Humanity has once again banded together to send a famous musician to perform in a place they probably don't really want to perform.Having not learned from previous mistakes (though, I can't imagine there would have been an article appearing on here about Papa Johns without this, so maybe it's a win?) involving Fred Durst, Justin Bieber, Pitbull and The Spice Girls, Papa John's pizza organized a competition in which the school that gets the most votes on Facebook wins a performance from Taylor Swift on their campus. The competition was quickly taken over by The Internet, and a school for the deaf is now destined to win.Har har.But this might not necessarily be so bad. A few years ago, we went to a rave for deaf people and had the most awk interview ever with MC Geezer, a deaf rapper.
Deaf people feel music – they can feel vibrations from the beats and the bass – but for deaf kids to want to get up and dance, it has to be LOUD.Aurally frustrated, some deaf hip-hop DJs in east London started setting up their own parties. The kids went mad for it, and soon deaf raves were drawing hundreds of people from all over the country. I went to one recently at Hackney Ocean, and the music was so loud I had to use earplugs to make myself deaf.Inside the club, the walls were pulsing to the music, but the 500-strong crowd was silent because everybody was just doing excited, drunken sign language. I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about, but they were partying way harder than people with ears that work. After years of not being invited to the party, these kids had finally created their own scene and it was exploding.On stage, there was live deaf karaoke, where hot deaf girls were frantically signing the lyrics to R&B hits. Then there was the deaf dance-off, where breakdancers battled to see who was the best at body-popping out of sync to the music.But the highlight of the night had to be Britain's first deaf rapper, MC Geezer, who signs-rhymes and raps out of time in that weird voice that deaf people have where Rs sound like Ws and "Blair" becomes "Blaiwe".Noisey: So, deaf rap is a pretty bold move, eh?MC Geezer: If a blind man can play the piano—like Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles—then why can't a deaf MC rap?Because they can hear and you can't.That's negative.OK. What do you rap about?When I'm on stage, I think about what has happened in my lifetime and what I've been put through for being deaf. I take that anger out on the mic and with my hands. Eventually I want to put out my own CDs.How are you going to record the parts that are just sign language?Well, we obviously wouldn't have those on the bloody CD, you twat. The visual part would be a DVD with subtitles or something. Signs and speech. Song and dance. Hit 'em on both levels, innit?:(
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