{"id":1977,"date":"2011-10-28T11:32:18","date_gmt":"2011-10-28T15:32:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=1977"},"modified":"2012-07-15T20:12:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T00:12:00","slug":"a-fathers-advice-from-yeats-jay-z-and-kanye-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/a-fathers-advice-from-yeats-jay-z-and-kanye-west\/","title":{"rendered":"A Father’s Advice from Yeats, Jay-Z, and Kanye West"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As fate would have it, this August I was reading a collection of William Butler Yeats\u2019s poetry around the same time that Watch the Throne<\/em>, Jay-Z and Kanye West\u2019s collaborative album, dropped. In all probability, you, like me, assign the newest hip-hop a separate sphere of thought in your cognitive landscape from even late Yeats. Since August I have realized the necessity of breaking those spheres down, as one song from the album demanded comparison to one of his poems.<\/p>\n

Both the song \u201cNew Day\u201d and the poem \u201cA Prayer for my Daughter\u201d are addressed to the children of the artists. Yeats wrote with his young daughter in mind, while Kanye and Jay-Z both address unborn sons. At the time of the album\u2019s release, he and Beyonce had yet to make her pregnancy public, but it doesn\u2019t seem beyond reason to assume that Jay-Z knew he was going to have a child when he recorded the song. Thus we have the establishment of an elementary similitude: artists in both 1922 and 2011 are interested in making art about the lives of their children.<\/p>\n

In \u201cNew Day,\u201d the enthroned rappers express concerns for their children that transparently reflect the issues and struggles of their own lives. Both straightforwardly project their own regrets and flaws through their lyrics, which is perhaps the most endearing characteristic of the song. Superficially, it seems like domineering or short-sighted parenting to say \u201cthese are my mistakes, don\u2019t repeat them,\u201d but it is done in such a plain-faced way that it is clear that they are only talking about regrets from their own lives, not announcing plans for their sons. West wants his son \u201cto have an easy life, \/ not like Yeezy Life,\u201d and Jay-Z trills, \u201cTook twenty-six years to find my path\u00a0\/ My only job is cut the time in half.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then what of Yeats? Is he working from the same model of parenting as a chance for introspection? Yes and no. No in that he is distinctly more veiled about where his recommendations come from, and it is only in the seventh and eighth stanzas that he makes it explicit that he is speaking from his experience. From the seventh stanza: \u201cMy mind, because the minds that I have loved,\u201d and from the eighth: \u201cHave I not seen the loveliest woman born?\u201d Thus it seems that these admissions of subjectivity are withheld to the second part of the poem in order to inform the first half, making clear that the lines about Helen of Troy in the fourth stanza are a thinly veiled allusion to the life of Maude Gonne, his life-long love that never came to fruition.<\/p>\n

So Yeats lacks the straightforwardness of hip-hop counterparts. This causes his claims at the end of the poem to seem as if they coming from some sort of omniscient speaker, who truly knows what is best for his daughter. He presents her with a narrow ideal of what life should be, an ideal which any reader with even the slightest inkling of feminist sympathy will no doubt latch on to and spit back out in disgust (feminist objections to this poem could rightfully make up another essay entirely). So while it seems that Yeats is coming from a perspective that is more thought out than the rappers, it is one that is distinctly more egotistical.<\/p>\n

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
\nWhere all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
\nFor arrogance and hatred are the wares
\nPeddled in the thoroughfares.
\nHow but in custom and in ceremony
\nAre innocence and beauty born?
\nCeremony’s a name for the rich horn,
\nAnd custom for the spreading laurel tree.<\/p>\n

He clearly only wants his daughter to fulfill his ideal of happiness, one which is apparently dependent on a husband.<\/p>\n

Contrast this with Jay-Z\u2019s closing message. \u201cI just pray we was in love the night that we conceived him.\u201d He wants his child to come out of love, and feel nothing but love from him as he grows: \u201cPromise never to leave him even if his momma tweakin\u2019 \/ cause my dad left me and I promise never repeat him.\u201d Jay-Z shows in this song a keen ability to empathize that neither his partner West nor his predecessor Yeats show any interest in. West is still too wrapped up in characterizing himself as the terrible person he believes people see him as to really be thinking about having offspring, so I\u2019m going to leave him out of the rest of the discussion.<\/p>\n

Sure, you can argue that Yeats desires nothing for his daughter but to have a \u201cself-delighting, \/ Self-appeasing, self-affrighting\u201d soul, but still his vision for her happiness is narrow. Jay-Z pledges support; Yeats offers his specific philosophical vision for happiness. Both use the task of parenting as an instigating event for self-reflective pieces, but Jay-Z shows himself to be the artist more aware of the stakes inherent to such a task. Yeats has heaped expectations onto his daughter with his poem without the basic self-awareness of this which the emcee demonstrates from the outset. \u201cI\u2019m sorry junior, I already ruined ya.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is, of course, an argument that considers only one aspect of each of the works, the message, and largely ignores issues of genre, form and the time in which they were written, but there is an important point here. Like all genres of music, hip-hop contains within it many performers who can only claim the title \u201cartist\u201d out of convention, but at least at the top, on the throne, and in other, less-visible places which I will discuss in the future, there are artists deserving of the title.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew Day<\/a>\u201d by Jay-Z and Kanye West.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Prayer for my Daughter<\/a>\u201d by William Butler Yeats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As fate would have it, this August I was reading a collection of William Butler Yeats\u2019s poetry around the same time that Watch the Throne, Jay-Z and Kanye West\u2019s collaborative album, dropped. In all probability, you, like me, assign the newest hip-hop a separate sphere of thought in your cognitive landscape from even late Yeats. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,223,219],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1977"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3256,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977\/revisions\/3256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}