Comparison “We Real Cool” and “Dance with the Devil”

     The poem “We Real Cool”, by Gwendolyn Brooks, and the song “Dance with the Devil”, by Immortal Technique, both tell the stories of Young, promising men who, to appear ‘cool’ and ‘evil’, took a bad route. In the case of the song this route eventually leads to the disastrous death of the protagonist, Billy, while in the poem, it’s just foreshadowing this yet avoidable destiny of a hedonistic and illicit lifestyle. In the poem, Brooks shows this desire to be cool by explicitly writing “We real cool. We / Left school. We”. In the song’s case, Immortal Technique sings “so hel felt the need (Billy) to prove to everyone he was evil” and “dropped out of school to sell weed” proving that Billy was no more than a kid.

     Another topic which both the poem and the song discuss is appearances and façades. Though they appear to be dangerous thugs, these men are just a bunch of soft cowards, pretending to be something they’re not. In the poem the men are playing pool during school time, meaning they either dropped out school or are skipping classes, but then the author adds the verse “we thin gin. We” (they put water to soften the taste of Gin) which remarks that these men are not truly ‘cool’ or ‘tough’. In the song Billy tries to join a gang of so called ‘tough men’, but to do so he needs to rape a woman. Forcing a woman, who is no match (physically) for a gang of men, is not acting like tough men, but rather as coward, and arrogant. A true man would match against other men, and not against defenseless individuals. The singer emphasizes this aspect of lack of manhood by singing “and crying out to the sky (Billy) cause he was lonely and scared”, which demonstrates that in the end, Billy is just a pretender, trying to look evil and tough, though he is just a kid.

• Another similarity I found interesting, but that it’s not worth a whole paragraph, is that both the 7 men in the poem and Billy dropped out or left school.