View allAll Photos Tagged angular
I've been suffering for my art out in the garden trying to capture some moments from the snowy winter we've had this January!
There are rappers who rhyme, and then there are rappers who make the rhyme sound like it has somewhere to be. Kool Moe Dee was one of those.
You could hear it before you understood it. The voice came in hard and angular, the syllables stacked up like bricks, and suddenly the beat wasn't just a beat anymore. It was a road, and Moe Dee was driving too fast down it.
People remember the battles. They remember the sunglasses. They remember “Wild Wild West.” They remember the great rap-war with LL Cool J, and the spectacle of two generations arguing over who owned the microphone. But somewhere inside all that history is something easier to overlook: Kool Moe Dee was a hell of a lyricist. Not just a clever one. Not just a guy who could come up with a good insult when the lights were on. A flow lyricist. He understood that the words weren't merely supposed to sit on top of the rhythm. They were supposed to become the rhythm.
Listen to him and you get that feeling of somebody trying to outrun the bar line. He'd cram a phrase into a space that seemed too small for it, then hit the next phrase harder, and somehow the whole thing landed exactly where it was supposed to. There was tension in it. Compression. Momentum. That's a part of rap history that doesn't always get the attention it deserves.
“I'm no phony, I'm the only macaroni”
Before rap became an industry of endless subcategories — conscious rap, gangsta rap, alternative rap, backpack rap, trap rap, whatever else the record-store clerk had to write on the divider — there were MCs figuring out what the human voice could actually do with a beat. Kool Moe Dee was one of those experimenters. He came out of the Treacherous Three, when the microphone was still close enough to the street that you could hear the invention happening in real time. The MC wasn't merely the person who introduced the DJ. The MC was becoming an athlete, a poet, a comedian, a provocateur, a rhythm section with a pulse. And Moe Dee had that athletic quality.
There's a difference between knowing words and knowing how words move. Moe Dee knew how they moved. He could bend a line around the beat. He could make consonants snap. He could accelerate without sounding panicked. He could repeat a phrase until repetition itself became percussion. That's why calling him merely an "old-school battle rapper" doesn't quite get there. That's like calling a great jazz drummer a man who knows how to keep time. Technically true. Completely insufficient. Because the thing about Kool Moe Dee is that he understood the microphone as an instrument. His voice had attack. It had texture. It had attitude. And when the rhyme came around, he didn't simply deliver it, he leaned into it.
Maybe that's why some of his work can feel strange to younger ears now. We're accustomed to flows being analyzed like engineering diagrams: triplets here, internal rhyme there, sixteenth notes, double time, syllabic density, breath control. Moe Dee was doing plenty of that before everybody had a vocabulary for describing it. He was making the machinery while people were still arguing about what the machine was for.
And then there is the other thing: the sheer intelligence of the man. He didn't treat an MC as somebody who merely rhymed the last word of the sentence. He treated the entire line as material. Sound, meaning, rhythm, timing, attack. The rhyme wasn't the destination. It was part of the architecture. That's why going back to him is worthwhile. Not just for nostalgia. For technique. Listen past the costumes. Listen past the battles. Listen past the mythology of the golden age. Listen to the syllables. There's a man in there who really knew what he was doing. And maybe that's the odd fate of certain pioneers. They become so important to the history that people stop listening to them as artists. Their name gets put on the timeline, their photograph gets placed in the museum, somebody says legendary, and then the record gets left sitting on the shelf. But records don't care about timelines.
Put on Kool Moe Dee and let the man work. You'll hear the sharpness. You'll hear the discipline. You'll hear the ego, naturally — this is rap, after all — but you'll also hear the craft underneath it. That mad flow. That sense that the next line is already chasing the one before it. And when it all locks together, you remember something that music has been teaching us forever:
Sometimes the person who arrives early doesn't get enough credit for how far ahead they were. Kool Moe Dee was early. And he was very, very good.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact: ibarraloana@gmail.com
Shot through the atrium ceiling at the Gaylord Texan Hotel and Resort just outside of Dallas, Texas. The hotel was near the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport, so there were lots of low flying planes over the grounds.
One of the world’s biggest Angular conference.
The beautiful city of Warsaw, amazing national stadium, 2 days, 15 talks, 5 workshops, Q&A session and much more!
Thank you to our wonderfull sponsors: Acaicoft, 7N, Twilio, SoftwareMill, SoftwarePlant, EDC Aviation Digital, Deloitte, CodiLime, Telerik, JetBrains, DataArt Poland. Thank you for the speakers, we are really appreciate that you came to Poland and share your knowledge! Thank you for communities from all over the world for your support. Thank you for ALL attendees!
Tilted layers of the Furnace Creek Formation have been eroded flat across the top, and more recent horizontal deposits of sand and gravel have since been laid on top of this old erosion surface.
Angular Nude
by Koola Adams
Cubist Style Nude painting. Acrylic inks on paper. 40cm x 30cm
Frame and mount not included
Copyright reserved by the artist.
www.contemporary-artists.co.uk/paintings/angular-nude/
#art #painting #artists
One of the world’s biggest Angular conference.
The beautiful city of Warsaw, amazing national stadium, 2 days, 15 talks, 5 workshops, Q&A session and much more!
Thank you to our wonderfull sponsors: Acaicoft, 7N, Twilio, SoftwareMill, SoftwarePlant, EDC Aviation Digital, Deloitte, CodiLime, Telerik, JetBrains, DataArt Poland. Thank you for the speakers, we are really appreciate that you came to Poland and share your knowledge! Thank you for communities from all over the world for your support. Thank you for ALL attendees!
Fun with the super wide angle lens for distortion, this got some pretty funny reactions while we were taking the photos