WHOA. This lyrical multitasker led me to the 8 wonders of life
PLUS: Graff writer WHOA of Canada's DGTL Army
The Ballad of Billy had stayed with me, at exactly 00:51, like muscle memory. When I heard Jay Dee’s Give It Up last summer, Ill Bill’s expression resurfaced like it was the track right before. Then I started hearing it everywhere: Chief Tony & MeRCY’s Where’s the Action. Crotona P, Only a Moment. Echoed in Martial Wal’s bluesy audio trademark. Fokis in Let’s Be Clear, with the UMCs. Pretty Bulli’s Listen Up. And listening wide-eyed to Mo Rukuz’s grime tale reflection. The title of his track and lyrical common denominator: WHOA. Like, ‘Hold up.’ ‘DOPE.’ ‘Slow down.’ ‘What the…?’ ‘No way!’ The millennial maxim of extravagance, ‘Amazing!’. And let’s not forget🔥and 😮. But what struck me is that the sense of awe behind the versatile four letters comes up again and again in underground hip hop.
At the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, they study well-being through a scientific lens; things like how experiencing awe can reduce inflammation and why anger can be a helpful thing. Dacher Keltner is a co-director there and teaches psychology. He grew up in Laurel Canyon in the 60s and seems like a down-to-earth, cool guy. In his latest book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023 Penguin), he defines the title term as:
the feeling of being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.
Origins of the word go back eight centuries when, during times of suffering in many forms and short lifespans, awe was about fearful and terrifying vast mysteries. In studies throughout the book, I learned how awe allows people to join with others to face life's immense unknowns. Scientific evidence and stories of awe from twenty-six countries are arranged into categories Keltner calls the eight wonders of life.1 . It wasn’t long before parallels to the elements of hip hop materialized on the pages. Things presented were practically conceptual templates—idea after idea of the evocation of awe.
In all elements of hip hop I’m often wonderstruck. In music, awe can hit me through lyrics, concepts, execution, or production—sometimes all four at once. As I read personal and scientific accounts of awe, I recognized how hip hop encapsulates combinations of the eight wonders of life:
Moral beauty
Collective effervescence or movement
Nature
Music
Visual design
Spirituality and religion
Life and death
Epiphany
Sadat X, Gang Starr and Inspectah Deck, Checkmate, Halfcut and MBK Richy, and Tone Cuff, Planet Asia, and Krumb Snatcha have created tracks representing the transcendence found in experiences of awe. In the five tracks that follow, things like an expansive, wide-open sound, unexpected lyrical combinations, esoteric themes, and mind-opening concepts had arrested my attention the first time I heard them. Dacher Keltner makes it clear that science isn’t dismissing spiritual notions like awe and wonder anymore—they’re known pathways to mental and physical health. The default mode network in the brain, or DMN, that puts the ego in charge and can favor negative thinking quiets down when I experience awe, studies prove. Some call it the vanishing self. Awe calms the vagus nerve, which regulates things like heart and respiratory rates and digestion and also allows people to be more open and loving. It’s also proven to move people toward wonder and saintly tendencies. But I wanted to know whether the transcendent qualities that captured me in these tracks could really restore me to my rightful place in the universe. I spent time with the tracks as I read the book and here’s what I found.
Would You Die?
Sometime back, I read an article that advised not to canonize the deejay. But I believe in deejays’ potential as messengers of the highest order, their specialized knowledge a source of everyday wonderment. Something in the way they curate and then create in the moment, never to be repeated, defines the transcendence of a well-executed mix.
During the immense unknown of the pandemic, it was in a live-streamed, vinyl DJ set that I heard Checkmate’s Would You Die? instrumental, which I consider my intro to the majestic sound of symphonics in hip hop. Present with other viewers, feeling as though I’d found a portal back to the land of the living, I pictured driving through a scenic mountain pass far from home, reminiscent of places I’d been before, yet totally new and unencumbered by time. The experience brought the chills the book says often come with awe.
… awe allows people to join with others to face the immense unknowns of life.
A brilliant track, skillfully integrated, excited me enough to seek it out on the set list and listen further in stillness to the vast themes of life and death, notions of religion and spirituality, and the romance of strings and vibraphones, all accented by Lil' Jaz’s cuts. This everyday awe opened me to the moral beauty of the emcee’s profound questions and the evolution that could come from answering them. I looked up the sample Flipout used—Ahmad Jamal’s Don’t Ask My Neighbors2—and loved its chill, soulful vibe.
A song that stays with me, I soon after heard another version on Breakbeats & Rhymes, and later watched it scratched live before Souls of Mischief. It was fascinating to read the scientific evidence that concertgoers sync up physiologically during a show: heart rates, stress-hormone levels, the brain’s delta band, associated with physical movement. I identified with the notion in the book that music allows me to feel located in the world, surrounded by the sounds and movements and rhythms of others. In hip hop, I feel it in the most immediate sense through music shared with me and at shows and breaking events, but also in a greater sense as I witness others pursuing their goals and sharing knowledge, including the mind-expansion coming directly through tracks like this one.
Attending a Pharcyde show in a Portland warehouse last year, I was awe-struck listening, standing with others near a roll-up door on a warm fall evening, watching a graff-covered freight train roll slowly past just a couple of meters before us.
Would You Die? by Checkmate, cuts by Lil’ Jaz (prod. Flipout), 2000 Double Up Records
Wiseman Glory
As with the Checkmate track, big questions surfaced as I read on. And stunning answers coalesced. I was interested to learn it wasn’t music or nature that people most often associated with experiences of awe, but the courage, kindness, overcoming, or strength of others. The author dedicated the book to his younger brother who’d died of cancer. I heard my story as he described how so much of his own awe had been experienced alongside his brother—traveling, hiking, sharing music—and was lost when he passed away. As he revealed how retracing some of the journeys he’d taken with his brother helped him restore awe, the seventh and eighth wonders on the list—life and death and epiphany—brought a massive revelation: After my dad passed away, it was “Li’l Dana” who could get in touch with the sense of awe needed to survive that loss. It was Li’l Dana who could ask what had happened to this person who’d been with her since birth, and she who felt as though this tangible part of her had been ripped away and cried out in 800-year-old fearful awe at such a vast mystery. It was she who could wonder where he went. Only she could find wonder in all the lights those first Christmases without him. And it was she who could find him in the sight of the moon on those very dark first nights. It was she who was okay feeling that small. She wondered but couldn’t comprehend what I later realized—that something of the lives of deceased loved ones live on in the cells of those left behind, called forth though tracks like these. Much moral beauty and good work lies ahead when a loved one passes, the book emphasizes. I’ve come to realize the truth in that. The hip hop community had mastered it from the beginning.
As the concept of moral beauty unfolded in the pages, I recalled places I’d encountered it in hip hop, thematically, lyrically, in an artist’s character. And how I’d been lucky enough to be raised by someone with all the attributes. Someone who pulled me from a rushing river when I fell in and couldn’t swim at age five; was respected for his kind nature by everyone who knew him; was a constant source of calm reason, light, and good humor in our house that could be the opposite; and contended with Parkinson’s disease with grace.
I recognized catharsis in the book as a necessary counterbalance to notions of transcendence—it makes hip hop the well-rounded art form it is. Keltner points out that catharsis in the arts allows a safe place for the imagination to consider and learn from “human horrors” and comes from a 2500-year-old practice as a purifying ritual to protect oneself from dangerous spirits. Catharsis in hip hop has the power to turn adverse experiences into aesthetic representations that bring awe.
“Either you play it safe or you take a risk. It ain’t how hard you punch, can you take a hit? Get back up, that’s the typa sh*t that makes a man a myth.” —Halfcut & MBK Richy, Wiseman Glory
Hearing Wiseman Glory last fall, Halfcut and MBK Richy’s lyricism and ShockOne’s first-rate production evoked that sense of something much greater than me. It is one of a few hip hop songs that has brought tears of the most healing kind, which, like chills, can come with awe, the book says, and with the awareness of things that unite me with others. The track evokes an unmistakable sense of my dad, Burt, who was open to all the wonders of life. His sense of forgiveness is there in the lyrics, helping me better understand how he accepted the blindness and deafness of those around him. Its hook counsels me to accept reality and get back up again and again—like the legend my dad was. Part Rocky Balboa, part Robert Frost, part Masta Ace. Real. Forever with me.
Wiseman Glory by Halfcut & MBK Richy (prod. ShockOne), 2023 Dope Sasquatch
Above the Clouds
The awe-based eight wonders of life exist in a different realm than the classical seven wonders of the world: hierarchical, power-based, monuments3. The wonders of life evoke a balanced type of reverence, one of equality. The foundations of Above the Clouds run deep, Guru living on through DJ Premier and in a sense through us. The intro audio collage is all about the awe of vast unknowns. I got chills listening to JFK’s words, knowing that the country forged ahead into space just seven years later. The track’s exotic beat fittingly evokes a sense of the new and unfamiliar. Its lyrics brought up instances of monumental awe for me.
Music shows up in the other seven wonders of life, and Above the Clouds represents all eight. It is filled with moral beauty, life and death, religion and spirituality. I loved how awe itself, nature, and collective effervescence came up in these lines:
“Unto the Earth from the Sun through triple darkness to blast ya [nature, unexpected awe]
With a force that can't be compared to any firepower, for it's mindpower shared” [collective effervescence]
And this line approaching epiphany:
“Poison bars from the gods bust holes in your mirage”
And the references to ancient Rome and Colossus constitute visual design. It brought me back to this moment of wild awe while traveling in 2022:
Above the clouds in LA—
Winding up the hills through well-established neighborhoods on my way to Griffith Observatory last summer, then hiking up from a lower parking lot, seeing the structure coming into view was breathtaking. I wandered through the crowded terrace past cute puppies and a man handing out Hari Krishna books, took in hazy vistas of LA, and made my way into the cool building. In the dark planetarium, the awe intensified, my default self hushed by the vast mysteries of the stars and planets. I decided to stay and watch the documentary about the building’s history, feeling more wonder as Leonard Nimoy narrated how the entire building had been lifted from its foundation during reconstruction. Reflecting on this, I realized how humans can sometimes be lifted from their foundations, unearthing new wonders, making way for reconstruction, and how close listening to music allows space for such awarenesses. Space above the clouds that sometimes obscure meaning in everyday life.
Reading the book and listening to Above the Clouds put me in touch with the “go find that”, curious, questioning part of me that loves putting things together in new, interesting ways4. I loved the reminder that experiencing wild awe is essential. Encountering lyrics and concepts of clouds, oceans, weather phenomena, stars and planets, plants and animals in hip hop has fed the part of me that finds the sublime and the sacred in nature like no other realm.
Above The Clouds by Gang Starr ft. Inspectah Deck, 1998, Noo Trybe Records
Coming up, an example of the awe of harnessing collective effervescence—a type of energy that can be felt around others with a similar purpose.
Black October
I watched a grainy interview with Sadat X from October 2006, right before Black October came out and just before he went to jail on a firearm charge, standing up for a friend. I was moved by his objective of a well-rounded album rather than using it to respond to the charges, and by his clear plans for the future and his focus on his loved ones. Acceptance, forgiveness, and overcoming comes through in the interview and the title track. He’s made peace with doing time and peace with what happened, and I could see why he chose Tony Williams’s There Comes a Time5 as the chorus, about the transition from one state of being to another.
… things like an expansive, wide-open sound, unexpected lyrical combinations, esoteric themes, and mind-opening concepts had arrested my attention.
Williams’s There Comes a Time is one of a few pivotal songs that made me acutely aware of vast wonderment when I came across it in the early 2000s—that there was something far greater than my street, my city, my own limited view of life. What I had experienced was the vanishing self the book talks about, quieting of the ego. The Williams song fades in with a crash of cymbals and bluesy guitar, its vocals materializing at the midway point. Sound and lyrics with a transcendent and transformative quality.
Surrounded by friends at the gathering in the interview, having penned Black October—and having a strong collaborative background—I got the impression Sadat X used collective effervescence, spirituality and maybe epiphany to face the term at Rikers Island. And just like my own experience grieving my dad had come up through Wiseman Glory, Sadat X speaks in Black October of grieving his own dad. I remembered how a change in location had served me in my grief and wondered if the same could have somehow applied for Sadat X with the jail term. I felt located in the world hearing him share that he had felt grief, too.
“They can lock the physical but can’t lock the mind.” —Sadat X, Black October
The idea of decay, distillation, and growth through awe—individually and culturally—comes up in the book. Maybe Sadat X’s preconceptions about the world had decayed well before the sentence. Maybe he distilled ideas he’d found in the way of life he was drawn to and had cultivated enough spiritual and collective awe to overcome adversity. In a recent After Party (Save the Hip Hop Culture™ and Carrying the Culture) episode, the hosts discussed hip hop’s relatively young age and how it will reinvent itself over and over and what it could be like when we’re long gone. It was awe-inspiring to imagine. In the context of the book, it reminded me that there are cycles of decay, distillation, and growth in hip hop and gave some perspective to my internal derisiveness toward mainstream ideals. Similar to how awe can override default modes of thinking, the studies in the book show that awe often happens with the perception of change and in a realm outside of materialism, wealth, and status—in a more sacred place.
Writing this essay, I caught sight again and again of the stunning Black October album cover. As a visual person, cover art can add a lot to the awe of listening, especially when it reflects well the concepts inside. Up next, how the wonder of visual design can convey lyrically, and two ways that structure can manifest in hip hop.
Black October by Sadat X (prod. DJ Spinna), 2006 Riverside Drive Records
Sacred Math
Keltner makes the point that awe takes place in a realm separate from what the default self—the ego, the inner neurotic—is used to. He says that unlike the wonder of beauty—found where sights, sounds, and ideas are familiar and easy to enjoy—awe occurs in the new and unexpected, even in frameworks we’re familiar with.
When I heard the Sacred Math Wildelux remix a few months back, it brought that very type of wonder. The talk box-like synth, harp, strings, scratching, and bongos toward the end, combined with mystical concepts, was like nothing I’d heard before—and, without direct references, brought a sense of the element of breaking. The book explains that awe-inducing music can cause me to infer a musician’s likely actions from the sound, bringing up embodied images from the past which are felt once again and then arise in the mind—it explains why I could recall Ill Bill’s whoa. The lyrics of Sacred Math at once call forth images of sacred texts, ancient sites, and the unearthly, the title itself evoking intricate geometric design.
Looking up Tone Cuff’s literary reference to The Mother Plane by Elijah Muhammad, I couldn’t help but think and feel the forward motion I encountered in Black October and the sense of the divine that Keltner says many associate with awe. Yet among religious, intellectual, and political concepts, the track grounds itself with more mundane ideas,
“Two Italianos movin’ heavy weight in Hoboken,”
and a meta point of view:
“The words constructed mentally is profound nouns and verbs.”
Amidst proverbs, the track introduces pluralism, like this line,
“ex-shooter now a Buddha doin’ meditations, it’s balance”.
expansiveness,
“The whole universe is my college,” and its refrain referencing “infinite potential,”
and compassion,
“If you knew better you’d do better, smart thoughts be comin’ off the top like a new era”.
Throughout, I was reminded of the book’s emphasis on seeking awe in everyday occurrences.
But the track’s unique structure and the strong feelings it evoked brought me back to the book’s point that mystical awe is often found in collective experiences of “representations, symbols, and rituals”—and that’s where the elements of hip hop are rooted. The song’s references of divinity and pluralism align with the idea of the “temple” many consider hip hop to be. It occurred to me that these two different ideas of structure align with the author’s “systems” view, simply that awe helps people make sense of being part of many things—like hip hop culture—that are larger than themselves. But music, Keltner relays, also shines a light on life’s patterns: justice, power, adversity, love.
The line, “my ancestors planted the desire within me to seek knowledge,” reminded me of the vastness of all that I do not know, a primary reason I write—letting the default self break down, in a sense, allowing for the distillation of new ideas and growth.
Sacred Math (Wildelux Remix), Tone Cuff ft. Planet Asia & Krumb Snatcha, 2023 DJ Enyoutee
It is mind-blowing to think that the representations, symbols, images, and rituals of hip hop music, graffiti writing, and breaking right now derive from humans’ evolution into cultural beings 80,000 to 100,000 years ago with the emergence of language. The book dedicates a whole section to the word whoa, a vocal burst used for millions of years, prior to language, to signal to others an encounter with awe. Even buying concert t-shirts, the book says, is derived from ancient acts of reverence ritualized into a cultural practice.
I’ve looked at how the eight wonders of life create awe in hip hop music through transcendence, and the varied and profound ways it can impact a listener. The state of wonder-induced awe is a more energized one, producing more rigorous thinking, Keltner points out. It helps explain how awe can drive creation and the inspiration I get from music. One study in the book involved rating poems for how much awe they brought. The criteria, dating back to ancient Greece, were:
Did the poem have boldness and grandeur of thoughts? Did it raise passions to a violent or enthusiastic degree? Did it show skillful use of language? Did it reveal elegant structure and composition?
Each of the featured tracks have met all four points. And I have heard these criteria met regularly in underground hip hop. The awe it brings enhances my life immeasurably—I feel located in the world. Willing, able, and ready to face vast unknowns.
A very special thanks to all the artists in this issue—and to all the hard-working artists in hip hop. RIP, Guru, Ahmad Jamal, Tony Williams, and DJ KaySlay.
Thank you for reading and listening.
This month’s UNDERSCORE: DJ KaySlay exemplifies the awe of collective effervescence in Rolling 110 Deep
This month’s featured graffiti writer— WHOA of Canada’s DGTL Army (Thank you to all the photographers.)
Keltner, Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Penguin, 3 Jan. 2023, pp. 10–18.
Navarro II, André. “AHMAD JAMAL - Don’t Ask My Neighbors.”
Tippett, Krista. “Dacher Keltner — the Thrilling New Science of Awe.” The on Being Project, 22 Feb. 2023, onbeing.org/programs/dacher-keltner-the-thrilling-new-science-of-awe/.
Tippett, Krista. “Dacher Keltner — the Thrilling New Science of Awe.” The on Being Project, 22 Feb. 2023, onbeing.org/programs/dacher-keltner-the-thrilling-new-science-of-awe/.
Planet, Brol. “The Tony Williams Lifetime - There Comes a Time (Remastered) [Jazz Fusion] (1971).