Deaf Girl Reviews Music: Hidden Flowers by Su Zi

Momma liked flowers, and I grow zinnias in her memory. I also follow garden-related accounts on social media, so a post about a flower and its name was a fairly prosaic event: however, that particular flower is a controversial one, which caused me to pause, to investigate. That particular flower was called Kush, and the post depicting the purple blooms was not, as some might giggle a guess, a moment of acquisitional glee, but an illustration for a song about the flower. Any familiarity with Shakespeare will recall flowers as a muse, as a trope. It is not irony that this Kush flower is purple, and that Shakespeare wrote aplenty about purple flowers, but rather a direct expression of a classical understanding of the lyrical arts.

I showed the picture to a few people as a post about a flower: there were those who recognized Purple Kush’s species and smiled, there were those who were interested in a song with the flower as a topic; however, when I mentioned the name of the artist who wrote the song, everyone became blanched of blood. How curious. A controversial flower can gather benign response, but not if the lyricist is controversial too. Featuring his typically collaborative and atavistic recording style of call and response, the song “Kush” is written by Dr. Dre and features Akon, and the ever-lovable Snoop Dogg. Released as a single in 2010, the culture around this flower has changed much; however, what has not changed are social attitudes towards the music which is in homage to this flower, and here we err.  Following a structure of a chorus framing alternating soliloquy is a device often employed in Dr. Dre recordings, and it is a familiar framework for theatrical musicals. What is striking about this song, and Dr. Dre’s work overall, is the precision of meter he employs, the split-second strike of his beats.

As a hearing-impaired person, music is a love and an agony. Momma loved music, met my father through music, and music played always, especially Vivaldi. The barely-one-ear nature of my hearing ability has evolved into an increased sensitivity: a keenness for birdsong, for environmental acoustics untainted, a physical reaction of nausea to sloppy human noise. That there’s music that is still listenable is a personal joy. Our flower song is among those happy experiences, yet a moment’s lingering reveals the intricacies of this bloom. “Kush” has alternating chorus, one heavily affected, and one sung in human choral voices. The first chorus reads as “Hold up, wait a minute/let me put some Kush up in it”. A recognizable couplet that could be ordinary, except for the meter of the lines: the spondee set forth by “HOLD UP” shifts to the troche of “WAIT a MINute” resulting is an ordinary tetrameter for that line, except that the following line shifts meter—five beats, pentameter—and ends also with the spondee of “IN IT”. Anyone familiar with Shakespeare even distantly, or with classic literary poetry, will recognize the pentameter as an oft used meter; what is unusual is to find this beat in modern music.

What further challenges conventional listening is “Kush’s” second chorus, “inhale/exhale”, which is sung by male and female human voices. Sometime sung iambically – inHALE/exHALE – and sometimes with a shift to troche – IN/hale/EXhale—the accompaniment has a drum and piano tonality, creating a classically clean chord. Intricacies of meter are a marked aspect of Dr. Dre’s artistry, and this song is no exception. Also exceptional is the consistently collaborative nature of Dr. Dre’s work; this song lists a dozen writers. In an Instagram post from the first week of March for this year, Snoop Dogg described working with Dr. Dre as a form of martial arts, and the collaboration as “sorcery”. What is also consistent is Dr. Dre’s assiduous and elaborate tonal constructions—a weaving of blues-bending notes, multiple voices, slant rhyme in lyrical construction, and a sense that we are listening to a modern and pure opera.

There are those who might be petulant or divisive and insist that poetic meter has nothing to do with rap beats, who might not wear a t-shirt that proclaims "Rap, Poetry is thy Mother”, or who might venture that flowers are not an appropriate topic for either Shakespeare or Dr. Dre. Since hindsight attests to Shakespeare’s work as iconic of the English Renaissance, and since living artists are more iconoclastic than iconic while working, it is premature to put the hope of an artistic renaissance on Dr. Dre. What these damaged ears carry away is a joy, a pure pleasure at that exquisite precision, and a gratefulness to have heard it.
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Jennifer's note:  Dr. Dre isn't disabled or neurodivergent.  This lyrical review (which may become a recurring column) is about mainstream culture from a crip POV.  

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Su Zi is a poet/writer and artist/printmaker and edits, designs and constructs the eco-feminist poetry chapbook series Red Mare. 

Publications include poetry, essays, stories and reviews that date back to pre-cyber publishing, including when Exquisite Corpse was a vertical print publication, and a few editions of New American Writing. More recent publications include Red Fez, Alien Buddha and Thrice. A resident of the Ocala National Forest, with a dedicated commitment to providing a safe feeding respite for wild birds, and for a haphazard gardening practice that serves as a life model for all aspects of her work.