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Hooked On Phonix · by R.H.S.
Spell It With A …
Phonetics and kinetics persevere therefore I kick it.—Dres
In this telling line from the inaugural verse of inaugural verses (from “Fanatics of the B Word” off of De La Soul is Dead) Dres tells a little tiny fib. The Native Tongues* family were usually reluctant to deviate from the conventional spelling of words. One of the most glaring exceptions has to be De La’s problematic but phuncky examination of inna citi life, the amusingly titled “Ghetto Thang.” Certainly Three Feet High and Rising can be seen as an excercise in tongue-in-cheek culture critique, but a buncha kids from Amityville, Long Island have a lot of explaining to do when their sometimes condescending take on reality rap is quasi-authenticated by changing an “I” to an “A.” Besides, the only ghetto these guys ever saw was on third-generation dubs of Wild Style’s PBS run.
In all seriousness, it was not the Native Tongues but the ever-colloquial geto boyz known as the Boot Camp Clik, specifically, the trio known as Black Moon, who lead the movement towards a more phonetical planet. On their debut LP, Enta Da Stage, Buckshot, 5 Ft. and Evil Dee tirelessly mangle words into convoluted conformity with the average Crooklynite’s brand of gold teef muddled pronounciation. The album’s liner notes are a phoneticist’s manifesto in which nouns, pronouns, and verbs bow down to the newly ushered change in spell. Only two songs are spared from the slaughta, “How Many MC’s…” and “Slave.” The most egregious violations of conventional spelling include “Make Munne” and “Black Smif-N-Wessun.” These titles are especially daring and hilarious because they include some very basic words that nobody had ever bothered to transliterate into the new rap language.
Searching for logic or consistency will get you nowhere. Why not “How Manne MC’s”? If it’s “Ack Like U Want It” and “Powaful Impak!” then it be “Blact Smif-N-Wessun,” right? Perhaps the gesture is one of concealment, of deliberate subterfuge, a kind of purposeful konfusion. Hey, it’s just the way that we spell, yo. As the Blastmasta and vocalist of “Rappaz R.N. Dainja” once explained “I speak in a code that the devil cannot see thru.” Always one to consider myself at least ninety-three million miles above such d-evils, I nevertheless managed to recently mistake Gangstarr’s “Playtawin” for some kind of obscure gerund upon seeing it in print.
Oddly enough, the Enta Da Stage liner notes contain some of the titles in their unadulterated form. A section reserved for sample clearance listings includes the titles “Into The Stage” and “Shit is Real.” In their conventional form such titles are plain and uninteresting, as typically mundane as Dan Quayle’s misspelling of “potato.” Black Moon demonstrate that phonetic spelling is a form of underclass dissent, a subversive aesthetic tactic that mimics the seemingly contradictory elusiveness and accessibility of street talk. And it works! The masses have unknowingly presumed that “Enta” was outer-borough shorthand for “Enter.” Posdnous himself makes this same error on De La’s 1993 b-side cut “Ego Trippin’ Pt. III” claiming that he “didn’t know you had to keep the ego front page/ like my man from Black Moon when he enters da stage.”
Like ever-shifting slanguages, the usage of a phonetic spelling is not always easily explained or justified. The world may never know why the word “niggers” remains unchanged in the Enta’s shout-outs (a phenomenon observable in the liner notes of Dead Serious, the debut LP from Das EFX, another crew notorious for their car-wreck spell jobs) or why the homies Finsta Bundy are listed quite snootily as “Finster and Bundy,” which reads more like the names of a pair of snarky across-the-pond opera critics than the chosen stage moniker of a Brooklyn rap group. Regardless, committed crate diggas will forever ponder this shit so long as aging insets remain readable. Through contrived mystique, the rap artist achieves lasting fame, and such is the way of the world.
*The larger debate over which artists actually constituted the Native Tongue is forever ongoing and will be explored in a later piece. In the meantime, I defer to Prince Paul’s claim that the Native Tongue consists of “De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest” and finally, Black Sheep.
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