Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates on hip hop as haiku.<br /><br />Topic: Cultural influences. <br /> <br />Ta-Nehisi Coates: It's really weird because, you know, I write for this high culture magazine. In all of my great original influence is, like, low culture. <br />I mean, I love, Fitzgerald. I love, love, love Fitzgerald, you know. I love The New Yorker. I love all these high culture things. But the first things that taught me about how words were beautiful was, like, hip-hop and Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons is all these--I'm about to get really nerdy on you, I hope you're ready for this. Dungeons and Dragons is all these great books, okay? And so, like, I can remember taking... One of the books is the Monsters Manual and it's a list of all these mythological monsters that inhabit the world of Greyhawk of Dungeons and Dragons. <br />And I can remember just sitting back and flipping through and looking at the words and the descriptions and it will come alive for me. And that was a beautiful thing. That was the first lesson for me about how words can take you somewhere else. <br />And hip-hop was the first lesson in terms of how words are beautiful. <br />My parents were very much in the books and so I've read a lot, certainly, as a kid. But in terms of people talking in the language the kids speak in. Someone's speaking in the slang of my generation. When I heard something like Rakim's "Follow the Leader," I could take a phrase that's really heard, flip it, and now it's a daily word. And that was, like, a high cool for me. That was beautiful. That was beautiful. And I desperately wanted to do something that beautiful. <br />And it wasn't this sort of thing that you thought it was beautiful because someone told you it was beautiful. You felt it. It was a feeling, like, here. <br />And, of course, all your friends, a lot of your friends felt it too. <br />But a lot of things later, I had to learn. So later, in college, I studied poetry, which is also a huge influence on me. But I had to learn why poetry was beautiful. I really did. I had to learn why art was beautiful. I had to learn why certain music was beautiful. And that's true for certain aspects of hip-hop. But for a lot of it, it touched on such a visceral level. I desperately wanted to create something that did that, still do. <br /> <br />Recorded on: March 19, 2009 <br /> <br /><br />Topic: Cultural influences. <br /> <br />Ta-Nehisi Coates: It's really weird because, you know, I write for this high culture magazine. In all of my great original influence is, like, low culture. <br />I mean, I love, Fitzgerald. I love, love, love Fitzgerald, you know. I love The New Yorker. I love all these high culture things. But the first things that taught me about how words were beautiful was, like, hip-hop and Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons is all these--I'm about to get really nerdy on you, I hope you're ready for this. Dungeons and Dragons is all these great books, okay? And so, like, I can remember taking... One of the books is the Monsters Manual and it's a list of all these mythological monsters that inhabit the world of Greyhawk of Dungeons and Dragons. <br />And I can remember just sitting back and flipping through and looking at the words and the descriptions and it will come alive for me. And that was a beautiful thing. That was the first lesson for me about how words can take you somewhere else. <br />And hip-hop was the first lesson in terms of how words are beautiful. <br />My parents were very much in the books and so I've read a lot, certainly, as a kid. But in terms of people talking in the language the kids speak in. Someone's speaking in the slang of my generation. When I heard something like Rakim's "Follow the Leader," I could take a phrase that's really heard, flip it, and now it's a daily word. And that was, like, a high cool for me. That was beautiful. That was beautiful. And I desperately wanted to do something that beautiful. <br />And it wasn't this sort of thing that you thought it was beautiful because someone told you it was beautiful. You felt it. It was a feeling, like, here. <br />And, of course, all your friends, a lot of your friends felt it too. <br />But a lot of things later, I had to learn. So later, in college, I studied poetry, which is also a huge influence on me. But I had to learn why poetry was beautiful. I really did. I had to learn why art was beautiful. I had to learn why certain music was beautiful. And that's true for certain aspects of hip-hop. But for a lot of it, it touched on such a visceral level. I desperately wanted to create something that did that, still do. <br /> <br />Recorded on: March 19, 2009
