Word: wordplay
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rapper, Eminem has always shown a talent for wordplay, but on his previous work, the lines between his characters--and those characters' broader meanings--were pretty fuzzy. On The Eminem Show, however, the three personalities fit together like a set of Russian nesting dolls. Slim Shady is the raging fantasy id, a nightmare projection of overprotective parents and the devil on the shoulder of teenage rebels. Eminem, meanwhile, functions as the voice of present-tense reality. He's the rapper who has run-ins with the law, an unraveling marriage and a nose for politics. At the wounded core...
...deep, honey-dipped soul. Even when he seems to be singing about, well, poultry, as on the supremely funky El Dorado Sunrise (Super Chicken), it feels vaguely religious. As a producer, Cee-lo orchestrates a humid symphony of rap, rock, gospel, horns and African rhythms to go with his wordplay. No album in recent memory--Yankee or Dixie--has taken so much joy in simply making music...
...Herriman played as well with verbal poetry as he did with visual. Puns, alliteration and copious phonetic wordplay fill the balloons and boxes. Krazy in particular has a remarkable patois like you've never seen before, combining Shakespearian sentence construction with strange malapropisms. To his worm pal he warns of the early bird: "He's a boid - and he's oily and he kraves a woim - ooy, l'il woim, l'il woim - I shudda and shiva for you." His bittersweet song of love goes, "There is a heppy lend...
...Teresa (Michelle Yard), St. Ignatius (John Heginbotham) and 12 "assorted saints" swoop, skip, strut and tango across the stage, bringing out all the fun in an opera that, since its 1934 premiere, has been embraced almost solely by devotees of the avant-garde. Skating atop Stein's nonsensical wordplay ("Once in a while and where and where around around is as sound and around"), Morris has created a heavenly playground full of beautiful saints who dance like angels. As always, he draws his main inspiration from the music. "It's so friendly!" Morris says of Thomson's score, a festively...
...good to have the author's subtle wit and love of wordplay on display again, even in small doses. And the book on beasts will be of special interest to the faithful because it purports to be a facsimile of a copy actually owned by Harry Potter and bearing his schoolboyish annotations. When, for example, the author promises "A Brief History of Muggle Awareness of Fantastic Beasts," Harry circles "Brief" and scrawls "you liar." No wonder so many readers love this...