Wednesday, May 30, 2012

How We Celebrate



“The thing about Hip-Hop is that it’s from the underground, ideas from the underbelly, from people who have mostly been locked out, who have not been recognized.”

        Russell Simmons

This past Friday marked eleven years of being a public poet for me. I chose to celebrate by driving to Atlanta and getting down at The Art Amok get together for Theresa Davis. Big fun was had, friends.

You know, as fate would have it, there wasn’t a slam, so everybody was free to read or recite whatever they wanted. I decided to do How We Celebrate, which is my poem about breaking (yes, I actually named a new poem! I’ve been struggling with that as of late.). That piece is about celebrating who you are and what makes you come alive. How apt, right?

You can check the poem out here: http://soundcloud.com/christian-j-collier/how-we-celebrate

When I came back to Chattanooga, I managed to record a reading of the poem. While I was listening back to it, I thought about the sound and timbre of my voice. Even though I’ve been getting up in front of rooms of people for eleven years, it wasn’t until I got into doing radio while I was in college that I started getting accustomed to how I sound.

In the past three or four months, I’ve been hearing a number of different things in my voice. I’ve really been experimenting with tone, melody, etc. and it’s been a lot of fun to stretch out a little bit. I’m not a singer (not by a long shot), but it is COMPLETELY within the realm of possibility that you fine folks out there could be hearing Your Friendly Neighborhood Christian do something that sounds very SIMILAR to singing. We shall see! Well, see and hear, but you get the idea.

Well, that’s all I’ve got right now. Listen to the poem, let me know what you think, and check out some of the music below that’s been in heavy rotation for me as of late.


2 comments: