Runic Rap - JAM BAXTER Original Painting

This is the first in my new series of paintings, Runic Rap.
 
Runic Rap is an attempt to place contemporary UK rap artists in the bardic/scop tradition that has its roots in Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Britain.
 
Hip Hop artists are today's bards - the social commentators and storytellers who describe life on this island, over drum beats. They carry the mantle of the deep rooted poetic tradition that has existed here in one way or another for thousands of years.
 
Many UK rappers are migrants or descendants of migrants, and are often perceived as separate from Britishness for this reason. But British history IS the history of migration and collaboration.
 
UK Rap is the inheritor of both the American-born Hip Hop and the British bardic context.People believe performing poetry over music was somehow invented in a vacuum in 1960/70s New York. You just have to see any performance of Beowulf to see how wrong this is.
 
Speaking over drums is a global phenomenon rooted in our collective ancestors.
 
Here is Jam Baxter painted on a Runestone, in the Northern European/Scandinavian tradition.
 
The lyrics are taken from his track "Vines"
 
"This is the hand you were dealt
Use it to swing our or strangle yourself
Use it to rip away realms of existence
Or use it to build them, candles all melt
Into blackness, flicker in the midnight madness
You will never see that road to Damascus
Live amongst humans or live amongst actors
Its your choice, they got this whole shit backwards."
 
Gouache and Acrylic Paint on A4 Bristol Board.