Action Speaks Louder

Abstract

CONTEXTUAL STATEMENT
This piece is a song featured on Specifik’s album Eighty3, commissioned in 2015 and since its release in the summer of 2016 has received airplay on The Pioneers Radio Show, Kane FM and widely across internet radio, and performed live in a range of different music contexts including Berlin’s Cassiopeia and hardcore punk venue, K19.
The research question that ‘Action Speaks Louder’ addresses is the issue of practice trajectory vis-à-vis time and space in hip-hop. Exposing the lackadaisical and rejection of knowledge in favour of recreation and self-indulgence – the song’s lyrics provide a concept of ‘time-as-palimpsest’, developed in these lyrics and expounded responds to Jeremy Till’s concept of “thick time” (2000: 156-83) as a point of departure. This is further explained in the author's article ‘The Futurism of Hip-Hop’: “Time as palimpsest is also a form of cultural assemblage which requires continual revaluation depending on its components, which in turn are overlaid and tested through time, which simultaneously reveal suppressed ideas and new discoveries.” (2018: 126), and reified in the lyrics “Verse two I serve in real time four dims / I fatten the thoughts and draw in other things”.
The song is furiously paced as an ode to britcore and as a reminder of British hip-hop’s formative hunger. The song also deals with concepts of lyrical eloquence achieved through astral travel: “Now I maintain scan horizons on the astral plane / Seven senses incense my sentences”. Lastly, the song connects themes of regional-rural developed in the author’s monograph PROVINCIAL HEADZ (2020), through lyrics such as: “My boom box still rocks sat in the window pane / As I track back through the dark lane / The endz bended, these streets ended, but I / Remain, Brexit unfazed and ended”, reinstating hip-hop’s provincial political position.
[295 words]