always missing deadlines

When I first misheard artist Sean Pauls’ “Get Busy”, I, like maybe every other English speaking person couldn’t help but wonder just what the hell this flood of sounds was. They were words, that much was clear. There was structure and consistency but the rules and vocabulary were only vaguely familiar. It was as if Sean Paul had come from a place in the future where all manners of business were conducted in quick-spitted rhymes set to dance club beats. I immediately wanted to go to that place. Some were not pleased with how foreign their own language sounded.

The idea that Sean Paul may be Shakespeare reincarnated came to me as I was driving through the Stanislaus County farmland. I had been avoiding reading Shakespeare’s sonnets because unlike perhaps the majority of English professors, I think Shakespeare was a total hack. For one, the most popular of his plays all have the same theme: everyone dies. His utterly ridiculous obsession with iambic pentameter caused him to strangle and mutilate the existing English language so that it would fit in both form and rhyme scheme. While he receives praise for his innovation and quality, I can’t help but harbor the suspicion that it was Shakespeare’s popularity (and vulgarity) rather than his craft that propelled him through the ages. He was a writer who gave the people what they wanted, and in turn, they soaked it up, Frankensteined phrases and all. Don’t get me wrong. I love inventing words and alchemizing (see?) phrases together to achieve the desired effect. All I’m saying is Shakespeare did the same shit. Big whoop.

I was listening to an episode of Radiolab where Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwhich interview James Shapiro, where he argues that Shakespeare was the inventor of a great many words, most of which begin with the prefix “un”. The argument is basically that by attaching the simple “un” prefix, Shakespeare was able to create a whole host of new words that were more or less the opposite of whatever words he attached the prefix to. An example given is “unnerved”. I can’t claim that Shakespeare is not the first person to use this term, although it seems just as likely to me that the word had been used previously, and Shakespeare is the first place we see it simply because his plays had been copied so many times, making them more likely to survive into the modern era where we could argue about such things. Overall, I was not all that impressed by Shapiro’s argument because it would mean actually reading something, and was actually a little annoyed. Shakespeare wasn’t really doing anything that remarkable. Anyone with command of the English language can apply the rules of prefixes and suffixes to existing words and then wait to see if those words become popular enough to be deemed worthy of the almighty Bible known as the Oxford English Dictionary.

Thus, I return to Sean Paul. Millions of songs have probably been written using the existing English rules, but like Shakespeare (allegedly) before him, Sean Paul said “Fuck dishit. Imma gwaan an make da perf re-cord” and began going crazy, experimenting with word combinations and deletions that really cause an admirer of language to marvel at the sheer brazenness of it. One can almost imagine him, all Dr. Tenma-esque trying to recreate his son in the form of a robot, only Sean Paul was trying to recreate song lyrics out of random phonemes. “Get Busy” is full of examples, my favorite being: “don't get agitate just gwaan rotate”. To truly understand Paul’s mastery, you have to hear it sung. The points of interest here are the use of “agitate” and “gwaan”. Both of these terms may have existed outside of and prior to Sean Paul’s songs, but Paul codified them by setting them to music and publishing them in that form.

In the context of the song, “agitate” should clearly be “agitated” as it is past tense. In order to fit it into the song, however incoherent the meaning becomes, Paul found it necessary to clip off the part that tells us when in time the agitation takes place. Interestingly enough, this clipping does not cause a loss of understanding by the listener, which brings up a lot of questions as to the practicality of using tenses via conjugation. I like to think of this type of inventiveness as a peak into the direction our language may be heading.

The use of “gwaan” is pretty straightforward. A compound word is created out of the words “go” and “on”. This new compound undergoes a phonetic combination so that a new word is created becomes both more and less than its parts . Shakespeare, likewise, was fond of the combination of words According to www.shakespeare-w.com the list includes words like “chimney-top” and “watchdog” and “wry-necked”. While these are simpler compounds, it seems likely that their creation, if done by Shakespeare, were out of necessity rather than a desire to push the language forward.

It is hard to say what the lasting effects of both Shakespeare and Sean Paul will be. I suspect that Shakespeare will continue to be jerked off in academic circles, while Sean Paul will most likely fade into musical obscurity. I find that a little sad, mostly because while we can guess as to where the words Shakespeare used came from and how exactly they were used, we can’t actually know. We weren’t around to hear them and no recordings exist. What we do have is Sean Paul CD’s. Not only is this man a visionary in the same tradition as Shakespeare with his word creation, but the pronunciation of existing words in the interest of creating a danceable beat is nothing short of astounding. Basically, if you were to ask me who I have more respect for in terms of writing skill, I’d have to give it to Sean Paul. Besides, all his songs are about boning. Maybe if Shakespeare had focused more on the sex instead of the dying in Romeo & Juliet, I’d be singing that in my car instead of “Give It Up To Me”.

At the end, if anybody has any clue as to even one word of what he says I would greaty appreciate it.