Life is full of surprises, right? Things that amaze and astonish us, keep us guessing, keep us wanting more.
I like to surprise people. For instance - I’m thirty-something years old and I quilt. That’s…unusual. And no, not just like a bin of fabric and a hobby I do sometimes, but an entire room in my house dedicated to sewing and crafting, trying to make a small (but growing!) business of it. Now, shall we add a layer? For the last hour and a half, while I sewed the pieces of a giant t-shirt quilt together, I tuned out the world and rocked to my own Eminem concert in my headphones. Yup, that Eminem. Slim Shady. Marshall Mathers III. The 90s/2000s bad boy white rapper. He’s top 5 of my favorite artists.
Eminem grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Detroit, but - surprise - he reads dictionaries for fun. He dropped out of school before the 9th grade, but always did well in English class. He told Anderson Cooper in an interview that he wanted to “...be able to have all these words at my disposal, in my vocabulary, at all times, whenever I need to pull them out, somewhere, they’ll be stored and locked away.” He's taken those words to create lyrics are NSFW and not exactly the best to play around young kiddos (like my own, who are parrots these days!), but all of that aside, he is surprisingly brilliant and extremely talented. In one of his songs, he rapped 9.6 syllables-per-second. Typical conversation is 4 to5 syllables-per-second. In a different song, he rapped 229 words in 30 seconds. The average person speaks 100-130 words per minute, or 50-65 words every 30 seconds. Surprised? Mind blown?
So what does this have to do with sewing? Well, Em was with me as I sewed 249 yards of stitches into a king size t-shirt quilt. I was enjoying the lyrics to songs I am not as familiar with, and dang if they aren’t clever!! That dictionary has done him well!
Rap God (2013)
MCs get taken to school with this music 'Cause I use it as a vehicle to "bus the rhyme" Now I lead a new school full of students
Til I Collapse (2002)
Adrenaline shots of penicillin could not get the illin' to stop
River (2017)
There it is. Who’d’ve thunk Quilting + Eminem could exist so harmoniously (Ha - see what I did there?)
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