Maximus Parthas: Artist Of The Week

posted in: Artist Features

maximus parthasPoetry gets little play in today’s pop-centric, narcissistic, everything-all-the-time, supersaturated media culture. Blame it on the kids, if you like, but we’ve found that kids have a high capacity for absorbing exciting and new (to them, at least) expressions of art, consciously or not. A Poetry Out Loud competition at a school can engage teenagers in a way that no one, including them, would have expected.  And, of course, poetry in a new context was part of the initial appeal of hip-hop. Evidence does exist that the most popular hip-hop has lost its way, in tandem with an increased dumbing-down of our popular culture at large. But we don’t think it would take much to really revolutionize the way we approach both poetry and hip-hop, separately and together.

Case in point: Maximus Parthas, our Artist of the Week, a self-described artist with an agenda. Maximus is a seasoned traveler on the road of independent spoken word and poetry slams, and he is multi-faceted in his creative output. Here on OurStage, we’ve been lucky to be exposed to his words in the form of engaging hip-hop tracks. He doesn’t necessarily rap, in the familiar sense, but he flows like crazy. Maximus plays with language like a master, making the messages “ of which he has plenty “ sound spectacular, with a hefty baratone.

No, I don’t wear a big poetry ˜S’ on my chest / I’m a pro-life, son of light, civil rights activist / A preacher that practices subversive ministry tactics through one mic entertainment, he says in My Life Is On The Line, acknowledging what may very well be the modern inseparability of message and entertainment value. In fact, his message is often about the medium itself “ the power, the drawbacks and flaws, the need to keep going. What the fuck do you want this poet to say / That everything gonna be alright now, everything gonna be alright now? / Shit, it’s not going to be and I don’t plan to act like it, he proclaims in Censorship. The tension is getting thick / and all I need is a fuckin’ excuse.

Whether you agree with the specifics of his social and political messages or not, what’s important here is the future of the message, the future of the medium, and the desperate, desperate need for all of us to start paying attention to what’s happening around us.