A few months ago a guy called Martin approached me about doing some spoken word/MCing for a new band he was forming. Provisionally titled Juggernaut due to the sheer number of musicians - about 15, including strings, brass, guitars, drums, bass and twiddly laptop/keyboard things - the band play a rich mix of jazz, funk, and hip hop with the odd Jewish folk or 50s surf influence thrown in for good measure. And it sounded cool so I said yes.
I thought it would also be a good opportunity to get other members of our collective Pen-ultimate writing and performing together with a live band, and I liked the fact that due to the amount of people involved no-one's seriously expecting to make any money doing this, and are doing it anyway.  
So Martin duly sent me some tracks and I duly failed to write anything or turn up to all but one rehearsals for a couple of months because I've been too busy doing other stuff. I finally got round to putting fingers to keyboard a few weeks ago and after many a frustrated writing session have decided to give up and try something else.  
Problem was, I'd chosen the track that fired me up the most, the one I could best imagine fantasy me spitting over. Unfortunately, fantasy me isn't necessarily capable of writing over 60 bars of what I realised was going to have to be rap lyrics in a fortnight. And what's more, none of the ideas I have chalked up on my docket at the moment fitted with the music. So I had to come up with a new concept and all I had to work with apart from the music was the title 'Gags, Lables and Tags'.  I ended up writing about all the possible permutations of those three words, and decided I wanted to tell a story about a young graffiti artist who gets caught spraying tags, labelled a criminal, meets an MC in prison who a major record label had tried to gag once, with a penchant for designer labels that landed him inside, but they both get out early, on tag etc. You get the picture.
But writing a story with a structure that fits a piece of music whose structure is already fixed is not easy, especially when you're writing in an unfamiliar form and trying to say something meaningful at the same time. So I've handed it on to Frisko, who has endless bars of high class rhymes to drop over it, while I go and write a soppy love poem over something more mellow! I'll hang onto the idea though, and share the first few lines with you, might grow into something else in future. And it's been a good lesson in knowing when to abandon something that isn't working, or is, in the words of Ira Glass, 'crap'. Meantime I've been writing something for a new Apples and Snakes project, news of which to follow...
 
He called himself
NORTI –
No Other Road To
Immortality -
And under that
banner he
Tagged up drab city
streets
With bright spray
can vitality
 
A middle class kid,
He hid his
privileges
Beneath scruffy
sneaks
And baseball caps,
Scrawled defiance on
Giant canvasses at
railway tracks
 
But he forgot to
watch his back
One night, got
gripped tight
By a copper, refused
to offer repentance
And the judge sent out
a proper message
In the form of a 12
month sentence.

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