Category Archives: Hip Hop

speaking of real talk…

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Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

While it seems like ages ago (as we’re all transfixed on natural disasters and the revolutions in the Middle East) I haven’t stopped thinking about the State of the Union Address:

What’s more, we are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea -– the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny… The future is ours to win. But to get there, we can’t just stand still. As Robert Kennedy told us, “The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.” Sustaining the American Dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age. And now it’s our turn. We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future. And tonight, I’d like to talk about how we get there. The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation. None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do — what America does better than anyone else — is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.

The tone of the speech was mature, thoughtful, absent of detailed description of policy initiatives, but a clear lecture of Real Talk. In many ways, I felt like this conversation is about two years late. Sure, better late than never…

And not to sound too arrogant or self promoting, but some of the themes Obama covered reminded me of a blog post I wrote nearly two years ago. Some background: I used to work in one industry and now I am doggedly trying to secure sound employment in another. This is a personal choice, privileged in some ways yet, dare I say, brutally difficult.

I also feel it’s premature to declare the recession over. Yes, the Dow is trading at 12,000, a high we last saw in June 2008, but job growth/creation has not matched that enthusiasm. 9.4% unemployment still holds, and if we count the ‘underemployed’, those with a smattering of temporary, part time and freelance jobs, more than likely uninsured, that rate doubles. If you’re a woman or man of color, god help you. The private sector may be hiring, but it remains unclear what those jobs are. There are some of us in this economy grinding to find work in our respective fields with nil to marginal success. Some of those jobs were eliminated and if we’re to be honest here, those jobs aren’t going to come back. Some of us will have to retrain, learn new skills to be competitive with a generation of new jobs that are hyper-specific to trade and skill. Continue reading →

you’re welcome.

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Social networking may be killing New York City, but I don’t care. I don’t care about any of that. Especially, when my friends on the facebooks share videos of awesome emerging musicians/bands/groups/vocalists.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present to you the formidable roots and bluegrass wonderment Valerie June and the afrobeat, hip hop stylings of Bajah and the Dry Eyed Crew.



radio silence.

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I think I’m burned out from the news. Too much salt, not enough sweet.

I’m trying to catch up yet find myself sinking deep into a malaise, my eyes flood with too much information. It’s difficult for me to focus on a single item long enough to concentrate. I read somewhere that the internet is ruining our brains. Maybe that’s true. I can’t even remember where I read that. Could’ve been a blog, or a newspaper. I honestly don’t know. I think the midterms put me in a funk. For every forward progression I think we make in civil society, there are dogged forces that pull us back. This may be contributing to my malaise.

For me, I know that when I’m overwhelmed by bad news, I seek solace in art. There’s an urgent need to be in a sublime space, the quiet, the understood relationship between you as viewer and the artist. So this past weekend I checked out Wangechi Mutu’s latest work at gallery in Chelsea. Peeped a view of the Copley exhibit. For three weeks, I had been immersed in reading, editing, coding Union Station Magazine’s latest issue and our new blog. While I was doing that I listened to music over the internet, alternating between Pinna Storm’s October Playlist (h/t Shani!) and Kanye’s Runaway. I bobbled up to the surface to read postmortems on the elections, the Maddow/Stewart showdown, and Bush being …well a victim. But I returned to my inner space, which is to say, I really appreciate Ye’s latest effort (more on that later). He won me over with a brilliant appropriation Bon Iver’s Woods. And going up in the woods is what this girl from Wisconsin really feels like doing. As the world spins, I really need to maintain my center.

“Develop a negative into a positive picture…”

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On the other side of paradise, a conservative blogger (Debbie Schlussel) goes after our nearest and dearest, Urban Word:

Um, how can they use the word “scholar” and “hip-hop” in the same sentence with a straight face? Ditto for pedagogy. With hip-hop, it’s more like pedophilogy.

Institute participants will learn proven, hands-on techniques that will help them to develop lesson plans and strengthen their course study, as well as create a platform from which they will understand the scope of hip-hop history, culture and politics, Cirelli said. The learning component is supported with night programming by lecturers and performers who will synthesize the day sessions with effective strategies and cutting-edge multicultural educational approaches.

“Hip-hop history”? Is that like memorizing the day that Russell Simmons and Rev. Run bought their first pair of laceless Adidas? Or is it the date the first naked butt was shaken in front of the camera in a rap video? Or maybe it’s the first day Ice T smoked his first crack pipe with a stripper. Forget reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic.  Perhaps it’s the day Professor Griff of Public Enemy uttered his first “Dirty Jew” reference.   It’s very important to America’s future that kids in school learn the important facts of hip-hop.

Math problem:  If 50 Cent has 9 bullets in his body, but gets two removed while all but two of his 30 tattoos are lasered off so he can star in movies, how many women did he infect with herpes divided by how many used condoms need to be recycled to keep things green?

Ugh.  I’m not posting the link because I can’t subscribe to steering more traffic to her site. Besides her unbelievably flawed, ignorant and racist assumptions about Urban Word’s poetry and hip hop education model,  it’s unfortunately not a surprise. It’s blog baiting, again from the mouth of a Coulter wannabee. I feel like I’m repeating myself a lot about the symmetry of uncertain times, however, I feel compelled to note that uncertain social, political, economic times often breeds lazy commentary looking for scapegoats (see Thomas Chatteron Williams.) Hip Hop and a black president are excellent fodders for noting the decline of ‘real american values’, no? And for the past 20 years, hip hop has definitely been a prime target. Music generally. If it’s not Jay-Z, it’s Marilyn. Forget individual choices. Marilyn and Jay-Z have nothing to do with the person who chooses to pull the trigger to harm classmates or neighbors. Continue reading →

the art of storytelling part 1.

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Confession: I love Auditorium.

Here’s the thing: I’m not really a hip-hop head. I don’t have a vast encyclopedia of knowledge of beats, rhymes and tracks of everything produce over the past 30 years. I know certain songs from memory because the beat was so sick it moved me, or the lyricism was so ill I couldn’t possibly ignore it. So I know some rhymes that are part of the basic lexicon of hip hop (Paid In Full, Rappers Delight, The Message, The Show, Children’s Story) as well as some recent classics from MCs like Black Thought, Eminem, Jay-Z, Biggie… I like what I like and I listen to it religiously.

For instance, I understood the importance of learning every single word to Lose Yourself and Lost Ones.  And I was so far from being a teenager but when the shit’s hot, you got act like you know, right?  But I’m really a girl from the Midwest and we love beats.  I like to believe this is a universal known about our creed. If the beat isn’t dope, I’m not really paying attention to it. Seduce my ear with a pulsing bass line that I can feel in my chest, and you got me. Lyricism is icing on the fucking cake. On the real, why I’ve listened to Mos Def’s Auditorium from his album, The Ecstactic, an embarrassing number of times simply stem from nostalgia for brilliant lyricism juxtaposed against melodic tones and break beats.

I geeked out about this with a couple of friends after brunch a while ago (What up Mara and Elon?) Have you heard Slick Rick’s (aka The Ruler) rhyme on this track (2:35)? Seriously, check it: Continue reading →

i got a story to tell.

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I was a senior in college when Biggie died. It was a Sunday. We spent the rest of the night in Steve and El B’s suite in East Campus like we did six months before, the night Pac was murdered. We listened to Big for hours. We talked about hip hop. We talked about guns. We talked about Suge. We talked about innocence. We talked and talked and talked. We were seniors. We were jobless. We were facing a recession. We were first and second generation college kids.  We traded lyrics. We talked about the future without Big and Pac.  We said hip hop died. We said hip hop died again. We asked could hip hop have seven more lives. We talked about what kind people we were becoming. We talked about 80s. We talked about the Stop the Violence campaign. We tried to remember the lyrics to We’re All in the Same Gang. We played Self Destruction.  We grew quiet. We mourned.

What we didn’t expect to happen during the same week was a call from the dean to tell us that campus security found the body of our friend Caryn.  It was a Thursday. She took a bottle of sleeping pills. She left a note. She had been there for days. They said there was a smell. They never told us what the coroner determined was the time of death.

They found her Thursday. Biggie died Sunday.

We mourned. We wondered when was the last time we saw her alive. We retraced every last moment we had with her. We tried to isolate signs. We searched for signals she sent us to tell us something was wrong. We wondered why she didn’t tell us that she was in pain. We wondered if we there was something we could have done to save her. We grew quiet. We wondered when will it stop. We were seniors in college. We were in a recession. We planned a memorial. We packed up her room. We said hip hop had died again. We said our innocence was over. We wondered what kind of people we were becoming.

there’s a party at the crossroads…

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A few months back this earworm invaded my mental mind and prompted me to post it as a stub. Today, it’s my writing prompt as I re-read Pygmalion and think about the code/switch.

For the uninitiated, here is a sampling of X-Clan’s tome to the complexity of black identity in the black and white imagination:

Let me tell you about blackness,
Grits and cornbread how can you act this?
I exist on a plane, where the jar is my brain, I’m livin’ to retrieve
cells,
Antenae my stick, picture bigger, made of liquor, figure,
The pull of the trigger goes zoom not boom,
Not a bunch of sissies, but saviors braver,
The red, black, and green,
It’s just so much more than red, black, and green,
You ask what I mean, but yet the sundial shades on lights and dreams,
Watch too late, oops, upside your head!
You drop through abyss like lead,
Where you goin’, what’s your speed, what’s your pleasure, what’s your
need,
Trees to branches, roots to seeds, forwards, backwards many
degrees,
Questions answers, what’s the sum?
We have come.

Continue reading →

Kevin Coval: A Post-Olympic Plan for a City Under Siege

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via huffingtonpost.com

There’s a special place in my heart for the Second City. Born and raised just 90 minutes north of Chicago, my family and I would find ourselves on somewhere on the South Side, crammed around a kitchen table at my favorite aunt’s house. We came to visit often; for school trips, church conferences and family gatherings. Chicago, in my earliest memories, is shorthand for ‘family’.

So it’s no surprise that when Chicago is dealt a blow, I feel it too. And it hurts. It breaks my heart. I see echoes of my beginnings too in broken neighborhoods, broken homes, broken bodies. I remember violence that took some of my classmates before they could reach their 16th birthday. I remember violence that still makes me afraid to wear red and black in neighborhoods in Milwaukee.

Yet in the wake of tragedy, I still have hope. I’ve got friends in Chicago who are doing good work. I’ve got friends who are writers, teachers, artists working with Chicago kids citywide, teaching them to craft words and manifest change in their lives. I’ve got friends who write grants to fund programs that have been victim of too many budget cuts supporting after school programming for high school aged youth. The above video clip is from a documentary about the people and work of Louder Than a Bomb.

I encourage you to read Kevin Coval’s full post. Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB) is approaching its ten-year anniversary. Through writing, poetry and performance, young people have found safe space to explore the struggles they face as teens growing up in tough neighborhoods, as well as the paradox of being between adult and childhood. They are doing all of this by kicking rhymes and writing poems.

Poems. Yeah, I said it. Poems. I know that writing saved my life when I was coming up. Hear me. Writing saved my life. There’s more I can say about that, but that’s for another time, when we’re better acquainted. But you should know this: there are words that can destroy, but there are words that can create. Create possibility, create ideas, create art, create change. Words that remind us to be the change we wish to see in the world.

Affirm Life.

MJ Legacy, Ctd.

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For those of you aren’t aware, Jay Smooth’s Illdoctrine video blog often offers the most insightful discourse on issues and themes in the hip hop world as well as pop culture.

His most recent post about MJ offers a deconstruction I haven’t heard too many places except in the comfort of my circle of friends, artists, writers.

It seems to me that mainstream media and its pundits, missed an opportunity to examine this hyper-reality that has manifested in our culture over the past 25 years or so. We watched Michael for nearly four generations in my family. You can’t say that about many pop stars. And I don’t think any of us thought about the kind of spiritual and emotional toll that takes on a person who is constantly watched, living in a meta-reality, between worlds, personal and public.