This spoken word poem addresses a fictional future audience as the speaker discusses the impending ecological disaster with the gift of hindsight. It discusses how we did not act collectively when we had the chance, how we have doomed the future generation, and how the Native Indians of America who were once considered ‘primative’ took greater care of their environments than the modern world ever did. He points out that much of this disaster came from a lack of critical thought; an obsession with profit, greed, and money; lying politicians who have sold off their people; but most importantly, it is the millions of people around the world who do nothing everyday, they have the power to make meaningful change. He employs rhyme, rhythm, comedy, satire, irony, simile, metaphor, personification, symbolism, sarcasm, allusion, and alliteration in his delivery.
Below are several question for a lesson plan on ‘Harsh Realities’.
Link to Lyrics: https://genius.com/Prince-ea-dear-future-generations-sorry-lyrics
Further questions
- What is his purpose (reason) for speaking? How is this reinforced by what you can see?
- Did you enjoy listening/ viewing this speech? What stood out for you?
- Who is his target audience? What clues does he provide for us to be able to identify this?
- What is his message/s? (put this into a sentence)
- What examples does he provide to support his message/s?
- What language features does he use? Find three and state the technique name, how it is used (quotation) and what effect it has through it’s use.
- Is this speech still relevant today? Explain why/ why not and make an ‘L’ statement. Link his message to context- you, our community or our nation (like paragraph writing- PEEL) (PEEL Paragraph structure = Point, Evidence, Explanation, Link)
- Let’s link this speech to our theme ‘harsh reality.’ Create a table (like below)
| How is the theme ‘harsh re-ality’ shown? | Supporting evidence (quotations) | What is Prince EA’s message to viewers? |
Humanity4HipHop 