"There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope".
~ Stephen Hawking (or at least the guy who played him in the movie)
In what will surely be one of my more convoluted posts, I'm going to honor two men who recently passed who couldn't have been more different: noted physicist Stephen Hawking and rap legend Craig Mack, who sadly passed around the same time. Two from a time when talent got you everywhere you wanted to get to.
Seriously though, Stephen Hawking did put some brand new flava in ya ear.
See what I did there?
I'm going to start with Professor Hawking, who a few years ago agreed to appear on the Big Bang Theory and insisted on delivering his own lines and not having them recreate his electronic voice. When you consider it takes sometimes an hour for him to compose a sentence, it was an enormous commitment on his part. And he made the most of it, much funnier than I expected. For a man who was supposed to die before I was born and who lived everyday trapped in his own mind, he had a cracking sense of humor. But then I guess he had enough time to make the inside of his mind rather nice, so maybe we were all the ones being left out.
As you may have guessed, I didn't know Stephen Hawking personally. But from a wheelchair in a frail body in need of constant care he changed our understanding of the universe we live in. He picked up where Einstein left off. Those who did know him called him engaging, funny and brilliant - from tales of nights in dive bars to extraordinary work in the lab. Because despite the more esoteric nature of his work, it is those understandings which contribute to the continued existence of the human race. And by that I mean things involving items not of this planet that in time will effect this planet. Good stuff. He funked the world...
Yes, that is an odd and awkward segue here...
Craig Mack is however, for us old heads. One of the original Bad Boy artists, the inimitable Craig Mack was a genius of rap in '94 of a kind of rap that artists have kept pretending to discover ever since. His freestyle free verse rap, unlike the story telling style of the contemporaries, consisted of songs that made more sense if you just let the lyrical word play shine through. The intelligence of the rhyme, the patter, smoothness was undeniable. A wicked talent for improvisation along with fat beats made for quite the combination in an age where every song had to have resonance.
But while his single “Flava in Ya Ear” became the label’s first hit, at least to me, he was unceremoniously buried by his label mate the Notorious B.I.G. whose banger of an debut album Ready to Die was released first. The scant few DAYS, not weeks between that musical avalanche and Mack's Project: Funk da World album release effectively knocked Mack out out the hype he'd started. We remember B.I.G. as an icon, but we have mostly forgotten the artist who was the first to walk away from Puffy's music machine. Mack became a legend more what he could have become than for what he did.
Hawking and Mack have things common. You wonder what these men would have accomplished had they been able to run free in their prime.
~ Stephen Hawking (or at least the guy who played him in the movie)
In what will surely be one of my more convoluted posts, I'm going to honor two men who recently passed who couldn't have been more different: noted physicist Stephen Hawking and rap legend Craig Mack, who sadly passed around the same time. Two from a time when talent got you everywhere you wanted to get to.
Seriously though, Stephen Hawking did put some brand new flava in ya ear.
See what I did there?
I'm going to start with Professor Hawking, who a few years ago agreed to appear on the Big Bang Theory and insisted on delivering his own lines and not having them recreate his electronic voice. When you consider it takes sometimes an hour for him to compose a sentence, it was an enormous commitment on his part. And he made the most of it, much funnier than I expected. For a man who was supposed to die before I was born and who lived everyday trapped in his own mind, he had a cracking sense of humor. But then I guess he had enough time to make the inside of his mind rather nice, so maybe we were all the ones being left out.
As you may have guessed, I didn't know Stephen Hawking personally. But from a wheelchair in a frail body in need of constant care he changed our understanding of the universe we live in. He picked up where Einstein left off. Those who did know him called him engaging, funny and brilliant - from tales of nights in dive bars to extraordinary work in the lab. Because despite the more esoteric nature of his work, it is those understandings which contribute to the continued existence of the human race. And by that I mean things involving items not of this planet that in time will effect this planet. Good stuff. He funked the world...
Yes, that is an odd and awkward segue here...
Craig Mack is however, for us old heads. One of the original Bad Boy artists, the inimitable Craig Mack was a genius of rap in '94 of a kind of rap that artists have kept pretending to discover ever since. His freestyle free verse rap, unlike the story telling style of the contemporaries, consisted of songs that made more sense if you just let the lyrical word play shine through. The intelligence of the rhyme, the patter, smoothness was undeniable. A wicked talent for improvisation along with fat beats made for quite the combination in an age where every song had to have resonance.
But while his single “Flava in Ya Ear” became the label’s first hit, at least to me, he was unceremoniously buried by his label mate the Notorious B.I.G. whose banger of an debut album Ready to Die was released first. The scant few DAYS, not weeks between that musical avalanche and Mack's Project: Funk da World album release effectively knocked Mack out out the hype he'd started. We remember B.I.G. as an icon, but we have mostly forgotten the artist who was the first to walk away from Puffy's music machine. Mack became a legend more what he could have become than for what he did.
Hawking and Mack have things common. You wonder what these men would have accomplished had they been able to run free in their prime.
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