Bards
First, let’s meet the contenders. In the red corner we have 50 Cent, a multi-award-winning rapper from New York whose albums have sold more than 22 million copies. Orphaned at eight and dealing crack on the streets of Queens by the age of twelve, Curtis Jackson is a poster boy for the violent world of “gangsta” hip-hop music. In 2000 he was even shot nine times by a rival gangster; his voice still carries a trademark slur from the bullet that hit his jaw. Jackson got his break, musically speaking, when he released the single “How to Rob,” which gave a comic but violent rundown of how he would rob a series of famous artists and entertainers. He went on to combine his thuggish but undeniable street cred with melodious rap beats and riffs on the hugely successful albums Get Rich or Die Trying and The Massacre. 50 Cent then parlayed these musical successes into a multimillion-dollar empire of clothing labels, beverages, films, and even mining interests.
So much for the man, but what of his art? What is rap, and why is it sometimes considered the pinnacle of male poetic creativity?1 Some critics, of course, dispute that it is, citing the undeniable obscenity, cruelty, boastfulness, and violence of many rap lyrics. Yet scratch a little deeper and another picture emerges. These crudities are often wittily and skillfully employed, as when New York rapper Supernatural won the crowd’s admiration in a live, “freestyle” (improvised) battle with rival rapper MC Juice (who had earlier defeated Eminem) using these lines:
Know it for a fact, nigger, you’re totally wack, you never could ever start to f#$! with Supernat. I could switch ya, one time, brother feel the mixture, I’m gonna come over, rip down this nigger’s picture.
Considering they were made up on the fly, these multi-syllabic, rhymed insults and threats are impressive. Not only do they fit their words into a fixed rhythm (what poets call a meter), they also organize each couplet around a finishing rhyme, with a secondary layer of internal rhymes: “never could ever” and “switch ya…mixture…picture.” These complex internal rhymes are, in fact, rap’s signature, and a skilled practitioner can pack multiple examples into a verse, as in Public Enemy’s line: “Their pens and pads I snatch ’cause I’ve had it/I’m not an addict, fiending for static/I see their tape recorder and I grab it/No, you can’t have it back, silly rabbit.” Rap battles are also, surprisingly, a deeply traditional art form. Insult competitions like the Supernatural/MC Juice battle hark back to the verbal jousts of slave days known as “Playin’ the Dozens,” in which rival African males competed to win over a crowd using back-and-forth insults of the “Yo’ mama so fat she wear a tent for a dress” variety. The high esteem in which verbally skilled males are held in African-American communities may, in fact, date back a thousand years to the griots (“wandering poets”) of West Africa.
But if this gives us a snapshot of 50 Cent, what of the blue corner—the ancient Greek poet Homer? Why pick this literary fossil whose poetry is written in a long-dead dialect and of whom most people only know through his fat, dimwitted cartoon doppelgänger, the father of Bart Simpson? It is because of Homer’s (the poet’s, that is) central role in Western literature. Due to his two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, both of which tell the story of the ancient Greeks’ war against the Trojans, Homer is considered the founder of European writing. But hang on, isn’t pitting the written works of this father of Western literature against the spoken compositions of rappers comparing apples to literary oranges? Actually, it isn’t. Leaving aside the fact that most rap lyrics, even apparently improvised ones, are written (see below), it turns out that Homer’s poetry, too, was originally spoken rather than put down on paper (or, more properly, papyrus).
Literary theorists had long been puzzled by certain recurring set phrases in Homer’s poems, such as “rosy-fingered dawn” and “the wine-dark sea.” In the 1930s linguists Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated that these were a memory aid used in traditional spoken epic poetry across the world—Homer, it seems, didn’t write his poetry, he rapped it! It’s highly possible, in fact, that Homer, the greatest poet in Western literature, couldn’t write, since the Greek alphabet wasn’t invented until circa 800 BCE, around the time Homer was composing. The fact that we now have written versions of both the Iliad and Odyssey, however, has led to the “transcription hypothesis”: the theory that both poems were transcribed by some scribe directly from Homer’s, or one of his disciples’, oral performance.
Again, so much for the man, but what of his art? What type of poems were Homer’s oral epics? Like modern rappers, Homer would have delivered his lines to musical accompaniment, though probably a lyre rather than a turntable, beat box, and drum kit. His poetry, like rap, also depended on rhythm, though in Homer’s case this was the strict meter known as the dactylic hexameter—an arrangement of six dactyls, or long syllables followed by two shorts. Unlike rap, however, ancient Greek poetry didn’t rhyme. It also relied far more on narrative than rap does. Much of this narrative was actually true history, as the excavations of archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who found the ruins of Troy in the 1870s, showed. Homeric poetry was also vastly different in motivation and style to modern rap. Where modern rappers compete for social position through boastful insults, ancient Greek poetry recounted the deeds of the Greeks’ glorious ancestors, and even their enemies, in order to pay homage to them. This essential difference is clearly shown by Homer’s noble treatment of the Greeks’ adversaries—not once does he call the Trojans “fools,” “wack,” “biyatches,” or any other favored rap putdown.
Comparing the two art forms is, of course, fraught with difficulty. Value judgments about poetry are notoriously subjective. Given rappers’ boasts about their prowess in the fields of memory and improvisation, though, we do have some objective measures with which to compare. Let’s bring it on, then, by launching directly into round one: memory.
Modern rappers are, admittedly, considered to be excellent mnemonists, or memory experts. They have to be: their songs, focused on wordplay, are much heavier on lyrics than regular pop numbers. Interestingly, this is probably why rappers often make a better transition than other singers into film careers. Rapper Busta Rhymes, for instance, states that his method for learning lines for his movie appearances is to rap them. But how many lines does the average rapper, in our case 50 Cent, actually have to remember? To get an idea I sampled 5 of Jackson’s songs: “In da Hood,” “Thug Love,” “Back Down,” “What’s up Gangsta?” and “Candy Shop.” These average about 60 lines each. To date Jackson seems to have written around 100 songs; let’s be generous and assume he can remember each one of them perfectly. (An incident at the 2007 Black Entertainment Television awards, during which 50 Cent was caught lip-synching, shows he may not always need to.) That makes a total of 6,000 lines. Now consider our ancient Greek poet, Homer. Just 1 of his poems, the Iliad, comprises an astonishing 15,693 lines of text. If you add the Odyssey, that takes his total to 27,803 lines of memorized verse. This is bad enough, but we have to remember, too, that these works are just those that have come down to us. Homer probably had more in his repertoire. Indeed, the evidence of linguists Lord and Parry shows he might have had many more. As part of their study of oral epic poetry, Lord and Parry researched the guslar tradition of Serbia and Montenegro. Medieval guslars were poets who performed epic tales of the Slavs’ struggle for independence against the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Remarkably, the tradition continued into the early twentieth century, and the two scholars were able to meet and interview some of the last guslars. One of those, an illiterate butcher named Avdo Mededović, proved capable of recalling an astonishing 58 epic tales.2 The 13 that Lord and Parry had time to record totaled 78,555 lines of verse, meaning Mededović’s complete repertoire probably comprised 350,476 lines of poetry. If Homer had anything like Mededović’s recall, his lyrical memory would have been fifty times that of 50 Cent.
Mededović’s feats, incidentally, also tell us something about the endurance of modern rappers compared to traditional epic poets. British rapper Ruffstylz claims to hold the world record for the longest freestyle rap at ten hours and thirty-four minutes. This was set in 2003 under official Guinness World Record rules, which allow a fifteen minute break every four hours and as many short breaks (less than thirty seconds) as the rapper wants. By comparison, Lord estimates a full recital of the Iliad would take about twenty-four hours nonstop. Modern academic opinion generally holds that these performances wouldn’t have been given in one sitting, but again, I think that’s judging by our own lax standards. In an illiterate age with very limited recreational options, visits from traveling bards would have been rare and exciting events, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if ancient spectators eagerly sat through an entire reading in one hit. In any case, Mededović’s phenomenal performances prove what traditional bards were capable of, blowing Ruffstylz away in the process—one song of Mededović’s that Lord recorded, for example, filled up one hundred LP albums, or sixteen hours’ solid recital time.3
Memory-wise, then, it seems modern rappers would have had trouble recalling Homer’s laundry list. By now, though, 50 Cent would probably cry foul—his real skill, and one old fossils like Homer lacked, he would argue, is improvisation. Jackson and his fellow rappers are experts at “spitting” on-the-spot lyrics, as their freestyling shows…or does it? Leaving aside the fact that many rappers cheat by pre-writing lyrics, one philological (a fancy word for literary) study of rap also found that freestylers use numerous tricks such as pre-written generic rhymes and stock phrases to help their flow. “Brooklyn” for example, is often paired with “took and” or “tooken” “Illin” often takes the partner “chillin.” Then there are the stock phrases. Even the aforementioned Supernatural, widely considered the best freestyle rapper in the world, was found, in one 254-line freestyle, to use repeated phrases such as, “I’ll tell you what” (11 times), “far as I can see” (3 times) and “it don’t make a dif” (5 times).4 Without dissing rappers’ impressive verbal skills, these tricks clearly reduce enormously the difficulty of rhyming on the spot.
More remarkably, however, it turns out that Homer’s poetry wasn’t just memorized, either: it, too, was substantially improvised. We know this because of those memory aids that Parry and Lord found scattered through Homer’s works. The linguists identified two classes of these: formulas and themes. Formulas are those set phrases, such as “the wine-dark sea,” which, because of their syllabic structure, could slot into the end of a couplet and maintain the strict meter of Greek poetry. Themes are longer passages of text that described a key scene—a battle, a feast, the assembling of an army—that were repeated at key points, often in the same words. These show, Parry and Lord said, that Homer didn’t just remember the Iliad and the Odyssey, he improvised them anew in every performance. This is a remarkable feat, by anybody’s standards. It’s also humbling to realize that the preserved copies of the Iliad and Odyssey we have today are simply snapshots of a one-time performance that happened to be transcribed.5
Once again, the Slavic guslars give us a sample of this remarkable process in action. To test how quickly their “modern” Montenegrin guslar, Mededović, could learn a new song, Parry and Lord had him listen to an unfamiliar epic called Bećiragić Meho sung by another guslar. The fact that Mededović was able to turn around and sing the 2,294-line song after just one hearing is incredible enough; even more remarkable is that his version, while still faithful to the narrative, was now 6,313 lines long. Mededović had lengthened it by three times, on the fly, with an improvised “rap” filling in detail about the characters, their actions, and motivations. What modern rapper could possibly duplicate this feat? Other historical poetic traditions also feature phenomenal improvisation skills. On the island of Malta, for example, men have long fought poetic duels called spirtu pront in which 2 singers compete to denigrate each other with improvised lyrics sung to music. Given that spirtu pront singers often sing an average of 5 hours a day for 50 years, ideally without repeating themselves, it’s clear they had, and have, improvisation skills probably even exceeding those of Homer and the guslars.6
Primetime poets
In the 1990s author Martin Amis published a witty and incisive short story, “Career Move,” that imagined a role reversal in which poets reaped fame and fortune while Hollywood screenwriters scrabbled to wring measly dollars from their action-filled, blockbuster scripts. It might astonish those struggling poets who smiled wryly at this conceit to learn that there is a place in the world where an ancient poetic art, still surviving, really is that popular: the Basque country of northern Spain.
In 2005 more than thirteen thousand ticket holders crammed into the Bertsolari Txapelketa, the national poetry championship of the Basque people, in the city of Barakaldo.7 Another one hundred thousand watched the seven-hour event live on TV. The championship was the culmination of a grueling, four-year round of elimination contests, many almost as well attended. In the Basque art of Bertsolaritza, dueling poets are given a topic and twenty seconds in which to create an eight to twelve-line rhyming poem that fits both a specific meter and a melody chosen from a stock of three thousand traditional songs. It is a supreme feat of improvisation and gamesmanship—for contestants must also then battle one another directly, twisting their opponent’s words into a clever putdown that will win the crowd’s and judges’ applause. It is the deeply traditional nature of Bertsolaritza, whose origins can be traced back at least as far as the fifteenth century, and its role as a symbol of Basque nationalism, that accounts for its sell-out appeal.8 
I think we can all agree that our bout has ended prematurely with a second-round knockout. 50 Cent, the pretender, is flat on the canvas with his trainer dabbing his face and yelling for the doctor. Homer, the contender, meanwhile, is riding off in the promoter’s limo to party with supermodels and take a call from the president. But if rappers have been shown up as totally wack in the virtuoso stakes, might they still not have a claim to fame in how bad their rap is? After all, rap—particularly gangsta rap—is widely acknowledged to be the most violent, obscene, and irreverent art form to ever grace (or disgrace) the airwaves, isn’t it?
Sorry. Even violence-wise, it seems, modern rappers would have made ancient audiences yawn.
This seems hard to believe, since gangsta rap lyrics are so notoriously violent they have sparked a number of public campaigns to censor them, not least by the Parents Music Resource Center run by Tipper Gore, wife of the former U.S. Vice President (though Gore was even more incensed by heavy metal). Nor were her concerns unfounded—one study found that in a sample of 490 rap songs, 41 featured a murder and 66 described an assault or rape.9 The language used to describe these crimes was also often exceedingly brutal, as when rappers Too Much Trouble sang of one imaginary victim that they would: “Beat her head with the phone until her skull caved in.” Tough (if cowardly) stuff, granted, but it pales in comparison to the body count of Homer’s Iliad. In that epic 105 victims lose their lives, proportionally (comparing by number of lines) four times the rapper’s death list. Nor was Homer short on blood and gore in his lyrics, to wit:
Then Idomeneus smote Erymas upon the mouth with a thrust of the pitiless bronze, and clean through passed the spear of bronze beneath the brain, and clave asunder the white bones; and his teeth were shaken out, and both his eyes were filled with blood; and up through mouth and nostrils he spurted blood as he gaped, and a black cloud of death enfolded him…
The bronze helmet did not stop the spear, but the point of bronze broke clean through the bone, and all his brain was spattered about inside it.10
In such graphic detail were these injuries described that one modern neurosurgeon was able to use them to make accurate diagnoses of specific neurotraumas among the Greek and Trojan soldiers.
Rap does, however, have a better claim for the obscenity of its lyrics. Decency prohibits the extensive listing of examples, but suffice it to say many gangsta rap songs use the word “motherf*cker” at least once; “bitch” and “ho” also feature prominently. One academic survey of sixteen Snoop Dogg songs, similarly, found half of them featured explicit descriptions of rape.11 Homer, it’s true, has nothing to equal this, though the Iliad does start with the kidnap and semi-rape of the beautiful Helen. What erotic references the epic does have are of the euphemistic “melting hearts” and “veiled desire” variety. Yet other Greek authors were not above including explicit obscenity in their works. In one of his plays the famed comic playwright Aristophanes, for example, takes great delight in calling Cleon, the Athenian general and politician, a “wretch and b*ttf*cker in matters of state.”12 He also gleefully fantasizes about a rival poet getting hit in the face by a dog turd. Perhaps the height of Aristophanes’ obscenity, however, is his description of a prominent Athenian citizen, Ariphrades, whom he accuses of inventing cunnilingus, saying:
[Ariphrades] defiles his tongue, with shameful pleasures, licking up foul secretions in the brothels, and staining his beard as he stirs up the nether-lips. What’s more, he writes poetry like Polymnestos, and hangs out with Oionichos!
The last two were, it seems, by far the worst transgressions.
Latin limericks
Smutty limericks are often thought of as a peculiarly modern art form. This is partially true—although limericks were first created by Edward Lear in the 1840s—it was in the twentieth century that they assumed their current mandatory obscenity. Yet it might surprise those who decry the lewdness of such stall-wall scrawls to know that several Roman classical poets also wrote positively filthy little ditties. Renaissance translators, for example, were horrified to discover that their hero, the poet Virgil, hadn’t only written the Aeneid and the Eclogues: he had also apparently penned a scandalous collection called the Priapea, poems dedicated to the Roman phallic god Priapus.13
Priapus was considered the god of orchards and fertility, so wooden statues of him were often set up in gardens. But he was also the god of male genitalia, meaning those statues frequently featured an absurdly large wooden penis. This gargantuan member often doubled as a club with which gardeners would beat off would-be-thieves, yet Priapus himself could use it to inflict dire punishments, as the god’s threat in one of Virgil’s Priapea poems makes clear:
But when I thrust up thee [robber] my great, thick pole, stretched without wrinkle will be thine a**hole.
Priapus, according to Virgil, even maintained a sliding scale of penetrative punishments (sorry), differentiated according to the age and gender of the thief:
Whoever the robber may be, each has something to offer me, the woman her c**t, the man his gob; if a boy his a** will do the job.
Despite the similarity of tone the Priapea poems are, though, far superior in poetic technique to limericks. One author, indeed, states that the collection “displays the full perfection of metrical art.” In the end, though, it is the sameness of comic sensibility that binds the two forms together. What else can we do, for instance, but laugh at Priapus’s shameful final confession, in poem 51, that all his threats have failed miserably. Despite the inferior quality of its fruit it is his orchard, rather than his neighbor’s, that the thieves continually plunder—it’s his “punishment” that they crave!
To digress briefly, Aristophanes’ comedy also provides a fitting case study for another modern conceit: that our comedians are more obscene and reliant on shock value than ever before in history. On the face of it, this seems eminently reasonable. Didn’t Eddie Murphy, after all, top off one legendary performance by commanding his audience, as well as an imaginary Bill Cosby, to fellate him—in considerably cruder terms than that? And didn’t British comedienne Jo Brand confess to once using the F word ninety-three times in one show? Add in the fact that the 1990s also saw the development of “male genital origami” as a form of comedy and it certainly seems modern comics will do anything for a laugh. Yet, as ever, compared to their ancient counterparts, they’re just try-hards. Male actors in Greek comedies, by way of comparison, wore huge, dangling red leather phalluses for giggles. One leading ancient Greek playwright even wrote a play featuring the Persian king’s supposed eight-month struggle to pass a turd, and some actors simulated defecation on stage to titillate the audience.14 Even these excesses, though, were pale imitations of the antics of some tribal comics. Many of the Plains Indian tribes of North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to illustrate, featured “contrary” clowning societies whose members did everything backward for comic effect. They spoke backward, walked backward, and played outlandish tricks such as plunging their hands into boiling water and complaining it was cold. Zuni Indian Koyemci clowns acted even more bizarrely—biting the heads off mice, tearing dogs apart and feasting on their entrails, and emptying bowls of urine over their heads, to the appreciative laughter of their kinsmen. They also drank urine, sucking down great draughts and smacking their lips at how delicious it was, and ate both dog and human excrement, all for a laugh.15 Famed anthropologist Adolph Bandelier wrote that he even saw Zuni clowns masturbating and sodomizing one another in their attempts to raise a chuckle.
Decency once again prohibits me from stating exactly which body part the above examples show Eddie Murphy has failed to put where his mouth is. But you get the idea.
Puppetry of the Polynesian penis
Comedians Dave Friend and Simon Morley really started something when their “Puppetry of the Penis” show debuted in the 1998 Melbourne (Australia) International Comedy Festival. The act—in which Friend and Morley stretched, twisted, and folded their genitalia into fantastic shapes such as “The Pelican,” “The Atomic Mushroom,” and “The Mollusc”—was regarded as hilariously original, and soon found a legion of imitators around the world. Yet Friend and Morley were, in reality, too late to claim an original creation—about 350 years too late. Captain William Bligh, of mutiny-on-the-Bounty fame, was disgusted to receive a very similar performance on his first visit to Tahiti, in which one man:
…had his penis swelled and distorted out into an erection by a severe twine ligature…applied so tight that the penis was apparently almost cut through. The second brought his stones to the head of his penis and with a small cloth bandage he wrapped them round and round, up towards the belly, stretching them at the same time very violently until they were near a foot in length…the stones and the head being like three small balls at the extremity. The third person…seizing his scrotum…pulled it out with such force that the penis went in totally out of sight and the scrotum became shockingly distended. In this manner they danced around the ring until I desired them to desist…16
Returning to rap, isn’t it still true, though, that the hip-hop art form can lay claim to one last unique element: that of the contest? Though Homer, the Slavic guslars, and other ancient poets might have been quicker, smarter, funnier, stronger in memory, more creative, and more violent in their lyrics, isn’t it still the case that modern rappers are the only poets to risk their reputations, and even sometimes their lives, in mano-a-mano confrontations with rival lyricists? Freestyle rap battles such as that of Supernatural and MC Juice are, after all, undeniably grueling lyrical tests of courage, quick-wittedness, and humor. Rappers also face possibly devastating humiliation if their poetic attempts to win the crowd over fall flat. They can even face violence or death, given the hip-hop institution of “beef”—feuds in which rappers attack each other with songs and, sometimes, blades and bullets. Surely no ancient or tribal poets dueled thus, risking their reputations and lives in the process?
The bad news is that some, in fact, did. And the worse news is that when they did, it was more difficult, more violent, and more dangerous than any modern hip-hop MC could possibly imagine.
The nith song duel of the arctic Inuit peoples in pre-colonial times, to illustrate, was an intense battle of words, wits, and wills in which men attempted to outsing one another to settle disputes such as wife-stealing or other insults. Since their object was to win over public opinion, performances took place in front of the whole village, the winner being decided by applause. Combatants strove to humiliate rivals with withering insults (accusations of cannibalism and incest being particular favorites) and witty boasts. They were required to suffer, in turn, the pantomime antics of those same opponents, who might stuff their mouths with seal blubber or blocks of wood to muffle their voices. The later consequences of nith song combat could also be devastating. As one Inuit duelist noted, nith song lyrics were “little, sharp words, like the wooden splinters which I hack off with my axe.” In the close-knit conditions of Inuit life the shame of losing often led to suicide, while winning might well lead to murder. Inuit song duels were, in addition, extremely long compared to modern rap battles (which rarely last more than an hour or two). Not only might one nith dueling bout last a whole day, tit-for-tat duel cycles often spanned the entire winter season, and might even be kept up for years.17
Another lengthy, vicious, and frequently devastating poetic contest was the haló song duel of the Anlo-Ewe people in colonial-era Ghana. It, too, had as its goal the winning of public support, though in this case not for resolving disputes but for marshaling fighting power to better pursue them. Haló duels, unlike nith contests, were fights between villages, and whole communities practiced for months to prepare their lyrical assaults on their neighbors. These practice sessions were usually held in the strictest secrecy, since the lyrics of haló songs were so insulting they inevitably provoked premature fighting once their content became known. In just one song recorded by an American anthropologist, for example, one village’s women were accused of: sleeping with their brothers, with all the men in their village, and with bulls; pleasuring themselves with sticks in the vagina; and setting bushes alight with their flatulence. The men were accused of: having absurdly rotund scrotums, selling their grandparents into slavery, and looking like monkeys. With verbal fireworks like these, and the inevitable violence they sparked, it is no surprise that the Ghanaian colonial police finally banned the ancient art of haló in 1960.18
Lest it be thought such lyrical mud-fights were beneath ancient Western poets, the medieval Anglo-Celtic literary tradition of flyting deserves a mention here. Flyting contests were insult competitions conducted in verse, but their lyrics were anything but poetic. The most famous recorded bout, for example, between poets William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy at the court of James IV of Scotland in the late fifteenth century, has been described as “500 lines of filth.”19 A brief scan of the verses of The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy shows why. Scatological references abound—at one point Kennedy insists Dunbar’s “arse drips with excrement, [to] scrub your bottom tired out ten old women.” He also accuses Dunbar’s loose bowels of almost sinking a ship. And the clever, convoluted rhymes, triple-rhymes, and alliterations of the piece do not disguise its other ferocious insults—insane werewolf, deformed dwarf, spawn of Satan, horse-fornicator, and so on. Dunbar and Kennedy’s poetic duel also employed shockingly violent threats. They happily accused each other of heresy and treason, crimes for which the listening king could have hanged them. Each poet also took great delight in vividly describing the brutal tortures his rival would suffer once his misdeeds became known.
Compared to the violence of this poem, one rapper threatening to cap another with his Glock seems distinctly ho-hum.
So much for violent language in poetic contests, but isn’t it still true that rappers have set a new record in actual violence between contestants? Their “beefs” are, after all, known to frequently end in assault and even murder. Perhaps the most famous example is that of rapper Tupac Shakur, who was shot and killed in September 1996, some believe on the orders of Notorious B.I.G., a rival rapper with whom Shakur had maintained a longstanding beef (and who was also later shot and killed). Even 50 Cent himself was stabbed by rapper Black Child, an associate of Ja Rule and Murder Inc., in one episode of 50 Cent’s beef with them. Yet ancient poetic contests were no stranger to violence between contestants either. Some, indeed, required it. Combatants in the Inuit nith song duels, for example, sometimes accompanied their ripostes with a savage head butt or straight-armed blow to the side of the head, which their opponent was required to accept stoically until his turn came to return it. Nor was fatal violence completely absent. True, the official ideology of the duel required combatants to laugh off their defeats and depart in good humor, but Inuit society was also strongly revenge driven: one early twentieth-century anthropologist reported that every man he met at one Copper Eskimo camp had been involved in at least one vengeance murder. It seems unlikely, therefore, that no defeated nith singer ever sought to even the score with a later harpooning (the usual method of Inuit murder). Tellingly, nith singers rarely included the accusation of murder among their insults—since all of them were killers, the charge lacked sting.
Physical violence was similarly common in the haló duels of the Anlo-Ewe people. Anthropologists reported witnessing frequent cases where the victims of the singers’ insults broke through the rope separating them from the performers and attacked them with weapons.20 These assaults usually prompted other audience members to join in, resulting in the inevitable mass arrests with which haló duels generally ended. Haló violence was even continued into the supernatural realm, with contestants eagerly attempting to injure or kill one another through the casting of spells and curses. Nor has the Western literary tradition been without its share of accompanying brutality. The reason for the violent language of the Scottish flyting contests was that the contest had originally been a simple prelude to battle, in which contending heroes would shout boastful abuse at one another. Even later, more refined literary disputes, however, also had their violent elements. Alexander Pope, the eighteenth century English poet, to quote one famous example, was forced to carry a loaded pistol and keep a savage guard dog to deter would-be attackers enraged by his popular satire The Dunciad. Given that The Dunciad was essentially a four-book “diss track” humiliating every one of Pope’s rival poets by calling them servants of the great goddess “Dulness,” we can well understand their murderous impulses.
Sadly, it seems we modern males have once more been trounced by our ancient forefathers. The verbal skills of modern rappers really are closer to Homer Simpson’s than to the Greek Homer’s. But this begs the question—why, then, do we bother? Why do rappers invest so much effort in proving their worth at wordplay when their literary skills, compared to pre-civilized standards, are so patently inadequate? The short answer, of course, is that they don’t know they are. Only our blissful ignorance of Homer’s poetic feats—and those of the Slavic guslars, the Maltese spirtu pront singers, the Inuit nith duelists, and others—allows us to make the ridiculous claims of superior wordsmithing that we do. Even if we did know, however, the evidence is it wouldn’t make any difference. As with those earnest young fighters who sign up in droves for ultimate-fighting classes, even though not one would make more than an appetizer for an ancient Greek pankratiast, our inability to perform doesn’t kill our desire to try. Rappers would still battle because the drive to demonstrate verbal skill is actually an essential one to the art of being male. The reason, as ever, is those omnipotent arbiters of male genetic fate—women. Numerous scientific studies have shown that women rate verbal creativity in men very highly. In a survey of thirty-seven different cultures across the world, for instance, women cited intelligence and creativity as their second-most important attribute in a male mate (the first was kindness).22 More tellingly, creativity rises to first place when women are ovulating. This is important because other studies have shown that the male attributes women find most attractive when their menstrual cycle is at its fertile peak correlate strongly with genetically desirable traits. To put it simply, ovulating women give the most honest insight into the genetic traits they really value, since it is then that their offspring get stuck with the consequences of the woman’s mating decisions. There is plenty of evidence, too, that men are acutely aware of these female predilections. One intriguing experiment at Arizona State University in 2006 found that males could be provoked to extravagant displays of involuntary verbal creativity when shown photographs of attractive women and told to imagine going out with them. (One dreads to think what lengths they would go to if presented with a real, live muse.) Once again, however, even clearer evidence can be seen on the street in the long lines of young female dancers who line up to audition for sexually explicit rap videos. As hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan points out, “the road and the ’hood are populated with women who would do anything sexually to be with a rapper for an hour, if not a night.”23
A muse of manure
A principle stated repeatedly in this book is that the instinctual drive to perform certain actions doesn’t necessarily correlate with any actual skill at doing them. Poetically, no man epitomizes this more than William Topaz McGonagall, the anti-poet laureate of Victorian-era Scotland. McGonagall was certainly afire with some muse: he published more than two hundred lengthy poems over an extended career, and wrote several autobiographies. Unfortunately, he was completely talentless, and is now known to history as one of the worst poetasters (second-rate poets) to ever mangle the English language.
McGonagall’s literary career kicked off with what he called “the most startling incident in my life…the time I discovered myself to be a poet, which was in the year 1877.” Audiences who heard McGonagall perform were equally startled. The poetaster proved totally unable to scan (hold a poetic meter), as shown by this stanza of his most famous work, The Tay Bridge Disaster:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say,
That ninety lives have been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.21
Undeterred, McGonagall took his act on the road, spending the next twenty-five years getting pelted with eggs, flour, rotten vegetables, and dead cats as he read his poetry to clearly unappreciative audiences in pubs, fairs, and circuses.
These assaults didn’t even scratch McGonagall’s remarkable self-belief, however. He still had the temerity to trek over sixty miles through a thunderstorm to petition Queen Victoria for the post of poet laureate in 1892. In typical McGonagall fashion, however, it turned out Her Majesty wasn’t even home.
The crowning humiliation of McGonagall’s life, however, was probably the time he was forced to pay for the privilege of appearing as Macbeth in a performance of the Scottish play at Giles Theatre in Dundee (McGonagall also considered himself an actor). McGonagall had the last laugh, though. When the time came for him to die at the hands of MacDuff he refused, bringing the house down with a ridiculously extended combat scene.
This seems puzzling: why do women demean themselves by trading sexual availability for the chance to worship at some rapper’s feet? Why do women rate verbally creative men so highly they are willing to endanger their long-term relationships for the chance of a fling with them (according to the evidence of their preferences at ovulation)? The reason the male voice acts as such a powerful trigger for female sexual behavior is because of the information it conveys about masculine evolutionary fitness. If the stomach is the way to a man’s heart and the eyes the window to his soul, then truly is his voice the road to divining his suitability as a mate. Even its pitch and volume carry useful information: a low, robust voice can indicate a powerful body and high testosterone, both attributes preferred by many women. This is strikingly shown by one scientific study demonstrating that baritone opera singers have more lovers than tenors do.24 (The tenors needn’t feel so bad, though, it was ever thus. anthropologists can testify that deep-voiced hunter-gatherer men father more children than their high-pitched brothers.)
War of words
Both Hitler and Churchill regarded their fiery words as real weapons of war, even though they delivered them from the safety of parliamentary or propaganda pulpits. Some ancient orators, though, literally backed their words with their bodies. Tahitian rautis (“exhorters”) chose the thick of battle to declaim their ferocious poetry—the better to stir their soldiers to frenzied violence.25 Naked but for a girdle of leaves, and weaponless save for a stingray-tail dagger (with which they were nonetheless deadly), rautis led Tahitian troops into war by thundering out tales of their ancestors’ glorious deeds mixed with commands to slaughter the enemy. Though bloodthirsty, these were full of rich poetry, to wit:
Hang on them like the forked lightning that plays above the frothing surf…
Devour them as does the wild dog…
Let the army be an open passage [on the reef] within which is a furious shark…
Rautis often kept up their efforts for days on end, moving through battlelines by day and camp by night to urge their soldiers on. Some were even known to die of exhaustion. The general dread in which they were held can be seen in the cry of protest common to Tahitian men receiving onerous commands from their wives or others: tini rauti teia—“this is equal to a rauti.”
An even more reliable guide than the pitch of a man’s voice, however, is his verbal skill. This is because the ability to produce quick, complex, intelligent speech is polygenic—it depends on a large number of genes, each equally essential for the finished product. Witty wordplay therefore proves that a man is largely free from any damaging mutations to his genome that might be passed on to his offspring. It is, as in the case of those testosterone-fueled muscles discussed in BRAWN, an honest and unfakeable sexual signal to a prospective mate. It is even possible that this sexual selection for verbal skill is the original cause of the evolution of human language. Some anthropologists theorize that long before meaningful words were created, female proto-humans were rewarding males with sex for the complexity of their repertoire of meaningless hoots and calls.26
Modern women, of course, might well feel that male language hasn’t grown any more meaningful in the intervening million years or so.
If creative wordplay is a sign of a mutation-free male genome, does that mean modern rappers’ second-rate efforts are all down to defective chromosomes? Clearly the answer is no. The polygenic nature of oral poetic creativity means mutant males probably couldn’t produce any wordplay, however mediocre. Once again it is, I think, an ontogenetic phenomenon. Oral poetry has declined drastically in impact, length, and quality because we modern males get so much less practice at speaking. Ancient hunter-gatherer societies were much more steeped in verbal culture. Anthropologist Lorna Marshall, for instance, described the !Kung Bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari desert as:
…the most loquacious people I know. Conversation in a !Kung werf [camp] is a constant sound like the sound of a brook, and as low and lapping, except for shrieks of laughter.27
Individual conversations might last, she reported, for many hours, or even days. She also found that male Bushmen were far more talkative than women. Modern men and boys, on the other hand, frequently spend those long hours with their noses buried in the voiceless worlds of TV, computer games, and Internet pornography. Nor are the misguided efforts of concerned educators to instead get those noses between the pages of a book any better (except for this one, of course). Writing is, it turns out, a major cause of modern males’ decline in verbal poetic skill. It is no coincidence, for example, that the best of the epic poets mentioned here, Homer and the Slavic guslars, were illiterate. In the case of the guslars, in fact, Lord and Parry were actually able to watch the negative effects of writing in action when a few guslars who had received an education began writing, rather than performing, their poetry. The results, the linguists reported, were abysmal: the guslars’ poetry immediately lost its grandeur and became stilted and pedestrian. The problem was the precision that writing allowed, leading poets to forsake memorable, stirring phrases such as, “Once in the days of old, when Sulejman held empire” in favor of prosaic constructions such as, “In the bloody year of 1914, on the 6th day of the month of August, Austria and Germany were greatly worried.”28 Granted, rap is at least partly an oral art form, but it is composed by literate practitioners (very few rappers are truly illiterate, despite the image-making) in a literate environment. It is no wonder, then, that it falls so far short of Homer and the guslar epics.
In any case, the situation for Homo masculinus modernus is definitely growing dire. We can’t, it seems, rely on our Cyrano-esque skills to woo our women; we haven’t got any. Might we not then instead play the part of Christian in Rostand’s play—the beautiful but blockheaded cadet whose good looks cause Roxane to fall hopelessly in love with him? Commentators such as author Mark Simpson, who coined the term “metrosexual,” say we’re already doing so. We modern metrosexual men are, according to these pundits, the most narcissistic, exhibitionist, and beauty-obsessed males in history. A whole industry has sprung up, virtually overnight, to pamper us with lotions, cosmetics, hair-care products, and even plastic surgery. The poster boy of modern metrosexuality is perhaps English footballer David Beckham, who wears more sarongs, nail polish, mascara, and hair product, and shoots more half-naked glam-porn shots, than even his ex-popstar wife, Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham.
Surely he, and by extension we, have the right to call ourselves the most beautiful men ever? Surely no other males in history have oiled, coiffed, perfumed, and surgically altered themselves as much in that quest for beauty as we have?
There’s obviously only one proper, scientific way to find out—a beefcake beauty parade. Remarkably, we don’t even have to contrive one. As it happens, there are men alive in Africa today who maintain an ancient tradition of male beauty contests: the Wodaabe nomads of Niger. For hundreds of years their men have shaved, preened, painted, and ornamented themselves to vie for the title of most beautiful man in their annual gerewol ceremony. It’s a grueling ritual in which tribesmen line up and dance the whole night through for seven days on end, swaying and weaving in time to chanted music, all the while contorting their painted faces to better display their charms to the young female judges. It’s possibly the ultimate test of male beauty. So how, I wonder, would the consummate metrosexual, the icon of modern-male beauty, David Beckham, fare if we entered him?
I’ll just go call his agent.