Brian Theng
I am no music connoisseur. But put a scholarship application and a bar conversation together, and we get a blogpost about Kanye West and Chance the Rapper. Or rather, a whimsical look at two of their tracks. Let’s start with Kanye’s Black skinhead from his 2013 album Yeezus. The chorus goes:
Four in the morning, and I'm zoning
They say I'm possessed, it's an omen
I keep it 300, like the Romans
300 b****es, where's the Trojans?
Baby we living in the moment
I've been a menace for the longest
But I ain't finished, I'm devoted
And you know it, and you know it
Good question, Kanye. Where are the Trojans? And what do the Romans have to do with the Spartans? Something’s clearly gone wrong in these lines, and they’ve been much discussed (see Genius and the Washington Post). But I think there is value is Kanye’s getting antiquity wrong, because it does make us wonder what the later Greeks and Romans thought about the famed 300 at the Battle of Thermopylae (480BC; Hdt. 7.201-232). A recently discovered fragment of the 3rd century AD Athenian historian Dexippus records another battle at Thermopylae. At c. AD262, the Greeks were preparing to defend their land from the Scythians. The Roman general Marianus exhorts them thusly:
O Greeks, the occasion of our preservation for which you are assembled and the land in which you have been deployed are both truly fitting to evoke the memory of virtuous deeds. For your ancestors, fighting in this place in former times, did not let Greece down and deprive it of its free state, for they fought bravely in the Persian wars and in the conflict called the Lamian war, and when they put to flight Antiochus.
(trans. Mallan and Davenport)
Marianus mentions in addition to the most well-known battle apud Thermopylae those which took place c. 323 BC (Diod. Sic. 18.11-13) and c. 192BC (App. Syr. 4.17-20; Livy 36.17-21). Thermopylae is, in such presentations, a byword for heroic last stands. And Kanye certainly sounds like he is ‘going all the way’.
‘300’ is also interesting as a number. It crops up, for instance, several times regarding Augustus. At the centre of Aeneas’ famed shield in Virgil’s Aeneid, we see Augustus (or Octavian, as historians refer to him at this stage of his life) dedicating 300 temples to the Italian gods (Verg. Aen. 8.715-716). Some scholars suggest that this has ominous connotations when linked to stories about Octavian’s slaughter of 300 Roman knights (or knights and senators) after the Battle of Perusia in 40BC (Suet. Aug. 15; Dio. Cass. 48.14.4). I don’t buy the link, but still find the numerology, about which a lot more may be said, interesting. Back to Kanye: there is a theory that ‘I keep it 300’ should be taken as ‘I keep it CCC’ (300 in Roman numerals), meaning ‘cool, calm, and collected’. Again, I don’t buy the link (it’s not the vibe of the song’s premiere on Saturday Night Live, for example), but it is curious to see what people have come up with.
One last muse. Another conversation – this time over brunch – alerted me to some choice Lucretian lines:
The expected delight of your pleasant friendship… entices me to spend the tranquil nights in wakefulness, seeking by what words and what poetry at last I may be able to display clear lights before your mind.
(Lucr. 1.140-144, trans. Loeb)
Very different from zoning and appearing to be possessed. But working creatively at night (I don’t mean pulling an all-nighter for an essay) seems to become a trope, especially when we hear that Chance did the same with the Blessings (Reprise) (So said music producer Cam O’Bi).
This neatly brings us to Chance the Rapper, because I’ve been dwelling too long on Kanye. Blessings (Reprise) is the last track of his 2016 mixtape Coloring Book. In it we hear:
Kanye's best prodigy
He ain't signed me but he proud of me
I got some ideas that you gotta see
Make a vid with shawty and they ship it like the Odyssey
They never seen a rapper practice modesty
I never practice, I only perform
I don’t even warn, I don’t eat it warm, I won’t be reborn
Now for a light-hearted exercise in Homeric allusion (controversial!). I take Chance’s mention of Kanye as the initial prompt that something is happening between these two tracks. Note ‘prodigy’. Not ‘protégé’ (thanks again, Genius). While prodigy can mean ‘super-talented young person’, it can also mean ‘omen’, albeit less commonly so. Haven’t we heard ‘omen’ somewhere before? And ‘I got some ideas that you gotta see’ is but a far calmer way of saying ‘I’m zoning | they say I’m possessed’. Both statements are, in essence, about the ability to create on the fly.
Chance goes further, though. He tells us that he never practices but only performs; Cam O’Bi in the interview cited above says the track was composed in one night. (All this sounds oddly like Statius’ self-professed spontaneity). Finally, I’m not sure if Kanye was on the way to being a Christian in 2016, but ‘I won’t be reborn’ could be tantalisingly taken as a pointed way of saying ‘I don’t need to be [a] reborn [Christian, ‘cause I already am]’. There’s a hint of one-upmanship in Chance’s lines: Kanye didn’t sign him, but that’s okay because he’s better. It’s only a hint, but it is an idea worth holding onto.
That’s because Chance is also ‘better’ than Kanye because he doesn’t get his antiquity wrong.
‘Ship it like the Odyssey’ is most interesting. The use of ‘ship’ is of course quite clever. But Chance doesn’t say ‘ship it like in the Odyssey’, which may make more literal sense, only because that’s what happens in the epic, a lot of sailing to places far and wide. But to say ‘ship it like the Odyssey’ itself is to say something quite powerful about the kleos of the Homeric epic and not just its protagonist. Alaka in his 2018 hip-hop response to the Odyssey, Blind bard’s vision, puts it quite well:
It’s the blind bard we know best
Is it ‘cause your word was twinned to empires’ wings?
Or that we touched something deep within?
‘cause when you boil it down beyond mythology and god
You find something that is just so human, do you not?
As I said in my last post about Pompeii, there are things in the Odyssey so different, yet so strangely similar to us which make it enduring.
I briefly return to the point about Homeric allusion to end. If we treat these two tracks as texts, and if we know nothing about Kanye and Chance the Rapper, then we might well be tempted to see clear allusions by the latter. But the idea of spontaneity almost makes our rappers oral poets. So, either Chance knew Kanye’s corpus so well that he could craft these lines so quickly (and thoughtfully), or they’re all just coincidences, and I’ve wasted an afternoon. Does this make me a neo-analyst, oralist, or neither?
I’ve probably said too much about Kanye and Chance so I will stop. Yet there is more which can be said. Maybe some Coldplay or Bastille next time round?
Some references
Cornell, T.J., ed. (2013). The fragments of the Roman historians. Volume II. Texts and translations. Oxford.
Dyson, J.T. (1996). ‘Caesi iuvenci and pietas impia in Virgil’. The Classical Journal 91, pp. 284-285.
Mallan, C., Davenport, C. (2015). ‘Dexippus and the Gothic invasions: interpreting the new Vienna fragment (Codex Vindobonensis Hist. gr. 73, ff. 192v-193r). The Journal of Roman Studies 105, pp. 203-226.
Rood, T. (2017). ‘Thermopylae business: exemplarity and historicity’. Anachronism and antiquity. Exploring temporality and anachronism in the texts and culture of classical antiquity. https://anachronismandantiquity.wordpress.com/2017/09/26/thermopylae/ (Accessed 12 December 2019).