re-presents) that expansion of knowledge, it expands knowledge.

This all became startlingly clear to me one day when my students were organized into 5 groups in class – some are in desks, some are in circles on the floor, in nooks in the school’s dusty hallways, and each group is having an open-ended conversation about the five albums they had just spent two weeks analyzing (Black Star wasn’t the only album in the project – they were also working with hip-hop albums from the 90’s – albums by Lauryn Hill, Public Enemy, Queen Latifah and Nas). This is a dynamic I first noticed back in 2020 – my teaching partner and I had put students into breakout rooms, and just asked them to listen to the albums and talk about them (different albums back then – including Kendrick Lamar and Beyonce, along with Black Star, Jamila Woods and Lauryn Hill). Each group had one album to work with, and they had each completed an independent recorded podcast analysis of a single song on their album – each student had picked their favorite song from the album to study on their own. Now they were listening to each other’s completed individual podcast segments, and constructing new ideas about each other’s ideas, so they could record one final group segment (in a way, one last posse track). And they weren’t arguing or trying to be right, they were developing ideas, forming their own cyphers– they were rapping, in the slightly older sense of the word. And that’s when it dawned on me that that is one of the fundamentals purposes of this music – to drive that ongoing, enriching discourse, toward the realization of the truth of Freire’s vision of “education as the practice of freedom.” And the beautiful part is, I’m just listening. I do not need to be an expert on this day, because they’re not learning something I know more about than them. They are learning how to be in co-existence, in the simple word of “Sonny’s Blues,” they are listening. But that’s not a small thing.

The Rest of the Song

I am going to resist the urge to track through all the rhymes, jokes, and ironies that populate this song – some of them are serious, some are playful, some are sexual, some about the music itself, rapping rivals, brand names, and everything else you can find in hip hop anywhere else. Just one moment from each of the other 4 verses.

From Wordsworth’s verse:

Now, don’t rewind, get it the first time
Shouldn’t have to repeat myself
Eternally verbally, I have numbers succumb to time-outs
In rhyme bouts, you’ll dial 9 just to get a line out
Known fact or factors and non-rappers fractured

Or Kweli:

We be lightin’ shit up like phosphorus
Turnin’ flamboyant n****s anonymous, depressin’ to optimist
You stoppin’ us is preposterous like an androgynous misogynist
You pickin’ the wrong time
Steppin’ to me when I’m in my Prime like Optimus, Transformin’
From rookie of the year to veteran

Or most simply with Punchline:

I build with friends, lyrically spit gems

This album is actually rarely overtly “political” in the sense of naming names and pointing specific fingers. It’s much more abstract so much of the time (even though the implications are quite specific in their own ways), but in Mos Def’s final verse, he directs his middle finger very directly – and prophetically – this is Mos Def speaking his truth, a good 23 years before most white liberals finally gave up on Rudy Giuliani:

Mayor Rudolph can screw off, you too soft to stop us
You and your coppers should see some foot doctors
Got your bird chest popped up, but keep your guns cocked up
‘Cause all them cats that you knocked up
Ain’t always gon’ be locked up

Let’s remember this is pre-9/11, pre-“America’s Mayor”, and also (more fittingly) pre-2020 “Four Seasons Total Landscaping.” Mos Def, unlike so many of the rest of us, actually took Maya Angelou’s advice, and when Giuliani showed him who he was, he, at least, believed him.

As each of these 5 performers takes their turn – Jane Doe, Wordsworth, Talib Kweli, Punchline and finally Mos Def – the realization of that freedom – that “let my people go” riff – spirals deeper and deeper until a final moment of realization, with Mos Def’s final, self-referentially performative one-line motto for the whole album, the whole project, the whole Black Star Movement:

We the five on the fist fortified organized like this!

This is an epic last line of an album with hundreds of equally epic lines. “Fortified, Organized like this!” Like what? To me, it means, “like this posse track” – this is what it means to be “fortified” and “organized.” But it’s broader – “like the album” – like all the roads it’s gone down, all the people, cultures and subcultures it has invited into the cypher. Sort of like Beyonce’s demand – “let’s get in formation!” (which my teaching partner pointed out to our students is also a demand to “get information“). It’s freestyle, it’s not “organized” in the conventionally written sense, but it’s organized in-formation “like this“– in a deeply oral-culture way, its logic is “fortified” precisely because of its flexibility, its playfulness, its indeterminate nature. Just like the MC who introduces the album says, “Music is not supposed to stand still.” It is “love in the face of hate” (from K.O.S.) – and if I keep thinking on this line, I realize so so many of the different phrases from this album all signify on that same three chords, that same idea of freedom, and the same idea of social, free-styled organization, just from different angles, in different tones and aspects. And that “five on the fist” – its the five posse performers yes, but also – the five knuckles on the Black Power fist, the five boroughs of New York City, the five components of Voltron? You name it. It’s all about the integrated, collaborative, equalizing force of the cypher as a literal performance and also a metaphor for political organizing.

Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star, in all of the cooperative, creative, resistant, re-claiming, allusive bravado is always in itself political, defiant, loving and educational. Somehow, I think, way back then on that chilly 2020, my soul felt it all, even if my mind is still catching up.

[This is the final part of a longer series – previous track – “Thieves in the Night”]