Maybe when I get tenure.

Language is my favorite. I'm excited to teach students to become Language Masters. (Our readings usually say, "Masters of language," but, at the suggestion of William Strunk, Jr., I eliminate words when I can.) (Parentheses don't count.) (In fact, nothing I write counts unless I say it does.)

It's too bad that our culture's best examples of language brilliance often occur in wildly offensive songs. Let's consider Luda's "Stand Up." The song boasts excellent examples of simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and pretttty clever rhymes. (Lots of rappers alter the normal pronunciation of words to flow together better, but Ludacris has the most fun with it.) Unfortunately, it also contains disgustingly sexist images and vocabulary I would never use with 14-year-olds.

Kanye West's "Crack Music," one of my all-time favorite songs, probably couldn't be played in a classroom, either. Some argue it's racist and paranoid (I don't know if I agree), but I think it provides plenty of interesting content to discuss. Plus, consider some of the most genius lyrics you've ever heard:

How we stop the black panthers?
Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer
You hear that?
What Gil Scott was hearing
When our heroes and heroines
Got hooked on heroin
Crack raised the murder rate in DC and Maryland
We invested in that
It's like we got Merrill-Lynched
And we been hanging from the same tree ever since

Too bad I won't discuss crack with 8th-graders. Anyway, I would feel uncomfortable sharing a song that I won't even sing along to because of the racial slurs.

At least I have Lauryn Hill, right? That is, unless I listen closer and find more of the same.

Someone, somewhere, please write and release some school-appropriate brilliance. Thank you.