Listen to the final HHS of 2024! We will be back around the end of January or early February. Stream our archives and stay tuned for more new shows in 2025.

Hip Hop Stacks w/ @ToneSpliff is airing on RAPStation365 on the RAPStation App. The App/Radio Station founded by the legendary Chuck D. Catch us Monday nights at 10pm-12am ET / 7pm-9pm PT

Donate to the HHS mix here:
CashApp/Venmo: $ToneSpliff
www.paypal.me/tonespliff

Download the app and tune in: rapstation.com/app

Browser Stream on Live365:
live365.com/station/RAPstation-Radio-a90692

Rebroadcasts on RAPstation365: 
Tuesday morning 8am ET / 5am PT
Wednesday night at 10pm ET / 7pm PT
Sunday morning 10am ET / 7am PT

Uploaded on Soundcloud Thursday morning

Stay tuned for more as we bring you nothing but heaters from the good folks at HHS and the incredible DJ skills of Tone Spliff.

Check for us daily at HHS: www.facebook.com/HipHopStacks/ | www.hiphopstacks.com/ | twitter.com/HipHopStacks | www.instagram.com/hiphopstacks/

Tone Spliff's music: www.tonespliff.bandcamp.com/ | @tonespliff | www.youtube.com/user/tonespliff | twitter.com/ToneSpliff | www.instagram.com/tonespliff/

*Full playlist available on Tone Spliff's IG/FB/X

Hip Hop Stacks with Tone Spliff - 12/30/24

One of the illest collabs I recorded was this one with Wordsworth and my cousin Rashan! Let's get it!

Lik A Shot feat Words and Rashan

A talk by Bob Carswell RBV about Dorothy Wordsworth's visit to the Isle of Man in 1828.

During her extended visit the Island, the sister of William Wordsworth kept detailed journals of the people, places, experiences and opinions she encountered on her extensive travels all over the Isle of Man.
They offer a fascinating insight into life in the Island's towns and villages in the early 1800s.

This talk was recorded live at its presentation for Michael Heritage Trust, in the Ebenezer Hall, Kirk Michael, 11 March 2025. It is shared here with their kind permission
More information: www.facebook.com/michaelheritage01

The material of this talk was first explored in Bob Carswell's programme on Manx Radio, 'Claare ny Gael': https://www.manxradio.com/podcasts/claare-ny-gael/

This recording was made by Culture Vannin, 2025.
Culture Vannin exists to promote, support and celebrate all aspects of culture in the Isle of Man.
https://culturevannin.im/
https://www.facebook.com/culturevannin/
https://www.instagram.com/culturevannin/
https://www.youtube.com/@culturevannin8486

Dorothy Wordsworth in the Isle of Man

"I wandered lonely as a cloud..." — William Wordsworth Eric Svenson Spring Poetry

Woods, Words and Will's Worth

Every month or so, a group of disreputable North West Norfolk wits meet to get drunk and read uproariously funny PG Wodehouse passages at each other. In March, we made it a Wordsworth Comedy Night instead. A challenge as, for all his sublime beauties and Miltonic grandeur, there are no jokes in Wordsworth.

No intentional jokes that is. His first draft of 'Daffodils' really was wandered lonely as a 'cow' until Coleridge - "if I might make a suggestion, Sir"- recommended the more aptly sublime 'cloud'; and the sur-realist measuring of a muddy pond and a weed in the notorious 'The Thorn' will bring a snigger to the stoniest face. If I've improvised a couple of parody lines, they are much in the spirit of these and not necessarily distinguishable from the Great Man's own.

Finally, he really did carry his sister rather than his bride over the threshold on his wedding day as she had fainted in church after crying throughout the ceremony and lived with them permanently thereafter (an unacknowledged researcher/co-writer of some of his most famous pieces) and if this isn't farce, I don't know what is.

You don't have to have had Wordsworth golden-treasuried-yellow-hammered into you everyday from the age of 12 and all through O and A level in the 1970s to get the comedy here but it probably helps.

This track is a sample of a rip roaring evening. We are only sorry we don't have a record of the 1950s comic turns, recitations, jazz poems, daffodil excursion (see picture) complete with tape measure and other treats. Not to mention the beef bourguignon. (I told you not to mention the beef bourguignon).
lyrics
by Wordsworth (mostly))

My heart leaps up when I behold
My heart leaps up when I behold
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky!...

So was it when my life began
So is it now I am a man
The child is father of the man
Is married to his sister...

I wander lonely as a cow
That floats on high o’er dales and hills
The Spring has sprung the grass has ris,
I wonder where the birdies is?

Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Ear-lie in the morning.

And to the left, three yards beyond
On a moss hill half a foot in height
Not five yards from the mountain path
I see a little muddy pond...

I’ve measured it from side to side
Tis three feet long and two feet wide
And six feet deep and stood beside
A grave man looking like he’d died...

A poet could not be but gay
In such a jocund company
For then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils...

Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Ear-lie in the BORING.

Oh a slumber did my spirit seal,
I had no human fears,
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force,
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolle'd round in Earth’s diurnal course.
With rocks! And stones! And trees!

She died alone and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be
But she is in her grave and OH!
The difference to me.

And when she was up she was up
On a hill above the town
She was three feet four, five stone, but now
She is six feet underground.

Wordsworth Comedy Night

Video- youtu.be/Q7h3TATTn0E

If Wordsworth had had the decency to die at a respectable Romantic age, ie under 30 and before his 1807 poems were published, he would have been the undisputed Hendrix of the group. He was as Radical as Blake and even more engaged (he travelled to France to join in the French Revolution and described it as "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ To be young was very heaven)" as passionate as Byron (he'd had a love affair and a daughter out of wedlock with a French girl while there) as visionary brilliant as Coleridge (they'd co-written the lyrical Ballads and its seismic Romantic manifesto together in 1798) as strange and gothic-beautiful as Keats (Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' is sometimes attributed to Keats) and as anti-establishment as Shelley (while Shelley was sent down from Oxford, Wordsworth simply walked out of Cambridge believing he could learn more from Nature and a walking tour of the continent.) The 1798 poems arranged here - part of 'The Lucy poems' and described as 'experimental' at the time - are perhaps the greatest achievement of this early 'disturbed' Wordsworth.

We reproduce below the original versions as taken from three of these Lucy poems. (Strange Fits of passion; She dwelt among th'untrodden ways - which was titled Song - and A slumber did my spirit seal"). They are a masterpiece of Romanticism: as sharp as a drystone wall; as fluent as a mountain stream; as clear as a March morning ; as wild as a upland wood.

His other definition of poetry "emotion recollected in tranquility" defined his later work but Wordsworth never really lost this visionary wildness. In old age he declared he loathed the Whigs but still "have much of the Chartist in me" and he must be the only Poet Laureate who secured an agreement not to actually write any laureate poems. But these dazzling early pieces can get lost behind the later establishment figure. We try to recreate their weird and experimental first appearance for a modern audience, performing over a nervous contemporary beat.

The simple folk ballad metre was a rootsy innovation at the time, reversing the classical formality and by then tired artificiality of the previous ('Augustan') age of reason and 'art' which Wordsworth and Coleridge helped to blast open with feeling, folk-magic and nature. The language is not 'Poetic' but that really used by ordinary people, the imagery sparse (when used at all) and when used natural and simple ('fair as a star when only one...') yet vivid and original ('a violet by a mossy stone'). But the most powerful thing about these love poems is the colossal emotional charge handed to single rhyme-emphasised words - 'trees', 'me', 'be' (such a tiny word conveying such enormity) at the end of lines and verses; not to mention that impossibly expressive 'oh'. There is nowhere in this naked language for a performer to hide. 

That's a real peacock adding its tale at the start and recurring.
lyrics
Strange fits of passion have I known,
And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover's ear alone,
What once to me befel.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.

A violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the Eye!
—Fair, as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her Grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

credits
from Poachers on the Common (LP), track released September 30, 2021 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/poachers-on-the-common-lp
Lake District photography by Bhas Allan

Weirdsworth's Lucy

Hip Hop Stacks w/ @ToneSpliff is airing on RAPStation365 on the RAPStation App. The App/Radio Station founded by the legendary Chuck D. Catch us Monday nights at 10pm-12am ET / 7pm-9pm PT

Donate to the HHS mix here:
CashApp/Venmo: $ToneSpliff
www.paypal.me/tonespliff

Download the app and tune in: rapstation.com/app

Browser Stream on Live365:
live365.com/station/RAPstation-Radio-a90692

Rebroadcasts on RAPstation365: 
Tuesday morning 8am ET / 5am PT
Wednesday night at 10pm ET / 7pm PT
Sunday morning 10am ET / 7am PT

Uploaded on Soundcloud Thursday morning

Stay tuned for more as we bring you nothing but heaters from the good folks at HHS and the incredible DJ skills of Tone Spliff.

Check for us daily at HHS: www.facebook.com/HipHopStacks/ | www.hiphopstacks.com/ | twitter.com/HipHopStacks | www.instagram.com/hiphopstacks/

Tone Spliff's music: www.tonespliff.bandcamp.com/ | @tonespliff | www.youtube.com/user/tonespliff | twitter.com/ToneSpliff | www.instagram.com/tonespliff/

Hip Hop Stacks with Tone Spliff - 05/12/25

95% of the population of Ireland speak English as their first language. English is the first language spoken by the majority of people in Wales and Scotland. But these other nations reverberate with their ancient Celtic languages, they seep through, will never be suppressed.

Glanmore, Wicklow

roy regant

A marriage (and we are actually married, 45 years so far) of melody and rhythm. We do folk, indie, Americana, Norfolk noir, beat poems &  ghazals. Traditional tunes with contemporary beats. Music videos  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb8wV0-DNiFs1R5G2VSytBQ
Maz lead & harmony vocals, acoustic guitar. Gaz vocals, voice, bass, drums & percussion, harmonium, recorders, lyre harp, field recordings.

Promoting and supporting all aspects of culture in the Isle of Man.

Culture Vannin awards grants and initiates schemes whilst supporting the work of development officers for music and language. The work of Culture Vannin has been fundamental to the revival of interest and support for Manx language and culture over the last twenty years.

Culture Vannin is the trading name for the Manx Heritage Foundation, registered charity 333 in the Isle of Man.

Posting some dope hip hop out there for the masses, for more hits like this hit up https://linktr.ee/HipHopStacks, where you can find daily news and findings related to all things hip-hop. One!

Tune into Hip Hop Stacks w/ @ToneSpliff on RAPstation365 Monday nights 10pm ET / 7pm PT with replays all throughout the week. Archived on SoundCloud Thursday mornings.

HaStyle Rhymes / Recording artist / Emcee / Producer / Cartoonist / Air Force Vet

Psychic Investigations:
exploring the weird British Isles

New tracks tagged #Wordsworth