sway got an answer

i just watched that kanye and sway interview for the first time. the main take-away for me is the look of fear and discomfort on kanye's face when my man asked him to bust a freestyle. not something i expected to see. the cowardly attempt at spitting a "no rhyme rhyme" in fragments on "what is this? a euro beat?" and trying to nervously stamp it off as some kind of innovation broke my heart a little. nothing like watching the fearless become frantic. i felt like i was watching another one of my favorite rappers turn into a tantrum talker and even worse, turn away from his talent. lupe hurt, but kanye? that's a downright tragedy. i don't blame either one of them, though. what the fuck else are you supposed to to do when you struggled and hustled harder than you can even remember (or rather, can't ever forget) to get on lowly but loyal fans like myself's number one lists and you're up top still being puppeteered, played, and pimped?

i took a black music and black poetry class back in college. one of the sweet honey's on the rock came in to speak one day and she said something about how she used to walk around her grandaddy's house singing when she was younger. one day, when he heard her voice, he asked, "where's all that voice coming from?" she said that was the first day she recognized her voice wasn't just for her. black music isn't made for the artist - it's made for everyone. "and black music, all black music," she said, "falls under the umbrella of protest music." every black person is an artist because everything about black art is made for some kind of freedom and made by some kind of slave. the only question seems to be if the mode of the martyr will be malcolm or martin? was there never a middle man?

kanye mentioned in the interview that he gets a lot of flack for working for and fighting against these corporations he's complaining about. it doesn't make sense to most people, including sway, an underground old school hip-hop head who just doesn't understand why he won't start from the bottom, build from the basics, because we all know there is more satisfaction in a struggle. but the modern day martyr knows that the only way to go against is to go within - you've got to be the middle man. what disappointed me most about that hesitant and half-assed freestyle was that, throughout this entire interview, sway spent his time interrupting kanye's muddled but mastermind monologues, something that seemed to fuel kanye's "turn up," and in the end he gave him one chance to say it all in a way he would understand - "i want to hear you rap about it." i was weirdly on edge waiting for his reply.

use the music, ye. break down the build up of that basic euro beat. hammer-head bob until you got bars to blast the nails down nine inches - bury the beat. talk about how you gonna strike first in a red october, tell 'em that you're warhol - i pop art like soda. tell 'em that you're shakespeare in the flesh - romeo in them retros, i'm fresh to death. everybody watched my throne like lady macbeth. i could rhyme or not rhyme, i could shonda rhime the word out. kilts and skirts, leather and mandals - boy, george, i'm a scandal, scandal. nike, google, fendi, and disney - who's gonna let me create like a medici? or yall gonna try and create me like a collodi? renzo rosso acting geppetto - but i won't settle, my mouth ain't made of wood, it's metal.

something, anything, please. instead, all everyone's going to remember is that "you ain't got the answers, sway." when, to me, it looked like he got one in the end.