The Dead Emcee Scrolls Read Online Free

African people and had planted this text to guide us through a crucial moment in our history, our future, our present. I thought intensely about the power of hip-hop. Had it, also, been planted by these African shamans as some sort of seed that would not blossom until four generations after slavery? Did it somehow hold the key to helping us express the greatest idea of freedom imaginable? Could any music have that sort of power?
    Surreal, almost supernatural, things would occur every time I read aloud from the manuscript. I’d watch the words, themselves, settle into the minds of the audience and how they would leave inspired, almost as if they had witnessed somethingextra-terrestrial. And even within myself, the energy that would swirl within and around me as I deciphered and recited these poems is practically indescribable. But even stranger things began to happen. People began to respond as if it were their personal mission to see that these writings reach the masses. After one reading, at New York’s reputable Nuyorican Poetry Café, I was approached by Marc Levin, a director, who had an idea of how these poems could work their way into a film. That film was Slam , which ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Paul Devlin approached me and other poets from the 1996 Nuyorican Grand Slam team with plans of making a documentary of our touring experience. That film was called Slam Nation. One of the slam team members, Jessica Care Moore, had self-published her own book of poetry and approached me about publishing mine. That book became The Seventh Octave , a pre-mature collection of parts of the manuscript that I was secretly deciphering, and my own poetry, inspired by the ancient text. Next I was approached by legendary producer, Rick Rubin, who encouraged me to sign to his label, American Recordings, and record what became my first album, Amethyst Rock Star.
    It took much longer than I would have imagined to decipher the text in its entirety. Each “poem” often left me in such a bewildered state that I could never guess what would follow. My process of deciphering remained the same, yet the text became increasingly difficult, as sometimes I would have to attempt a passage as many as thirty times before it became clear. It oftenseemed that I could not decipher a text until I was ready to understand it. I often took long breaks between working on the manuscript for the sake of digesting what I had already deciphered. About three years into it I began deciphering the poem entitled “Co-dead language.” The long list of names baffled me. Most startling was that the writing seemed to be a direct response to the death of the hip-hop icons Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. I had found the manuscript before either rapper had been killed, and even though I had been comfortable with the idea of this being an ancient text that had somehow fallen into my lap, when it spoke this directly to our times, I must admit, it frightened me. That fear propelled me to read it aloud as much as possible. I put it to music. I read it on TV. I couldn’t listen to hip-hop the same way. I felt personally attacked whenever I felt an emcee was misusing his power. I grew angry at the way capitalism and violence was being romanticized. Then I started working on the final scroll.
    I had saved the longest scroll for last. This was to be the seventh and final “poem.” From the start, the tone of this page was completely different. It felt raw, unpolished, even gangster. My difficulty in deciphering it lay in the fact that I was completely surprised by the direction in which it seemed to be heading. And for a long time, I guess I wasn’t ready for it. More than any of the others, I could feel its direct connection to hip-hop. The style in which it was written felt more like a rhyme than a poem. It was hardcore. So hardcore,