The Dead Emcee Scrolls Read Online Free Page A

that I abandoned it for over a year, while busying myself with other projects. Had I abandoned hip-hop too? It’s true that I was listening to less hip-hop than I everhad. The growing romanticism of gangsterism and heartless pimpery had left me somewhat confused and more than a little angry. It felt like hip-hop was further off course than it had ever been. The have-nots of the African American ghettos had seemingly bought into the heartless capitalistic ideals that had originally been responsible for buying them as slaves. It felt hopeless. Hip-hop was dead. Misogyny and ignorance prevailed. Hip-hop seemed to be running the same God-forsaken course as the American government. Diamonds were as fluid as oil while the violence and corruption surrounding African diamond mines became just as overlooked as the number of dead women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan murdered in the name of American greed: the crudest oil of all. It hurt to hear emcees rapping about pointing guns at each other rather than at real enemies facing our communities and children (, Said the Shotgun to the Head). It felt senseless.
    Slowly my senses returned to me. Through the growing popularity of southern hip-hop, “crunk” music, “trap” music, chopped and screwed, etc., I was reminded of the original passion embedded in hip-hop music. It’s not that the subject matter was any more uplifting; rather the context that shifted surrounding it. Suddenly, through hearing Southern rappers voicing their desire to once and for all “put the South on the map” I was able to see that hip-hop was still voicing a centuries old desire for respect. I was also able to realize how much of a product of America it is. This cry for respect allowed me to lose my impatience with hip-hop’s overall infatuation with gangsters and realize that even that was simply a cry for power andto be recognized. Like so many, in cases when the oppressed regain a sense of power, the initial intent is to express or abuse that power in the same way that it was used against them. Men have used this sort of manipulative power over women for centuries. In hip-hop, as in America, misogyny still prevails. But that misogyny is ironically rooted in an intense and undeniable love of women. How can we uncover those roots? I slowly began to trust that I would not be shocked by my findings with this last poem. I went back to deciphering it. Sure enough, I believe that that is what the last poem (actually the first in this collection, NGH WHT) is aimed at. The problem with poetry or scripture is that even after all my deciphering, there is still much to be deciphered. Phrases must be picked apart, dissected, meditated on. There are layers of meaning.
    In the bottom corner of the final page I found the last few words. What I found, I initially thought funny and quite witty. I decided to use those words for the title of the entire manuscript, The Dead Emcee Scrolls. Of course, it is first a reference to the ancient Judaic texts that were found in the 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea Scrolls are often confused with the Nag Hamadi, other ancient texts that were found in Egypt around the same time that claim to be, among other things, the secret teachings of Yeshua (Jesus). Both findings, along with a few others, have been of growing popularity since the pop explosion of The Da Vinci Code , a novel that uses factual historic data to bring light to ground-shattering truths which may have been suppressed by the early Christian church. I also believe the title to be a reference to the two hip-hop iconswhose deaths have served as an example of what can happen when the power of hip-hop is misused or simply over-looked.
    I have yet to fully comprehend why these texts came to me. Maybe my training as an actor, and until then, untapped talent as a writer, prepared me to write and recite them in a way that would garner the attention they now desire. I believe this