Bomani Armah, not a rapper but a poet with a hip-hop style, is hitting the big time

(Photo credit: By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)

Bomani Armah is a Busboys and Poets regular. For the Busboys family, he often leads Open Mic Night while inspiring his fellow poets, poetesses and audience members alike.

We were thrilled to crack open this morning's Washington Post and see that they had featured Bomani on the cover of the Arts & Living Section (C01). The article's title is aptly written: His Punch Line Smarts: Hip-Hop Parodist Bomani Armah Juggles Sense of Humor and Identity, and the contents of the article are even better.

A few of our favorite passages on his provocative and now infamous song "Read a Book" (for the full article from today's paper, please click here)

[Its] rise to [the] consciousness:

He's fixated... on what has happened to him over the past four months, how he somehow became a symbol of the coarsening culture. All because he wrote a crunk song, "Read a Book," that traveled the Internet, that was discovered by Black Entertainment Television, that was made into a video, that ignited a controversy, that turned Bomani Armah into a person he didn't recognize, someone accused of "setting my people back 100 years." Between the irate blog posts and the snippy interviews by the likes of CNN's Tony Harris, Armah discovered that he had suddenly become somebody.

Bomani's follow-up thoughts [below the surface] of "Read a Book":

" 'Read a Book' was a joke from the beginning," he says. "It was more about parodying the state of hip-hop." And now it has become the thing that defines him. He thought about that for a moment. "Damn, do this many people not get me?"
[...]

"I feel like I'm a sergeant out here in the field, showing how ridiculous the culture is," Armah says. He began performing his song around the Washington area and it caught on. He made it available for free download on his MySpace page, and the buzz grew. At some point the "Read a Book" MP3 reached the inbox of Reginald Hudlin, president of entertainment for BET, who passed it on to the network's animation division, which loved it and wanted to create an animated video off the track. Which is where Tyree Dillihay, a Los Angeles-based animation director, comes in.