ZENtheRapper

“Mr. Zen, I know what your favorite word is,” one of my students came to me with, excitedly, one day. 

“Oh really? Lemme hear it,” I responded, mostly unsure of what they were getting ready to tell me. I’m the wordsmith. I’m the rapper teacher. I use a large variety of words and I’m always trying to teach them new vocabulary, whether in the classroom, at the lunch table, or even at recess.

They smile. “Ayyyyyyyyyy!!!”

I smile in response.

In my efforts to craft a unique and marketable identity as a rapper, it seems I have globbed on to this ad-lib. It’s not even entirely unique, many rappers use this ad-lib and use it often (G Herbo for one). 

But somewhere early on, there, I noticed that people would try to emulate my Ayyy during my performances, and my brothers in The Push Soul Collective came to me one day and said that my Ayyyy was becoming a recognizable trademark, much before I realized it.

I was an essayist before I became a rapper, albeit a boringly academic one. These days, as an artist, as ZENtheRapper, I seek to salvage certain jewels from my experiences doing academic writing, but mostly I desire to reflect my inner voice, without the undue expectation of academic objectivity or even a basis in agreed upon facts. 

Because as ZENtheRapper, I am a mystic, a sage, a prophet of sorts. I am an interpreter of experience, a connector of microcosms and macrocosms, a scientist of interior life. 

So what does Ayyyyyyy mean in my music as it shows up today, blessed – or cursed – as it is, with the boon of recognition and awareness of technique. 

Well, first, it means that someone told me it was cool and I was sort of on a mission as a rapper to communicate cool in a difficult way, considering my academic roots. 

But, after that, it’s something of a vocal warm-up. It stretches my vocal passageway and tunes my verbal instrument in a way that prepares me to spit with my (now) characteristic poetic flare. It elevates my speaking voice to a rapping timbre. 

When I say it at the beginning of songs, I am practicing sliding through a series of notes, modeling the pattern of cascade and crescendo that characterizes my flow and cadence. It’s like that first stretch when you wake up in the morning, when you first get out of bed and you exhale breath while extending your arms out into a y-shape. 

And then after that, as we journey beneath the surface, it represents that way I deploy meaning and I decorate my verses with multiple entendres. Ayyyy is sort of indicating that what I just said… it deserves multiple interpretations. It’s indicative of meaning that once unmasked is usually very controversial or else politically charged. And usually it’s the case that the surface or mask meaning is intentionally banal. 

After thaaaaaaat, my favorite word, the ZENtheRapper ad-lib Ayyyyy, signals my attempt to represent my sense experience. My attempt to make collage art out of my imagined recollections. My attempt to artfully reconstruct my memory and liberally mix those perceptions in with the corpus of historical knowledge that’s also taking up space in my mind. It accomplishes this by being my natural reaction to rap beats; through its natural evolution, nowhere planned. It communicates a subjectivity of experience that explicitly aligns with my intentions as an artist… somewhat ironically. 

It’s sort of the connecting sense of identity, sense of Self that screams out from the IMAX seating in the Cartesian Theater of my mind. I say it in pretty much every song, across the range of moods and themes I might tackle. What’s more, my friends have taken to greeting me with a warm Ayyyyyyy which is making it feel more and more like a unique identifier for me as an artist, even though I appropriated it from Domo Genesis and G Herbo.

Ayyyy feels emergent. It feels expressive. It feels a bit wild. I think it serves as a great glue substance for my art. Like the wily veteran off the bench who only plays 15 minutes a game. It’s really been with me for my whole journey, and it asserts itself proudly (and rightfully so) these days.

And lastly, at the edge of this analysis, It’s sort of a stand-in for the mystery and the majesty of existence, for the feeling of spawning into a world already created and sure of itself in many ways, with me trying to cope with the weight of that understanding. 

AYYYyYYYYyyy. 

Emerging organically from experience, used as a vocal warmup, and signalling features of my art include interiority, subjectivity, and awe at the mystery of existence, yes, I think Ayyyyy just might be my favorite word.