Couldn’t Tell the Difference ‘Tween an "-a" and "-er"

1. “Let us begin with a simple construct: a solitary slave sings. The singing is heard as enigmatic noise by an overseer on the ship at sea moving somewhere along the middle passage; or heard by a young and enslaved Frederick Douglass, and remembered (differently in the process of reflection and critical interpretation) as he composes his memoirs; or heard by the white abolitionist whose own sense of pathos guides him or her to anticipate that this experience will be repeated again and again; the slave’s song is captured as a fleeting specimen fitting some mid-nineteenth-century protoethnographic schema of ‘natural history’, or it is heard by the man of scientific training who now knows that it has a proper place within a taxonomy of ethnologically conceived folkways.
…
While the singing emanates from an individual or group, it is never reducible to only the sound of a singing subject. In breaking the air, it punctuates an existing history and ruptures into the present. Certainly it hails a past just as much as it marks its own movement. As a cultural form, the song further extends an already extended cultural passage, just as it also begins passages that will cover new cultural terrain.”

Jon Cruz, “Culture on the Margins: the Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation”

——————

2. Wale, “The Kramer” (mp3) (from 2:19 to the end, especially)
from The Mixtape About Nothing (2008’s best rap album) (download)