SO, after indulging in a little history while watching boats go up and down the Connecticut River and hearing the news that this and that celebration had been postponed because of high water to the North in Hartford ... I was in a car with some teenagers. I happily heard them mentioning the Magna Carta. Then, on the radio came a rap song with that title by the new “King John,” I guess, the man who rules over all he surveys and, of course, they were talking of the record “Magna Carta ... Holy Grail” from Jay-Z… not the wonderful book, “1215: The Year of Magna Carta, I had been reading. I was already behind the rap “music” scene, being scathingly told that this song, concert, whatever it consists of, had already gone platinum and had been out for a week. (It is the 12th solo album by Jay-Z of the Beyonce Jay-Z family.) He had introduced his monumental work and presented it next to the famous copy in Salisbury Cathedral. (People who weren’t talking or thinking too much about history, already knew that Samsung had bought a million copies at $5 each to give away.) So I listened to Jay-Z’s rap because I wanted to learn and I thought the marketing was pretty brilliant even if I didn’t recognize anything thrilling in the words. I think it might be useful if Samsung gave away Jay-Z’s “Magna Carta” in a mob rule Egypt, although I don’t know if the Army or the Muslim Brotherhood would allow such a thing. As one headline put it: “In Egypt, mob rule is no substitute for democracy.”
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 14:01:13 +0000
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