No Church in the Wild Discussion

toure's breakdown is below...shares alot of the stuff we have mentioned but its pretty good
[h3]Unpacking "No Church In The Wild"[/h3]


Jay-Z’s verse on No Church In the Wild is one of the most interesting on Watch the Throne as it combines religion, spirituality, and philosophy. I tried to unpack most of what I heard but I’m sure there’s things I’m missing. It’s a deep verse. (Again, my point system is based on amateur boxing with 2 points for great lines, 1 point for good lines and 0 for anything else. But in this verse there's no 0s.)

Tears on the mauseoleum floor
Blood stains the coliseum doors
[2 points for the first line and 2 points for the second—These are great, brief images, like complex snapshots made by words—those sorts of photos that seem to suggest a scene. These give us moments of power asserting itself on weakness. In some grand, giant building, a mauseoleum, someone has been made to cry. On the door of the grand, giant stadium someone’s blood has been spilled. (Possibly many someones.) In societally-massive places someone has hurt someone else and left the mark of it behind. Thus Jay-Z slides into the song as a detached narrator, passing no judgment on these scenes, like a director starting the film with still images that tell so much but leave many questions, too. Also, really nice poetic work here rhyming a pair of four-syllable-then-one-syllable words.]

Lies on the lips of a priest

Thanksgiving disguised as a feast

[2, 2—In the song’s first two lines, the images were literal but in these two lines the images have turned figurative. But still we have power asserting itself on weakness. Priests were once among the most powerful men in society—a time evoked by words like mauseoleum and coliseum. This lying priest is hurting the people who believe him absolutely just as the person (or people) who cried and bled in the previous lines were hurt. Also, this figurative image becomes more literal because the previous two lines were literal so he’s accustomed you to see images from the words so that when you get a figurative line you see that, too. So I visualize the lies—these malicious words sitting on his lips like diseased spittle, about to fly out to the people’s ears. The following line (about Thanksgiving) concludes the series of images with a celebratory moment that’s really a Trojan horse allowing the powerful to take advantage of the weak. Interestingly, the first three lines suggest old Europe— mauseoleum, coliseum, a place where Priests had hegemony—while the fourth line, the line about Thanksgiving, clearly evokes early America, though perhaps at the beginning of America they were still more European than American. Perhaps.]

Rollin’ in the Rolls-Royce Corniche

[2—All these lines are getting 2’s because of the overall story they’re telling and how well they fit together to build something that’s greater than the sum of the parts. Is this particular line great in a vacuum? Maybe not, though the alliteration is nice, but what makes it great is how it fits with the lines we’ve been given before. Jay’s been a detached narrator so far, giving himself no place in the story and not even passing judgment on the scenes he’s painting. Here he enters the story in style. In style linguistically—there’s an elegant subtlety to how he inserts himself into the narrative. He doesn’t say “I
 
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