It’s so simple

Ah, the arts. In this enlightened age of the 21st century, we love the arts. Don’t we?

 

So why is it that the field of language arts has taken so much abuse? Texting, blogging, Twittering — all of these things have put publishing power in the palms of the people. This should be a sort of Golden Age for language. But, very often, these technologies have instead revealed some serious grammatical deficiencies. And I’m not referring to acronyms and abbreviations inherent to texting, such as LOL. Those devices are (in my opinion) the tools of a legitimate subset of English.

 

But before you start exploring a language’s subsets, it helps to have the basics down first. That’s why I want to help. As the son of an English teacher and a man who has had more experience than he ever wanted in the world of journalism, I have a certain set of skills when it comes to writing.

 

Today’s lesson: It’s a mystery.

 

It’s a mystery, apparently, when to use “it’s” or “its.” Luckily, the answer is simple. If your sentence would still work by substituting “it is,” then you want to go with “it’s.” In this case, for this word, the apostrophe denotes a contraction (“it is” = “it’s”), and not a possessive.

 

The other form, “its,” does denote a possessive. “The food lost its flavor.” Or, “the phone lost its signal,” for example.

 

See? It’s simple.

Amped via amps

 

For those about to rock...

Ordinarily, of course, I would have been asleep. It’s not that I necessarily need more sleep than I did 20 years ago, but the schedule has moved up a few hours.

 

 

None of that really mattered Wednesday night when The Throwbacks (Aviator and Ryan) and Rapper Steph took the stage for a midnight performance at Great Scott. The raw energy cycling between the rappers and the crowd was more than enough to keep everyone amped — even those of us defying sleep schedules.

 

It wasn’t automatic — the three worked themselves into a frenzy on stage, sweating as if they had just run a race. (The heat was intense enough that, shortly into the set, Aviator declared he needed to take off his cardigan sweater. And yes, as you might expect, he caught the kind of hell a rapper wearing a cardigan might catch.)

 

There are certain parallels among the musicians: all three are within two years or less of earning their respective college degrees; and of each them knows the value in having that degree. And, interestingly, each of them described rapping as a way for processing the world around them. You could get the sense that, before entering the world of rapping, these three were natural introverts. But now they have a vehicle for packaging and presenting their internalized thoughts.

 

This package, by the way, is loaded with hooks — huge, industrial-strength meat locker hooks that remain stuck in your skin long after the performance. I challenge you to listen to The Throwbacks’ American Phenomenon and try not to get hung up on the hook. I dare you. Hell, The Throwbacks probably dare you, too. Likewise, the lyrics are designed to engage. Steph, for example, speaks to social injustices in her song American Dream.

 

That mix of the beats and rhymes resulted in a show with a crowd jumping around and shouting the rappers’ words back at them, in unison. I suspect the three rappers will be seeing more of that.

 

The Throwbacks (Aviator and Ryan) and Rapper Steph