This essay brings together two texts, a letter to the editor written in experimental prose by the Black avant-garde Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The Unlocking,” a spoken-word poem written and performed by Ursula Rucker that appears at the end of The Roots’ critically acclaimed rap album, Do You Want More??!?. By using the aural to disrupt expectations set up for us by the visual, each text shatters the visual. Though radically different in form from each other – Kaufman’s letter was written to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1963, and Rucker’s poem appears on a 1995 rap album – both artists turn to the ear to subvert the eye, using sound to disrupt fantasies about race, gender, and power in the larger social scenes in which their texts originally appeared.