We’re not big into the Rap scene. Sure, there are a couple of Rap artists that we enjoyed but they hale from what now seems to be decades ago – because they do – like Sugar Hill Gang and . . . okay, so the Sugar Hill Gang really is our last real affection for the genre. But to be fair, how could anyone top “Rapper’s Delight” with the memorable rap opening:
I said a hip hop
Hippie to the hippie
The hip, hip a hop, and you don’t stop, a rock it out
Bubba to the bang bang boogie, boobie to the boogie.
QED
But there is a rapper from Seattle who is hoping to steal our heart. Macklemore posted on his Instagram page that he is releasing the “first ever Magic Rap album.” We don’t have an Instagram page but we do have Twitter (@insidemagic) and that’s where we learned the news of this melange of magic and Rap.
It could be true that Mr. Macklemore (if “Macklemore” is his last name – we’re not sure) is releasing the first Rap and magic album but we aren’t sure.
We checked our always reliable Magic Guide book to see. It is like Major League Baseball’s stat and history book but for magic. It said Alexander (“the man who knows”) did an impromptu poem to ghostly hums during a performance in Detroit, Michigan. The poem was about the dead (he was doing a “Dead or Alive” test effect at the time) and while it didn’t rhyme as well as modern rappers, it could be considered a Rap:
I ask who is dead
And who is alive
I’ll be able to discern this jive
Bubba to the bang bang boogie, paper notes to the Magi.
Apparently the last line is a traditional fourth line of any essential rap. We didn’t know that until we checked Wikipedia. The fourth line was obliterated by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s groundbreaking work in the 1970’s with “The Message (It’s Nasty).”
Mr. Macklemore wrote “I’ve been working hard on this magic s—.” He told a hip hop site that he’s “been doing magic for about 2.5 years now.”
“A lot of people are already calling me mid-pack David Blaine,” he said. “One afternoon in my magic shed, I was doing some rabbit work when the idea hit me — ‘What if I combined my natural ability of wizardry and used music to genre blend!?’ I ran it by the local magician community in Seattle and one out of two of them agreed — it was a great idea.”
We embrace his ambition even if we think 2.5 years and the opinion of “one out of two” magicians (we think that is close to 50% but we don’t know what that would be in metric for our European readers, sorry) share our embrace may indicate he has not yet mastered his skills. That said, we likely would not book him yet for our birthday party but that is only because we have already booked two rappers from the 1920s to appear via hologram.
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