Being a Vessel
Bible verses must have been rap songs.
How else would they have made their way to us?
Certainly our people weren't sitting in lecture halls transcribing the words from someone behind a podium.
We were sitting at the feet of divine emcees transfixed by flows, rhymes, and wordplay so meticulous it had to have come from God.
We must have drank the words like water and stored them in our bloodstream like camels—ready to dispense at a moment's notice.
Before they packed us into them, we were the vessels.
Vessel— this was the word I couldn't find last night when I needed it.
Onyi had sent me a video of a woman passionately rapping the words to Freeway's verse on "What We Do." She didn't just know all of the lyrics, the song was hers.
And not hers in the way people talked about Lil Wayne commandeering songs from other rappers but in the way like she loved, honored, and cherished the song so much that it was hers to carry.1
And right as I finished the video, I thought of the only other person I've heard rap someone else's bars so wondrously that their performance simultaneously operates as recital, revival, and revision—the Queen of Brooklyn.
Before she even starts rapping "Imaginary Players," the Queen is the quintessence of what it means to be a vessel.
Pure.
In this transcendent six minutes, she is both carrying the entirety of Brooklyn and standing taller than the Empire State building
The beautiful thing about hip hop is that sometimes you want to rap the song bar for bar, other times dance to it beat by beat, but rarely do you think to fully rap and dance to the same song. Maybe "The Bridge is Over"↩