Word: spoken-word
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...brilliant Stolen Moments is an openly contentious album. Most of the songs deal with aids, and each of the tunes pairs rappers with jazz performers -- rapper Guru with Donald Byrd, the spoken-word group the Last Poets with saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, Digable Planets with guitarist Wah Wah Watson and trumpeter Lester Bowie. Age is coupled with youth, cool with anger, and the result is music with a caustic beauty...
...revenge by destroying the items of Bernhard's ouevre in her possession. The message seems to be that Bernhard doesn't care what we think, and that she will do whatever the hell she feels like, and that, moreover, we should do the same. The first track, a short spoken-word piece entitled "Excuses for Bad Behavior," frames the album as a self help course that will teach us that what life boils down to is "me, me, me." This is fine, but you'd have to be pretty hard up to find it either outrageous or liberating...
Caedmon, the largest spoken-word recording producer in the nation, tapes on a different track. Famous for its early renditions of literary giants and its 33 Shakespeare plays, the 30-year-old company sold one tape for every ten records in 1971. Now the ratio is 1 to 1 for its nearly 1,000 titles. Caedmon rarely offers complete books, but concentrates on authors reading in their own voices: William Faulkner rushing over the magnificent rhythms of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in a high, fast drawl; Robert Lowell stridently brave in poems about his mental illness; Ernest Hemingway growling...