DJ Shadow (feat. Run the Jewels) – "Nobody Speak" (2016)

I am crack, I ain't lyin’

Kick a lion in his crack

2 or 3 lines learned a new word when he was researching today’s featured record.

“Chiasmus” is defined as “a figure of speech in which the grammar of one phrase is inverted in the following phrase, such that two key concepts from the original phrase reappear in the second phrase in inverted order.”

Here’s an example of chiasmus from Milton’s Paradise Lost:  “Adam, first of men/To first of women, Eve.”  

Here’s an example of a particular variety of chiasmus called “antimetabole”: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”  (If the two inverted phrases use the same words, it’s antimetabole.  If the two inverted phrases use different words, it’s chiasmus.)

The two lines from today’s featured record that are quoted above are another example of chiasmus.

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The featured records in each year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” – a/k/a/ “28 Posts in 28 Days” in non-leap years – used to share a certain characteristic.  For example, each one might have had a title with a number in it.  Or each one might have been a cover record.

But these days I have far too much on my mind to bother with such trifles.

This year’s featured records have nothing in common – except each of them is a record I heard for the first time only recently.

Some of those records might have been originally recorded in the sixties or seventies.  But if 2 or 3 lines never heard them until recently, then they are new records as far as I’m concerned.

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DJ Shadow was born Joshua Paul Davis in 1972.  “Nobody Speak” – which was released in 2016 on his fifth studio album, The Mountain Will Fall – features El-P and Killer Mike, the two rappers who joined forces to form Run the Jewels in 2012.

I first heard “Nobody Speak” a couple of weeks ago when I was watching “Prague,” which is the title of the eighth episode of the first season of Succession, WHICH IS ONLY THE GREATEST TV SERIES IN HISTORY!  (I find a lot of great music on the soundtracks of the TV series I watch.)

Click here to watch the very provocative music video for “Nobody Speak.”  (Be prepared: the lyrics are extremely explicit!)

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.