"I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens"

Russell Simmons imagines a cultural reset where the coolest thing a kid can do is carry language like a drum. The “baldhead kids” line conjures a street-level uniform, youth stripped of ornament, suggesting a style that signals belonging. He wants poetry to wear that swagger, to be as contagious as a haircut, to cut through fashion and status until the shared badge is mastery of words.

“Getting the music out of the way” isn’t an attack on sound; it’s a challenge to dependence. Strip away beats, hooks, and studio gloss and you’re left with breath, cadence, metaphor, and meaning. The voice becomes the instrument; the body, the metronome. When the scaffold of production falls, language must bear its own weight. That is both a dare and a democratization. Spoken word needs no studio, only a room and an audience. Anyone can enter. The gatekeepers shrink.

There’s a nod to hip-hop’s lineage: rap is poetry with percussion; remove the percussion and test the fiber of the verse. Does it stand? Does it move people without the push of bass? That test re-centers responsibility, on clarity, truth-telling, wit, empathy, and the courage to say something worth remembering.

“See what happens” signals experiment over certainty. Make poetry ubiquitous and unpredictable effects follow: classrooms become open mics; corners turn into workshops; attention shifts from image to articulation; metrics of cool begin to include vulnerability and intelligence. The shift threatens an attention economy built on spectacle. It also invites community, literacy, and listening as shared practices.

The vision is disruptive, not nostalgic. It asks a hyper-produced culture to tolerate silence between lines, to meet complexity without distraction, to discover rhythm in human breath. If kids grab the mic for words alone, the result could be a recalibration of power: fewer filters, more voices, and a public moved not by volume, but by meaning.