The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

And always at these moments I was taken back to the obsessions of my childhood: the organization of words, silences, and sound into stories. And to that I added the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation, and the private ecstasy it all brought to me. And I saw, considering the phrase “I am one, my liege, / Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world,” that there was magic in Shakespeare’s repetition of a sound represented in the b, and that this was the same magic used by Rakim, only this time with the sound represented by the r: I’m the arsenal, I got artillery, lyrics are ammo Rounds of rhythm, then I’ma give ’em piano I was about your age when I began to understand what I had first glimpsed in that copy of Sports Illustrated—that sound and rhythm are even more powerful when organized into narrative. That is to say, words are powerful, but more so when organized to tell stories. And stories, because of their power, demanded rigorous reading, interpretation, and investigation.