Poaching Piece

Every Villain Wants to Rule The World

Upon reading the assignment description on the class blog, I immediately thought of at least a dozen different pieces of art that I could poach (to use the term used by Benjamin) and another dozen ways that I could change them and make them uniquely “me” as it were.  I thought that some students might near-immediately think of various films to poach, as we are all film students, so I wanted to use a different piece of art.  As I thought of numerous pieces of art to pirate, I asked myself the questions, “What is uniquely ‘you’?  What sort of art do you enjoy that your classmates or other people in general might not?”

The first two ideas that came into my head were “Hip-Hop” and “Comic Books.”  The result of this idea is a song of my own creation.  Incidentally, I added another layer of “myself” as it were, to this project.  What I have done is “sampled” the song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears For Fears and created a hip-hop song with it.  I chose this song in order to incorporate not only another taste of mine into it, but also the comic book aspect of my idea.  I thought of this song because my favorite comic book as a child was X-Men (and this art fulfills the requirement of being older than I am).  Unlike many other heroes, almost every villain that the X-Men battled with was bent on world-domination or change.  Certain politicians such as Graydon Creed wanted to change the face of America and even the globe in an attempt to enslave or repress mutant-kind, while others like Magneto and The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants wanted to liberate it, hence the thought of the title of the Tears For Fears song (which is also older than I am).

 Hip-Hop and the comic X-Men have both, historically, dealt heavily with the issues of race, coexistence, freedom, and oppression.  While other art forms have largely and thoroughly explored these ideas since before these two were created, few comics and few forms of music have been as outspoken or metaphorical about such issues to the extent that these have.  Now, there is seemingly a contradiction between why someone like myself identifies with these mediums that explore these issues (being that I have not been greatly oppressed in my life or experienced hateful racism directed toward me), but I have always been a person that is interested in art, especially words and drawings.  I have always been interested in an artist’s craft, how they evoke emotion or thought while making words rhyme, how a graffiti artist can do the same with spray paint (and before you criticize, graffiti is one of the four fundamental elements of hip-hop), or how a comic book artist can draw action associated with dialogue accurately in many different frames on a page.

The stereotypes of being a nerd because of a love of comic books or being a gangster or thug because of a love of hip-hop may seem like contradictions upon seeing or meeting me for the first time, but I submit that these stereotypes fail to hit the mark when describing the type of fundamental elements that are associated with these art forms, the elements that I identify with.  For this assignment’s sake, these elements are the craft of writing hip-hop lyrics, the expression of unrest or dissatisfaction through the form of rhyme, the process of making images speak and tell stories with action and drama, and the art of telling a compelling story.