I first started listening to rap music when I was 14 years old. And as a person who loves words and who spends his free time reading or writing, falling in love with the art form was as natural as the sun rising every morning.
There is something indescribable that inexorably draws me to good rap music. I swear, it's more than just the love of the words, or the metaphors, or the puns, or the double-entendres, or the rhyming, or the style, or the cadence, or the punchlines or the storytelling, or the profundity of just good rap music. I guess it is all of these things plus more.
Poker ship's "Young Monsters" reminds me why I fell in love with rap music. This takes me back to my secondary school days when I would pop a mixtape into my CD player and just let my mind float to the words of Nas, MC Solaar, Eminem, Common, Kool G Rap, Arsenik, Ps4 De la rime, Lauryn Hill and so many others.
Not always their popular songs, some the ones they poured their heart and soul into and just came clean on the little battles they go through; the little battles we all go through. Reconciling ourselves with ourselves and with our environments.
The internal battles we all have with accountability. The battles we all have when we come of age and start questioning our existence, our actions and the consequences thereof.
Poker's "Young Monsters' is rap music in its essence. It is also hip-hop. It is raw, it is tough and it is more than just good rhymes neatly put down on a backing instrumental.
It is an all-too-common story of an intimate existential dilemma that is dictated in a world that seems to be ruled by and white and a dark area, and a grey area in between that is synonymous with living with demons in your head. It is a story of atonement and sin that can be projected into all areas of our lives, not just of trying to do good and staying away from the bad, but also just figuring out why you are alive and what exactly you are in this world for and if really, the white place you seem to be in isn't instead a dark space. It then spins, for most people, into a grey space that they need to find their way out of.
As it turns out, neither of those places may even be the right one. Perhaps we need to look for something beyond that to fight our demons and find our own personal salvation.
Poker's song does not give answers. It is just one man's confession of his existence and the demons that haunt his dreams. It is a story of his resolve to find the answers - the right answers. And like an encyclopedia that has been laying on the shelf for too long, he has taken the decision to open the pages, blow the dust off it and start making the lines that lie within the book known.
This is rap.
-Wandji Wilfred