Everything Has A Starting Point...
Released in 2012
Recommended Age Group: Late Elementary to College
There is a fundamental truth about music: fringe genres are using maligned, if not outright rejected by mainstream listenership. The rise of jazz in the 20s, Elvis’ appropriation of rock ’n’ roll, punk in the 70s, etc. are all examples of how quickly music on the edges are rejected and maligned. Later those genres are often accepted, embraced, and then deconstructed and, often, exploited. However, this practice is not new nor unique to music: fashion, food, and literature have gone through the innovator to mundane cycle. Shakespeare has definitely been integrated into our society in a way that is closer to mundane. His name is evoked in video games, episodic shows, books; his image used to hock movies, locations, food. Students often know his name but don’t know why they know his name. Like so many individual pieces of personal art ephemera, it has woven into our cultural landscape in a way that removes the significance and strengthens the its commonality. As an example, I recently said his name in a classroom and a student admitted to knowing the name but not knowing why.
There was a time that Shakespeare meant edgy, new, fringe. Although that time was more than 400 years ago, the reality is that because he was an innovator, for a long time his works resonated with outsiders. Whether it is a gender bent version of Romeo and Juliet or reinterpreting Titus Andronicus as an action film, we see how his work can still have weight and present something on the edge. On the other hand we have the capitalist reinterpretation of Hamlet in the Lion King or 10 Things I Hate About You; these works exploit the commonplace nature of Shakespearean narratives to make them palatable for current audiences. While I agree that we need to honor and propagate Shakespeare’s plots in order to get more people to understand his body of work, there is something lost in these interpretations which loses the innovative edge. Students need to understand both ends of the spectrum with Shakespeare and his literary brethren; authors like Joyce, Austen, Shelly, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. all have, in their time, been both fringe and commonplace.
Kate Tempest’s “My Shakespeare” honors both sides of Shakespeare’s cultural legacy. Like most of her poems, it is an explosive affair. In the span of just a few minutes, Kate lays out a litany of examples of how Shakespeare should be paid attention to in our lives. By synopsizing the plots of his major plays and then giving many of his created phrases, Kate barrages her audience with reasons why his works are important to every day language and creative processes. Whether it is the Taming of the Shrew (“He’s in every girl who ever used her wits”) or Hamlet (“In every ghost that will not rest”), Kate name checks the major plays in short phrases that move with a blink and you’ll miss it speed; Kate by speeding past the main points show both the litany of plots that we all know by heart through extended reinterpretation and how much we actually might know about Shakespeare without knowing it. Then she gives us the Bard’s invented phrases: heart on your sleeve, all that glitters is not gold, method in your madness. Phrases that we all use, sometimes even words, that are just embedded into our lexicon. Kate gives her audience too many reasons not to understand how Shakespeare is part of your world already; she just wants us to see it and then dig deeper.
Part of the dig is understanding performance. In this case Kate’s performance shows use the other aspect of Shakespeare’s cultural legacy: the fringe. Kate’s words are tightly braced like arrows and she rapid fires them like any great poet. Her cadence is less royal stage and more grime album. In the video Kate wears a loose ball cap and a large shirt; she moves like a rapper, arms up moving with her beat and cadence throughout poem. She almost shouts some lines for emphasis, ever picking up speed and channeling her litany of reasons for the Bard’s importance into line after line of well rhymed spoken word. Basically, Kate presents the poem less like a classical poem a la Shakespeare’s sonnets, more contemporary rap album. Although the connection between hip hop / rap and Shakespeare is well traced and used very effectively in many classroom, there is something that seems fresh about Tempest’s poem even after almost a decade. It has a level of passion, understanding, and effective use of the medium to create a reminder of both Shakespeare’s and contemporary poetry’s importance in our day to day life.
A few year after she released “My Shakespeare” Kate released her first album, Everybody Down. As a debut it showed a fully formed artist with a unique voice and her themes, like Shakespeare, in deep clarity throughout her work: London, Englishness, empathy for everyday struggles, the crushing nature of modernity, and our own personal injustices. Although as a teacher I would have a hard time showing some of her works to students, as she does not pull her punches with content or language, the songs on Everybody Down and its followups Let Them Eat Chaos and The Book of Traps and Lessons, are visceral elaborations on these themes with occasional reprieves of absolute beauty. As I prepared for this post I could not stop thinking about what her legacy will be. Much like Shakespeare she is product of her time, but also timeless in theme and idea. She produces art that while completely socially understandable; she confronts the listener both with her intellect and style. Isn’t that what true lasting art do?
