© Talon Books 2006

The Rap Canterbury Tales

Preface

Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,

He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan

Everich a word, if it be in his charge,

Al speke he never so rudeliche and large,

Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,

Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe.

Like its namesake, this is a book about storytelling, and about the way stories are carried on through different forms, languages, cultures, and centuries. The simplest version goes like this: a few years ago I took some stories from a fourteenth-century manuscript and rewrote them into a contemporary rhyme style and they are printed here. We could leave it at that and simply allow these stories to have their impact (skip to page 66 for this option), but stories tend to produce stories of their own, and the ones I chose to translate seem to have accumulated some density. In the general prologue you will also learn how my source created his stories, and why he chose to use iambic pentameter couplets to tell them, and why I chose a more recent rhyme format for my translation, and where those two different forms come from and how they are related. In fact, over the past few years I have found it impossible to tell the stories in The Rap Canterbury Tales without also telling the story of how their creation came about, which now deserves an explanation.

This book began as the solution to a problem. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales over the last two decades of the fourteenth century, and it has brought him over six hundred years of imitation and reverence. However, today Chaucer’s poetry is only generally accessible to scholars and students of Middle English. The rhyming verse in The Canterbury Tales is explicitly designed for oral recitation, as was all poetry in the Middle Ages, but the language is too different from our own to retain its original impact. The problem, as I saw it, was that Chaucer’s literary importance has always been a function of his popularity, and his popularity was waning. I wanted to bring these stories back to life, but translating them into prose would only stifle the lyricism in Chaucer’s narrative voice. On the other hand, translating them into a contemporary iambic pentameter would still feel archaic to the modern ear. What I needed was a new medium that would capture the same ethos as Chaucer did for his age: a live performance mode rich with wordplay and lyrical nuance, with a technique that could grab a live audience’s attention and hold it long enough to tell a complex story. At the same time, I saw this translation project as the solution to another problem. I have been involved with hip-hop culture and rap music (hip-hop’s oral expression), either as an avid listener or as an artist, since the age of eleven, and I see it as the embodiment and essence of what poetry should be, and once was. Hip-hop is the site where literature is produced before it is recognized as literature: the pen, the pad, the stage, the performer, and the crowd. Whether or not any individual creation is recognized as literature is the business of forensic scholars; what is more important today is hip-hop’s emerging status as the source of more creative juice than any other musical or literary genre. This is partially a function of its simplicity and accessibility, since rhyme, rhythm, and storytelling are such universal human instincts. However, at this point hip-hop must be recognized as the primary creative source because it is now the preferred medium of expression for the first-ever globally connected generation. This unifying potential should be a cause for celebration, but previous generations still tend to resent and fear hip-hop culture and denounce it as a corrupting influence, mostly because of widespread misrepresentation of the culture’s core values in the media.

The humble ambition that inspired me to write The Rap Canterbury Tales was a desire to resurrect Chaucer’s brilliant stories from their vellum mausoleum by giving them a new form that would once again delight and edify live listening audiences, while at the same time redeeming hip-hop in the eyes of my parents’ generation. Since Chaucer is an unassailable icon of literary culture and the old guard, I saw his poetry as a valuable tool to dismantle the widespread prejudice against hip-hop culture, which gave birth to the art form I love. Also, since hip-hop is an unassailable icon of contemporary cool, I saw it as the perfect medium to deliver Chaucer’s message to a younger generation growing indifferent to the delights of archaic literature.

I chose to translate only the specific Canterbury Tales that would work best in a live performance context—stories with a coherent narrative thread, a solid and conclusive ending, and intrigues involving those old stalwarts of pop culture: sex and violence. For the past six years I have performed various incarnations of these stories in front of thousands of people around the world, as well as setting them to a hip-hop soundtrack and recording them in the form of a rap album. Until now, they have existed only in the form of sound waves and digital files and never on paper, except in my notebook. They are presented here, along with Chaucer’s original Middle English and my explanatory introductions, as the best possible way of telling the story of how these stories came about, and what they were meant to do. There is more here than I could ever get a live audience to sit through, and it is only at this point in the story’s evolution that I am willing to leave the listener behind, briefly. It is my hope, however, that reading this book will do more for your appreciation of poetry off the page than anything I could say to you in person, or in rhyme. Experience precedes formulation, and the spoken word precedes the written, but once you have read, I invite you to listen.

General Prologue

Ther is no newe gyse, that it nas old.

This story begins in April, when spring rains engender flowers, birds sing, and people start to think about going on pilgrimages. In the first April of the new millennium I was busy finishing my English honours thesis, “Competitive Poetics: A Comparison of Speaker/Audience Relationships in Hip-hop Lyrics and The Canterbury Tales.” When my last assignments were handed in I would leave the city to work in the mountains for the summer, planting trees. I was also busy making travel plans for autumn, the beginning of my hard-earned post-graduation year off. My plan was to go to England to perform my newly minted hip-hop adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale at the Canterbury Festival 2000, a celebration marking the six-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death. This was amazing synchronicity, I thought.

But he that departed is in everi place

Is nowher hol, as written clerkes wyse.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As plaunte a tree or herbe, in sondrey wyse,

And on the morwe pulle it up as blyve!

No wonder is, though it may nevere thryve.

You may ask yourself, how did I get here? The idea came to me about nine months earlier. I was at my summer job, planting trees on a muddy clear-cut, thinking about rap music and about traditional English poetry, and for the first time I recognized them as part of the same continuum. My reasoning was simple: if Shakespeare is poetry, then rap is poetry. This is not to say that any living rapper is necessarily on par with Shakespeare as a poet, but rather that rap fills virtually the same social niche: live performances of oral storytelling and lyrical entertainment. The general perception of rap as a popular form unsuited to literary subject matter only reinforces the correlation, since Shakespeare’s plays were also a form of populist entertainment, and were only later adopted by academics and hailed as great literature in hindsight. Storytelling and language arts once existed only as live performances, and our appetite for literature today has its roots in that experience. Perhaps rap has succeeded by speaking directly to that instinct in a way that contemporary poetry rarely does. If the enduring relevance of literature is a function of popular appeal rather than intellectual pretensions, then rap music may be the Elizabethan theatre of our time. The specific connection to Chaucer didn’t occur to me at first, simply because I was less familiar with him, but I was sure this correlation would extend far beyond Shakespeare.

Associating rap with literature made immediate sense to me logically, but the connection also became a source of creative inspiration. I had recently started writing lyrics and performing as a hip-hop artist, and my intention was to make it professionally. However, I was also three years into an English degree and clearly the demands on a scholar’s time were not compatible with launching a music career. At least by making hip-hop lyrics my subject I could advance my understanding of the art form in tandem with my skills. Hip-hop appealed to me as a creative outlet partially because it makes such brilliant use of rhyme and rhythm, devices that traditionally marked the difference between poetry and prose. Hip-hop artists and literary poets of the past are united by their use of structured language, while contemporary poets tend to reject formal devices in favour of free verse. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick complains, “I was not born under a rhyming planet,” as if skill with rhymes were an innate quality that some people are simply endowed with, either by providence or by genetic disposition. However, if rhyming planets do exert an influence on poetic form, then most of the twentieth century has been a bit of a dark age, and scientists have yet to discover a lyrical gene to correct the problem. Yet rappers now routinely claim to be possessed by rhyme in the same fatalistic way, as in the words of Bubba Sparxxx, “I ain’t choose to rhyme; rhymin’ chose me.” I realized that there had to be a connection between the formal parallels (rhyme and rhythm) and the parallels in function (live entertainment), all of which seemed to put both hip-hop and traditional English poetry at odds with today’s published free verse. The inspiration I felt that day in the summer of 1999 was not so much an epiphany as an overwhelming sense of curiosity, compelling me to explore.

Diverse scoles maken parfyt clerkes,

And diverse practyk in many sundry werkes

As with many theories, I began with an intuitive certainty and then faced the daunting challenge of proving the correlation with evidence. When I returned to university in September for my final year I immediately announced to my supervisors that rap lyrics would be the subject of my honours thesis, and that I wanted to connect rap with literary history. They actually took this better than you might expect. The main caveat I got was that I wouldn’t get away with doing less research simply because I had picked a “fun” subject. So I hit the library, and was surprised to find quite a few books on hip-hop culture waiting for me, shattering my assumption that the study of rap would be relatively virgin academic territory. However, most of these books and articles discussed hip-hop in terms of political science and cultural studies rather than literature, tracing the music’s roots in the oral traditions of the African Diaspora. The only explicit connections I could find between rap artists and literary poets were references within the lyrics themselves. While cultural scholars were pronouncing rappers the inheritors of the Nigerian griot storyteller, Black Thought from The Roots was rapping, “My style’s got the rhythm that of an Anglo Saxon”; Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest proclaimed, “It’s the Abstract Poet, prominent like Shakespeare”; and my favourite thinking-man’s rapper at the time, Canibus, growled, “I’m breakin’ the laws of physics with metaphors and lyrics / Speakin’ to dead poets by conjuring up their spirits / From Shakespeare to Edgar Allen / Yo, the whole Dead Poet’s Society couldn’t mess around with the talent.”

What I also discovered when I began to research rap in earnest was that its cultural context was far larger and more complex than I had imagined. By 1999 rap had spread from its origins in New York City in the seventies into every urban centre on the planet. I read about rappers in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, South America, and dozens of other places I had never imagined hip-hop to exist. I also found that each of these sub-cultures had managed to claim hip-hop for its own, adapting the art form to local needs and circumstances. Even its roots were being debated. Most of the books and articles treated hip-hop specifically as a black cultural phenomenon, but one article that stood out for me was about the Latino roots of hip-hop. The argument was that the origins of hip-hop were equal parts black and Latino but blacks had unfairly taken full credit for it, and these early Latino rappers could trace their cultural roots back to the ancient Aztec warrior poets of Mexico. This immediately gave me pause to think about my own intentions, since I was reading articles by black writers about rap’s African roots, articles by Latinos about rap’s Aztec roots, and I was planning to make an argument connecting rappers to white Europeans.

Apparently each person who engages with hip-hop culture, either as an artist or a critic (if there’s a difference), tends to imagine hip-hop in the context of their own heritage, but these perspectives can’t all have equal historical merit. If the people who invented hip-hop were all black and Latino then theirs are the roots of the culture, yet few would argue that hip- hop is of pure stock in the same way as, say, pre-contact indigenous peoples’ traditions. Hip-hop’s original roots didn’t grow in a vacuum; they were quickly grafted from all sides and nurtured in the American urban melting pot under the influence of post-industrial European institutions. However, I wasn’t out to claim hip-hop’s roots as European, only to show that hip-hop has grown into the cultural space once filled by European poets, who themselves were the inheritors of bards and oral storytellers. The challenge with oral traditions is that they leave no physical record, so they can’t be studied in the same way as the written word. It is usually only possible to discuss them through the work of ethnographers and anthropologists, or sometimes in terms of written texts that employ oral storytelling techniques. Rappers, on the other hand, write their lyrics down and mass-produce them for resale, activities more familiar to post-literate European poets than pre-literate African griots. However, when it comes to oral traditions it could be said that all roads lead to Africa, since modern humans are all descended from African ancestors. African Americans are more directly connected to this heritage, but if you trace any culture’s oral tradition back far enough it will lead to the same place. Some rappers even see hip-hop as Africa’s gift to the world, a form of global creative redemption by way of slavery and the Diaspora. This view is explained by Common, a rap artist from Chicago: “[Black people] are obviously shining our light to the world, and went through these trials and tribulations for a certain reason.”

Besides navigating this cultural labyrinth, my real challenge was narrowing the subject down to more concrete terms without losing sight of the greater trend. I began to hunt through the canon for stylistic analogies and discovered some interesting parallels. For instance, the rhymed short- line verse structure of John Skelton’s sixteenth-century poem “Phillip Sparrow” is almost identical to DMX’s rhyme style in “Rough Rider’s Anthem,” which was a hit song at the time. I also found dozens of parallels in the content of traditional poetry and rap lyrics, such as Thomas Wyatt, “Then seek no more out of thyself to find / The thing that thou hast sought so long before / For thou shalt feel it sitting in thy mind,” and Blackalicious, “The final destination used to be my main question / But then I looked and all that I was searching for was present.” This was a scavenger hunt though, yielding interesting tidbits but no smoking gun. That same semester I was also enrolled in my first full course on Chaucer’s poetry, and I began to get into his world through close readings in tutorial. Historically Chaucer seemed like an excellent candidate for comparison with hip-hop because of his closeness to the oral traditions of England and the extent of his influence on future generations of poets, including Shakespeare, and also because Chaucer’s particular dialect of English was later accepted as the written standard. For these and many other reasons he has been recognized for centuries as the “father of English poetry,” and thus Chaucer and hip-hop could be seen as bookends representing the earliest and latest expressions of rhymed narrative verse in the English language.

And though I nat the same wordes seye

As ye han herd, yet to yow alle I preye

Blameth me nat; for, as in my sentence,

Shul ye nowher fynden difference

The most remarkable analogies I found between Chaucer and hip-hop were not only historical, however; they were also reflected explicitly in the organizational structure of The Canterbury Tales. The text consists of a collection of stories that Chaucer wrote over the course of about fifteen years towards the end of his life. Some of the Tales were apparently composed before he began the compilation, while others were obviously tailor-made for the project. To bring all of these different stories together into one, Chaucer creates a fictional company of pilgrims riding on horseback from London to Canterbury, who all decide to play a game to help pass the time along the way: a storytelling contest. Each tale represents an entry in the contest by one of the pilgrims, and Chaucer ascribes certain personality traits to each of them, which are then reflected in the tale. What begins on the surface as a religious pilgrimage soon takes a profane turn when the stories become a vehicle for challenges and insults aimed at the other pilgrims. Chaucer employs the competition as a unifying principle, and also as a device to expose social tensions among the pilgrims, while showcasing their different storytelling techniques and levels of ability.

The clearest analogy for this storytelling contest model in hip-hop culture is the phenomenon of the freestyle battle, a live performance event that underlies the majority of recorded rap lyrics either in style or content. By definition, a freestyle is a rap that is unwritten and unrehearsed, composed by the rapper in the moment of performance, with rhymes that are improvised on beat and, when required, on topic. A freestyle battle is when two or more rappers compete in this way head to head, using punch lines, boasts, and insults to out-rhyme and outwit their opponents. The two terms aren’t interchangeable though, since written rhymes are sometimes used in battles, and freestyles are often simple demonstrations of ability rather than direct competitions. Freestyle and battling perform the same function in hip-hop culture as Chaucer’s storytelling competition does in The Canterbury Tales, dramatizing social tensions among rappers and showcasing different techniques and levels of ability. These systems were developed in response to the particular conditions of hip-hop’s genesis.

Hip-hop first appeared in the mid-1970s in the Bronx borough of New York as a dance party phenomenon, the result of extreme creativity fostered under conditions of extreme poverty. Innovative DJs like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa entertained crowds at block parties by playing a new style of music, blending together only the “break beat” or percussion breakdown sections of records selected from various musical genres. The point was to keep people dancing by never letting the beat stop or falter in intensity. Before rap lyrics were ever recorded, DJs would hook up microphones to their mixers and have someone (or themselves) hype up the crowd with simple rhymed phrases like “Throw your hands in the air, and wave ’em like you just don’t care.” These hype-men came to be known as MCs, for “Master of Ceremonies” or “Mic Controller” or Rakim’s interpretation: “No mistakes allowed / ’Cause to me, MC means ‘Move the Crowd.’” It was during this period in the mid- to late seventies that the core elements of hip-hop culture all appeared in the Bronx: turntablism, rapping, break-dancing, beat-boxing, and graffiti art, all characterized by the need to find outlets for creative energy (musical, lyrical, kinetic, percussive, artistic) using only the limited resources of the urban ghetto.

Hip-hop was intensely competitive from the beginning, with decibel battles between sound systems, b-boy battles among break-dancers, territorial battles among graffiti writers, battles over DJ skills, and lyrical battles for prestige among MCs. This was partly because the Bronx was a centre of gang activity in the seventies, and the performance battles of hip- hop culture were invented to take the place of physical encounters. Rappers began channeling other oral traditions such as signifying (insult contests) into their live performances, and the competitive atmosphere increased the pressure on rappers to distinguish their styles and be clever and innovative with their wordplay. There wasn’t a culture of celebrity around the rappers yet, however; they were part of larger sound crews and their primary function was to support the DJs, who were the culture’s real pioneers. There also wasn’t much money in hip-hop in its embryonic phase, but there was respect to be gained, and those crews with the most recognition were soon doing paid gigs at clubs.

And therefore every man this tale I telle,

Wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle;

In 1979 the first commercially successful hip-hop record, “Rapper’s Delight,” was released as a single on the label Sugar Hill Records. Up until “Rapper’s Delight,” the only way to make money from hip-hop was by performing live, but with that one song’s immense success there was an immediate shift in the aspirations of artists towards recording projects. There is still a lot of nostalgia in hip-hop culture today about this pre-commercial period when rappers were defined strictly by their live performance skills and not by their corporate promotional backing, but rap music’s pop-culture status remains a paradox that even the strictest purists can’t escape. Without “Rapper’s Delight” and the parade of commercial hits that followed, the phenomenon we call hip-hop wouldn’t necessarily still exist, or most people wouldn’t have heard of it. When rap was adopted by the popular music industry in full force throughout the eighties and beyond, it permanently changed the face of the culture, but surprisingly little of the essential elements of hip-hop’s foundation were altered. Instead, the sites of hip-hop cultural production were split loosely into two camps with different functions, underground and mainstream. The mainstream manifests itself whenever hip-hop crosses over successfully into mass media, while the underground maintains the same live performance aesthetic that defined the culture’s origins.

When I first started rapping I didn’t realize how crucial both freestyle and battling are to hip-hop culture. I started off simply writing rhymes and memorizing them, ready to recite to anyone who would listen. On a few occasions I would spout off in front of an MC about how I was an MC too, and I often got the same response: “You’re an MC? Okay, let’s hear you freestyle.” I would answer that I couldn’t do it, and would repeatedly be told, “If you can’t freestyle, you’re not an MC.” At the same time I started noticing this distinction in hip-hop lyrics as well; for instance, a New York MC called Wordsworth declares, “I’m from an environment where freestyle’s the requirement / I bought every album; then my parents had to hide the rent.” It was also repeated often in books on hip-hop: a rapper is someone who writes rhymes and memorizes and records them, while an MC has the ability to write and memorize but can also freestyle and battle other MCs in a live setting. In other words, every MC is a rapper, but not every rapper is an MC. Live performances are inherently less profitable than selling records because of the physical limitations of the audience, so freestyle and battling skills alone are not usually enough to sustain a career in hip-hop. Instead, live performances function as a training ground for artists, who are expected to pay their dues before graduating to the recorded medium. MCs aren’t required to continue battling and freestyling regularly once their music careers take off, but they must be able to demonstrate their skills if challenged. Constant battling is counter-productive when you’re making records, so in this case the readiness is all. Some rappers naturally try to subvert this process, recording radio singles without building any live skills first, but MCs tend to denounce this as an unfair cop-out or shortcut, since they consider their skills harder won. On the other hand, some battle MCs never make the transition to becoming recording artists, and the greatest success comes from balancing live performance skills with record sales. This is where the tension arises between the underground and mainstream, and hip-hop culture is produced in the ebb and flow of this tension.

Hip-hop’s underground and mainstream veins interact much like organisms in symbiosis, or like parts of the psyche. The underground functions as hip-hop’s conscience, while the mainstream functions as its ego. The underground accuses the mainstream of selling out, and the mainstream accuses the underground of player hating. The underground provides the mainstream with talented new artists reluctantly eager to cross over, while the mainstream ensures hip-hop’s dominance in the public media, keeping underground artists motivated by the distant promise of fame and fortune. Neither side can exist without the other. Anyone who complains about the negativity of rap—the violence, misogyny, and jewelry-obsessed materialism that have come to define the majority of mainstream artists’ content—is in essence mistaking the mainstream for the culture as a whole. However, this is an illusion of visibility, like watching a summer blockbuster and instantly dismissing cinema as an inherently superficial art form. The reason MTV and Top 40 hip-hop are rife with criminality and the objectification of women is because gratuitous sex and violence are universally marketable subjects. This also explains the commercial success of pulp fiction novels, prime-time television, and Hollywood movies. Mainstream hip-hop is marketed and distributed entirely by a handful of profit-driven corporations, and they predictably guide mainstream artists’ content in a profitable direction. This is a constant source of frustration for underground MCs at the top of their game, as expressed in Immortal Technique’s rant, “And now they say they wanna get me signed to the majors / If I switch up my politics and change my behaviour.” However, many hip-hop fans would consider “signing to the majors” a betrayal in itself, regardless of content. Likewise, this is a constant source of frustration for commercially successful artists who don’t feel like their content has suffered as much as their credibility simply for being popular, which prompts Wyclef to mock, “Hip-hop fans, you’re like the woman in my house / No matter how loyal I am, you still have your doubts / Talkin’ about, ‘is he real in this relationship? / Or did he “go pop” and on the side get a mistress?’”

For what man that is entred in a pley,

He nedes moot unto the pley assente.

Around the time I started learning about the role of freestyle battling in hip-hop culture, I also started watching live battles and freestyle performances in my hometown of Vancouver. I was aware that most rappers are supposed to cut their teeth freestyling in the schoolyard or on the corner, but I was insulated from this community during my first year as an MC (or proto-MC) since I didn’t know many rappers. It also took me a while to accept the fact that I was going to have to learn to freestyle on demand if I wanted to get even a nod from other artists. Freestyle is a skill that seems nearly impossible when you first try it, and gets easier and easier as you practice, as with any instrument combining sound and rhythm, but it also requires a cognitive attention to meaning. Paradoxically, thinking too much about your words is totally paralyzing, so freestyle requires a balance between intense mental focus and absolute faith, allowing the words to come from somewhere unknown (either the subconscious or the spiritual realm, depending on your beliefs). This is also the source of traditional English dream poetry such as the Venerable Bede’s “Account of Caedmon” or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which is not rationally “composed” in a cognitive sense. Freestyle is not free from structure, however, only from pre-composition: its quality is determined by the ingenuity and harmony of the rhymes, and the way they react to the beat. There is an element of freestyle in all writing, in so far as every word is produced in a given moment, but solitary composition affords the option to edit and rearrange. Hip-hop freestyle, on the other hand, is a continuous linguistic flow that exists only in the moment and cannot be captured or revised; it is a live event that offers a cross-section of the performer’s mental landscape, history, personality, and skill level, revealing as much in the rhyme patterns and syntax as in the content of the words. Of course, it takes a trained ear to sort through it, but from the number of things I’ve surprised myself by saying in freestyles I imagine it could be of great use to psychologists, if anything is.

I remember feeling extremely discouraged at first by how awful I sounded. I can also remember a dream I had near the beginning of my experiments with freestyle (speaking of psychology). There was a bespectacled black Rastafarian hip-hopper with dreadlocks sitting on the hood of a car, and when I approached him he confronted me with the now-familiar, “Oh, you’re an MC? Okay, let’s hear you freestyle.” My freestyle skills in the dream were equal to my skills in reality, virtually non-existent, and after a few awkward lines I stopped. Then he proceeded to demonstrate the possibilities of the art form, conjuring rhymes that rendered our surroundings in striking terms, using metaphors that defied anticipation, and twisting words and phrases into indescribable new forms. I remember thinking, in the dream, that I couldn’t learn to freestyle that well if I spent the rest my life practicing. I awoke with that same feeling of hopelessness, but later it occurred to me that on some level I had actually created all of the lyrics in my dream, both his and mine. Although I couldn’t remember what was said, I was certain the words were real and intelligible, and I realized that this elusive ability was actually latent within me, perhaps within everyone. Soon my freestyle sessions took on the quality of uncovering something half-buried internally, rather than striving after something outside of myself. After all, I was already confident that I could write, and freestyle was just a matter of writing out loud, under pressure, much faster, continuously, while using rhyme and rhythm. It came slowly, but I built my confidence and my abilities in tandem, with Talib Kweli egging me on: “If you can talk you can sing, / If you can walk you can dance.”

I was freestyling my head off (in private) by the time I launched into my thesis research in the autumn of 1999, but was still too green to enter real battles. I also resisted the idea of battling for a long time because I wanted to take a rhetorical stand against it as an MC. The first rhymes I wrote followed the standard “I/You” hip-hop formula where a phantom opponent (you) is insulted in contrast to one’s own prowess (I), as in Lauren Hill’s opening salvo in The Score: “Claimin’ that you got a new style, / Your attempts are futile, / Oooh child, you’re puerile, / Brain waves are sterile / You can’t create; / You just wait to take my tape.” This battle formula can be found in the majority of mainstream rap lyrics largely because most rappers develop their techniques through underground competitions before getting a record deal. However, it felt awkward and illogical to me, since most raps are actually delivered to an audience rather than an opponent (and Lauren is probably not calling her fans puerile, although some rappers do). So I decided to break from tradition and began addressing my “you” to the audience if I used the word at all, in both my written rhymes and freestyles. This gave me a broader frame of reference in my content than the standard battle metaphors, but it also made it harder for me to get my head into battle mode when I finally tried to make the switch.

I can not se that arguments avayle:

Thanne semeth it there moste be batayle

My initial ambivalence towards battling was transformed into pure reverence when I witnessed my first live event. It is impossible to capture the tension and excitement of a live battle in a mere description, but I can highlight some of the qualities that make it so fraught. Proper freestyle battles are rigidly structured, with time limits for the raps and clear standards of judgment. Competing MCs are usually organized into head-to-head battles in heats, eliminating half of the competitors in each round. In my first battle there were over fifty MCs signed up, so the organizers held a mass qualifying round right at the beginning to determine who would make the final three rounds (I did not). This sudden surge of interest was spurred by the release of Eminem’s semi-fictional biopic, 8 Mile, which rekindled widespread interest in battling as an art form. Of course, battles still happened regularly before 8 Mile came out, but I had never heard of fifty MCs signing up for one. It was proof that there were closet rappers everywhere.

Since the purpose of a battle is to test MCs and also to entertain hip-hop fans, the audience is always an integral part of the performance. At the beginning of a battle the host will usually announce something like this to the crowd: “If you feel what these guys are sayin’ you better make some noise for them, and if you think it’s weak, well, you better let ’em know it.” The invitation to participate effectively puts the audience in the judge’s seat, since battles are decided by crowd response. Rappers sometimes pack the crowd with their friends to bias the outcome, so a few individual judges are often designated to make a final call. However, judging also introduces the possibility of corruption into the battle arena, since it’s generally easier to bribe or influence an individual than a mob, which is why most MCs would rather lose to a biased crowd than a biased judge. Despite this slight grey area, in 99 percent of battles the judges go with the crowd, and the winner is usually obvious to everyone. It is also the audience’s belief in their own supremacy that spurs them to participate, and it is the MCs’ subjection to the crowd’s will that keeps them humble and at the same time gives them their confidence. This confidence comes from the knowledge that there is no elusive essentialist standard by which your raps will be judged in a battle; there is only you, your opponent, and the crowd. Win the crowd and you win the contest. Winning the crowd is harder than it sounds, however, since hip-hop crowds are notoriously hostile to performers. There is no appreciation given for effort or good intentions, only a frank and raucous appraisal of each MC’s entertainment value from moment to moment. To win a battle you have to draw on a combination of quick thinking, rhythmic delivery, cleverness, and confidence, all live on stage while being analyzed and insulted by your opponent. If you falter, stutter, or fail to be generally entertaining, the crowd will take the opportunity to loudly heckle you off stage, interrupting you even before your minute is up.

The thing that makes freestyle battling such an effective test of an MC’s ability is that it is virtually impossible to fake. Once MCs get on stage it quickly becomes obvious whether or not they are able to compete, because of the intense pressure applied by the audience. Occasionally rappers will attempt to pass their written rhymes off as freestyles in a battle, but this is an old trick and the crowd is always looking for it. Battle freestyles have to use the immediate setting as a source of material, by rhyming on the opponent’s name and appearance, and especially by responding to things that were said in the last rap. This serves as a test of MCs’ ability to focus and think on their feet, which increases the entertainment value of the performance; it also signifies to the crowd that the rhymes aren’t regurgitated. If an MC is battling with lines that sound too abstract, or the rhyme schemes are too obviously structured, the crowd will often harangue and make a gesture in the air like a pen writing, calling, “Booooo! Written! Written!” I have seen MCs get disqualified from battles because their rhymes, while effective in every other way, were exposed by the crowd’s response as pre-written.

For soothly, he that precheth to hem that listen nat

heeren his wordes, his sermon hem anoieth.

The result of this heavy scrutiny and the structured simplicity of the battle format is that most rappers, like myself, eventually have to concede that the only way to win battles is to practice obsessively and build your skills until you have the confidence and command of language necessary to perform under those conditions. There is no way to circumvent the paying of dues in this context, which ensures that only those who are serious about being hip-hop artists can succeed, although even with commitment there is no guarantee. In a battle you can’t expect the crowd’s indulgence just because you are exposing them to your personal art, nor can you attribute a hostile response from the crowd to their lack of taste, or insightfulness, or discernment. These are excuses that have exposed countless audiences to stupefying drivel at the hands of inept performers, whatever the genre. In a battle the only valid definition of taste, skill, authenticity, originality, craftsmanship, quality, genius, or any other criteria that we use to distinguish great art from mediocre, all flows directly from the crowd in the moment of the performance, and anyone with enough talent and dedication can capture this current. It is also irrelevant what you have achieved in the past, how rich you are, what colour you are, or what your reputation is; all that matters is how you perform. Evidence, one of the MCs from Dilated Peoples, says it best: “Fuck what you’ve done; if you’ve got skills, reveal it.”

There is something appealing about the inherent fairness of this system. No one planned or designed it; it simply evolved along with hip-hop culture as a way to test the skills and dedication of artists, preventing posers and amateurs from dominating the stage. The reason this mechanism evolved is obvious: there were simply more people who wanted to be rappers than there were people willing to support them. This is described by Pras of the Fugees in terms of a competition for resources: “Too many MCs, not enough mics.” The existence of freestyle battling and live performance as a necessary trial for underground MCs acts as a form of natural selection or quality control for hip-hop culture as a whole, demanding a level of commitment from artists that isn’t imposed by the recording industry. Record companies don’t care whether their artists can battle, only whether they sell records. Reciprocally, underground hip-hop heads care more about an artist’s skills and authenticity than about Sony’s profit margin. Freestyle and battling evolved in response to local challenges, namely the disproportionate number of aspiring rappers; however, the unintended result has been an impressive talent pool that contributes to hip-hop’s continued dominance of the music industry and global popular culture. This relationship also steeps hip-hop culture in the ideal of meritocracy, where creativity is rewarded and fraud is punished. Of course, this ideal is constantly frustrated and perforated in reality by record companies and the market-driven mainstream media responsible for broadcasting the message, but this only feeds into the underground’s commitment to self-determination.

As I gradually came to understand the function of freestyle battling and live performance in hip-hop culture, I also began reading Chaucer’s poetry through the lens of my experience. The result was that it became impossible for me to conceive of Chaucer outside of the context of what I was learning about hip-hop. I viewed live hip-hop shows as field research, and my close readings of Chaucer as lab work. Whether you attribute it to the power of positive thinking or to the pattern-recognition neurosis that plagued John Nash, I found exactly what I was looking for in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer seems to have designed his pilgrim storytelling contest around the exact same principles and guidelines that govern hip-hop’s underground, and I believe he uses these devices for the exact same function they perform in hip-hop culture. I would even argue that Chaucer anticipates hip-hop in a number of important ways, by dramatizing live performance and competition explicitly in his content, by drawing attention to different stylistic choices, and by raising questions about the poet’s place in society at large, all within the playful context of a fictional game.

In the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer establishes the setting, introduces his characters, and sets up the framework for everything that follows. He tells us that he was resting at a Southwark inn, near London, preparing to leave the next day on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, when a group of twenty-nine other pilgrims arrived at the inn with the same purpose. By the end of that day, Chaucer tells us, he has already spoken to each of these pilgrims and learned virtually everything about them, and he goes on to describe their history, appearance, and personality, one by one. There is an element of magic realism in this narrative already (or simply tall-tale telling), since the details Chaucer gives are more complex than anyone could possibly have learned from an afternoon of conversations, no matter how sharp their networking skills. This will not be the last time he makes use of his fictional licence for the purpose of the story. Once the pilgrims have been introduced, we meet the innkeeper, described as a large man, bold and impressive, whom Chaucer refers to as “our Host” throughout. The Host proposes a game for the “sport” and “comfort” of the journey, a storytelling contest in which each pilgrim will tell a tale as they ride along (actually the proposed scope of the work has each pilgrim telling two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back for a total of 120 tales, but Chaucer died before completing them all and never revised the introduction). According to the Host, the stories must be “aventures that whilom han bifalle,” (things that happened in the past), and whoever “bereth hym best of alle” (performs the best) will win the prize, which is a “soper at our aller cost” (a free meal). The criteria for judging the tales will be based on two factors, “best sentence” and “moost solaas” (most solace), which is generally taken to mean the tales with the most meaningful content and the most entertainment value. This balancing act between a story’s ability to edify and entertain is based on the old Latin maxim delectare et docere (to delight and to teach), a classical literary ideal that is returned to throughout the Tales. The Host also declares that he will join the pilgrimage and act as a judge for the contest, like the mediator of a freestyle battle. Chaucer even begins by calling the Host a “marchel in an halle,” or Master of Ceremonies (MC).

Though I right now sholde make my testament,

I ne owe hem nat a word that it nys quit.

The Knight opens the contest with an epic tale of chivalric romance, the longest and most complicated of The Canterbury Tales. When The Knight’s Tale finally ends, the Miller declares that he is going to “quite” the Knight, a word that in Chaucer’s time meant “respond to” or “pay back,” the root of our word “unrequited.” The Miller goes on to tell a tale in which the Knight’s themes are all reversed, chivalry is lampooned, and the rich old carpenter John is humiliated. This aggravates another pilgrim, the Reeve, who is a carpenter by trade, and he responds with a tale in which a miller is humiliated in a similar way. The Reeve claims self-defence: “[L]eveful is with force force of-showve” (it is right to respond to force with force). This theme of “quiting” is carried on throughout the Tales, with rivalries cropping up among the pilgrims over their social standing, their personalities, and their conflicting views. Sometimes these rivalries are mediated and defused by the Host, and other times he seems to fuel them and stir up his own conflicts. As the journey unfolds, Chaucer usually remains in the background as an observer, telling us what the other pilgrims are saying and doing without

getting himself involved.

“Quiting” is also one of the most important factors in a freestyle battle, since the crowd demands an interactive event, looking for constant evidence of improvisation. Although Chaucer never explicitly tells us whether the stories in The Canterbury Tales are being improvised or recited verbatim from memory, the presence of “quiting” in the text implies that at least the choice of tale is flexible, since each narrative may be required to respond to the previous one. If they are meant to be improvised stories, it is obviously only within the fictional world Chaucer creates in the text, since text is relatively static by definition. This would make them like the scripted battles in 8 Mile, which are not literally improvised but are meant to signify real freestyles within the fiction of the movie. Of course, the improvisation required of rappers in a freestyle battle is not expected to be absolute either. Many of the rhymes will have been used before in other freestyles or written songs, and common themes and refrains allow the mind to move from topic to topic without stumbling. What is required, however, is novelty in the word order within lines, and if material is being transplanted from other performances it must fit the specific context of the battle, proving that the rapper can interact with his environment. This is also the way storytellers have traditionally functioned in oral cultures throughout history, constantly retelling old stories with new words, improvising only in the details. One of the only published links I found between hip-hop and European oral traditions in my research was an essay comparing hip-hop freestyle to Homer’s versification techniques in The

Iliad, both of which require the poet to master a range of rhythmic and descriptive patterns within which to fit their improvised lines. This is precisely how I read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; the pilgrims are telling familiar stories of the past, but the individual lines and rhymes are being improvised, at least fictionally. This is much more believable from the perspective of verisimilitude as well, since it is much easier to learn the general plots of stories than it is to memorize them word for word.

Whiche layes with hir instrumentz they songe

Or elles redden hem for hir plesaunce

To get a better sense of Chaucer’s treatment of oral traditions in The Canterbury Tales, it is important to consider his historical context. Chaucer was writing in the latter part of the fourteenth century, which was a transitional period for poetry in medieval English society. Court records show that up until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, minstrels were regularly receiving aristocratic support for their services as both musicians and storytellers, so that poetry and music were inextricably linked during this time. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, there is a well-documented change in the social function of minstrels, who were specializing into a more narrowly defined role as musicians and singers, rather than poets and storytellers. Of course, many minstrels may have continued to compose and perform poetry, but there is virtually no further record of them being paid for this service, only for their music. One explanation that has been offered for this shift is the rise of what Richard Firth Green calls the “household poet.” As medieval culture generally grew more literate, aristocratic households were increasingly filled with amateur poets whose performances placed them in competition with the minstrels who had traditionally monopolized the role of oral storyteller. Gradually this trend caused the mystique to disappear from the poet’s role, since poetry was now practiced so commonly it was no longer worth paying for. Minstrels survived this transformation by increasingly specializing as musicians, for which they were still in high demand, but poetry became something far more communal and democratic, open to anyone who cared to join in, as opposed to an exclusive class of trained professionals. One of the most dramatic effects of this trend was a collapse of the sense of separation that had once defined the relationship between poet and audience. Minstrels had previously enjoyed a certain aura of mystery around their status as performers and guardians of social and spiritual tradition, similar to oral storytellers in pre-literate cultures. In contrast, the amateur household poets who succeeded them were far less privileged, since any member of the audience might also be a performer waiting to participate. As a result poetry became a more accessible activity, but at the same time there was less assurance of quality, leaving it up to the audience to decide what was acceptable. Also, with the barriers broken down, the audience now had far more freedom to provide instant feedback, which increased the pressure on poets to meet a certain performance standard or suffer the consequences. One important outcome of these combined factors was an increase in competition among amateur poets, which found its expression in various literary games, such as riddles and verse improvisation contests.