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William Shakespeare’s MACBETH #ShookOnesChallenge Lyrics

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On August 22nd, legendary hip-hop duo Mobb Deep issued a challenge to their Facebook followers: come up with new lyrics to their song Shook Ones.

The song is dark, crackly, like something you’d pick up on a castle radio during a midnight thunderstorm.  One can even imagine Thane of Glamis and Cawdor, temporary King of Scotland Macbeth bobbing his head to the beat. So who better to drop a few bars than the Immortal Bard, straight outta Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare?

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou an abjuration,

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from my heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet (am I going insane?)

In form as palpable as this which now I draw actual.

My culpable mandible makin’ me act insensible.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

Thou marshall’st me the way that I was goin’;

And such an instrument I was to use unknowin’.

Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,

Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still, consequences

On thy blade dudgeon gouts of gushin’ blood,

Which was not so before but now comes in a flood.

There’s no such thing: It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes like an Autobot transforms.

Now o’er the one halfworld nature seems dead,

And wicked dreams abuse the curtain’d sleep coverin’ ya head.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

Witchcraft celebrates what Pale Hecate gives,

and wither’d murder massacres by bloody boney shivs,

Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf (Arrroooooo),

Whose howl’s his watch, stealthy pace like R2D2.

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like Ghostface Killa or J Dilla in his prime.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

Thou sure and firm-set earth, hear not my walkin’,

which way they walk, for fear thy very stones will start talkin’

of my whereabout, and take out the present horror of this explorer

from the time which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives (oh shit):

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives as the situation proceeds.

A bell rings (a bell rings) A bell rings for thee,

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell.