Hip-Hop on Life Support

Let me establish two things before I get into the discussion proper: first, Hip-Hop is musically my first love (I’ll come back to that later) and second, I generally try to avoid cultural topics because of the relativity of values and opinions but for this one i will make an exception. Hip-Hop is hurting me. She is like a bad girlfriend and I’m steady looking at other women because she keeps breaking my heart. She’s cheating on me with Soulja Boy. Look, at some point I was 17 too and I liked really silly stuff but I don’t think I ever strayed into minstrelsy. Soulja boy and the paradigm that allowed him to become successful have taken the bite out of one of the most powerful types of social protest music. Hip-Hop even in the days when it was about fun, had a form of social commentary that was particularly relevant. From obvious critiques like “The Message”, through less clear forms of commentary like the albums of NWA, Hip-Hop has always had something to say and usually it was something sorta relevant. Soulja Boy and his contemporaries are in the process of destroying that. Hip-Hop isn’t just going pop, it’s transforming into music whose sole purpose is to sell irreverent, irrelevant music to stupid people from the suburbs. One of my friends offered this opinion: Soulja Boy is saving Hip-Hop and making it relevant. If making bad music with no legitimate content is relevant, well you get the idea. Though this subject doesn’t really change a lot politically, I do think that Hip-Hop has a relevant history of being politically important even when it just expressed rage, indifference or violent lack of regard for the norms of western society. These expressions took the temperature of urban black life and that in and of itself was important because it allowed older generations to better understand the children they rejected or abandoned to die in inner cities across America. I don’t mean to pick on Soulja Boy but he’s the best example that I can find of this sad new movement of Hip-Hop. He’s a kid and he wants to sell records, yeah yeah yeah I’ve heard all the reasons (read: excuses) but the fact of the matter is that much of our leadership is based on celebrity and we’re really not in a position where we can afford not to hold people accountable for their garbage. Soulja Boy doesn’t raise kids nor does any other rapper but in many cases nobody raises these kids and to ignore the responsibility of those with so much power over youth culture is frankly being ignorant. Nas was right, Hip-Hop is on some silliness now but it isn’t dead it just needs to be reminded why it became relevant in the first place. In the words of my first girlfriend, Lauryn Hill, (everybody has dreams, right?) “Hip-Hop started out in the heart, uh, now everybody tryna chart…”

Don't Wanna be and American Idiot

Ok so as a christian I felt like it made sense for me to watch the special with Obama and McCain at Rick Warren's Saddleback church. McCain did his usual thoughtless extremism bit: "Evil exists and must be defeated". Yeah, John evil does exist. Evil like going into third world countries, using extreme poverty to pimp the people, setting up dummy regimes into order to exploit natural resources and watching the regions rip themselves apart. Hmm, sounds like evil to me. Well McCain's (and America's) preposterously idiotic and amoral (not to be confused with immoral) pretensions of foreign policy aside, I found the relevance of the program in Obama's message. Obama scares me, not because his policies aren't acceptable or because there's anything wrong with his personality, etc. He scares me because he's too mature for America. Barack Obama seems like a profoundly reasonable man in a completely unreasonable age in a country where punchlines seem to all too often become realities. Haha, the president is an idiot. Haha, we're killing people over natural resources and not even doing a good job pretending we're not. Haha, if we continue down this road we really might be responsible for the end of the world. Oh wait that's all true. But Americans eat it up. John McCain said that he would "hunt Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell". What kind of crazy ass rhetoric is that for any grown man, much less a candidate for the leader of the free world? What Bin Laden did (well we all seem to forget that there isn't any verifiable proof that he was specifically responsible but anyway) was abhorrent. It was morally abhorrent and if he is responsible for the deaths of those people, he should be brought to whatever justice is appropriate (read: dragged into the street and shot in the head). The point is that I can say this because I am not suggesting that I should be allowed access to the preposterous number of nuclear warheads that the American military holds. In this day and age trying to bully the world is just silly because there are some people (evidently) whose countries you can bomb into parking lots and they will not stop coming. Let me make this clearer: THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WITH WHOM DIPLOMACY IS A GOOD IDEA. So installing and overthrowing regimes in their countries in regions that are already unstable is a good way to start World War 3. The problem is that Americans are so fat, lazy and spoiled that the idea of bullying the rest of the planet seems like a legitimate option. We have all been fed the notion that American ideals are innately superior to the ideals of other countries and that America has never lost a war along with many other myths and bedtime stories. This faux superiority is the basis for American warmongering enthusiasm. I guess everyone skipped US AP history in high school and forgot that we got our asses kicked on our own soil in 1812 and a foreign army marched through Washington and burned the White House to the ground. So clearly we aren't so vastly superior in terms of our military history (let's not forget Somalia, Vietnam and the other skirmishes in which we demonstrated our mortality) but what of our ideological superiority? Clearly American democracy is the best in the world right? Umm naw, not exactly. Democracy here is cool but we so regularly put it on hold. Japanese internment, Black slavery, cheated elections, the patriot act, national security legislation, all examples of people America putting democracy on hold on American soil, no less. We won't even get started on what America does abroad with its "democracy". What I'm basically saying is that this is all completely bogus. This superiority complex is a joke but its what keeps American idiots "safe" and happy. This is exactly why a reasonable adult cannot be president of the US. I'm not saying Obama can't win per se but I think that the only reason a senile old man who mistakes one country for another is still in the race is because of he plays into that complex. His black and white view of the world is shared by much of the rest of the country because they think that they can afford it. He who has the biggest gun makes the rules right? No, not these days. In the age of suicidal extremism he who cares less about his life makes can make the rules too, and if Americans don't start recognizing the need for reasonable foreign policies, we'll find out the hard way again. Obama, God willing, will be the next President because if he isn't another regime of intolerance and ignorance might just lead us to our last regime at all.

Big Ups to All My Haters...

You're a hater. Don't hate on me. Stop hating. Recently a couple of my friends and I had a discussion about haters. We thought about most of the people who talk about haters and we realized something. We as Black people only claim that people are hating when they critique us while we're doing stupid shit. Think about it, most rappers complain about getting hated on because they drive a "car the color of watermelon with the bubble gum inside" or some such inane statement. God forbid someone suggest that you spend that money on your family who're still stuck in the projects or yourself so that when your bubble bursts you'll have legitimate investments and not just that magical combination of jewelry and debt. This doesn't only apply to rappers though, we have allowed ourselves to fall into cultural and intellectual sewage because everyone is scared to call dumbness exactly what it is. Beyond that, we have developed this strange moral relativism in which the ends justify the means so much that we celebrate people who are (or were) legitimately evil all in the name of not hating. Men who use womens' bodies to collect payment should be hated on. Dudes who sell concentrated, addictive death to their people should be hated on. People who shoot other people over blocks that belong to no one but the US Government (it's not your block, stupid, you just live there) should be hated on. These people are in many cases the equivalent of urban terrorists and they need to be hated on! Look, there are differences between people in their situations that make drastic and morally abhorrent actions seem necessary and I can understand that. It's only the grace of God that kept me from those situations but that doesn't justify people who can avoid it engaging in those activities or seeing something stupid and saying it's cool because they don't wanna hate. To combat this, I'm starting the "hate-on-em" movement. If you forever rap about selling drugs and killing people and then get all shy or angry when someone asks you why you portray negativity, then I'm going to call you on it, not because I'm a hater (what do you really have that I would need to hate on?) but because you are being a dummy. I grew up in the hood too so all that "i rap about what i see" garbage is not gonna fly because let's be frank, you were not that dude (the killer, superhustler, pimp, etc.) if you made it in the rap game because you'd still be in the hood right now if you were. I'm not only going to go after rappers, this applies to intellectuals and politicians as well. I'm hating on Marion Berry for smoking crack. I'm hating on Cornell West for wasting his monstrous talent on Rap CD's and strange misguided attempts to be a rock star intellectual (aka pretending to reach out to the youth) . I'm hating because it seems like no one else will. Everyone is so concerned with the concept of being a hater that we've allowed our standards to fall to dangerous levels in many areas of Black life. Now suddenly, entertainers are our intellectual standard bearers and anything that requires more than 2 minutes thought is "deep". Enough is enough. It's time for us to take back a culture that has been hijacked by greedy, sellout Black people and large corporations. We have become slaves to the almighty dollar in so many areas and now that Blackness is a commodity, "hating" has become public enemy number one. Everyone is a hustler nowadays and by suggesting that what they do is illogical, stupid, morally wrong or anything other than "their unique hustle" is hating. Sorry y'all, but if y'all think that this craziness is justified and that calling it craziness is hating, then I am a hater to the bone gristle. And if you are busy worrying about being a hater with the AIDS rates in the Black Community (comparable to third world countries), the homicide rates among young black men (15 times more likely to be killed than any other group), and the fact that many other ethnic groups have come to this country after we did and surpassed us in terms of measurable progress (not all our fault but a problem nonetheless) then I AM HATING ON YOU!

CNN

It's funny that we're all over TV now. Suddenly it's important to know what it's like to be "Black in America". I don't actually have anything particularly deep to say about this phenomenon as there is little to say beyond a sort of cliched statement about how it's messed up that we're only important when there's a Black Democratic nominee. I know that this is just Standard Operating Procedure for the media: deal with issues when they're hot. Race is hot cuz Barack is hot. The Media is, first and foremost, a business and I'm not going to fault them for being inadvertantly racially insensitive while pursuing the almighty dollar. What does concern me is how we use this opportunity. As previously stated, Jesse and Al are more or less dead in terms of power or relevance, so how can we use this exposure to address a couple of issues? Lord knows we have let some opportunities pass us by before. We let Katrina demolish the 3rd Ward and turn Black N.O. residents into refugees while FEMA took its sweet time getting water into the superdome and we didn't make more than a squeak. We let the country ignore our dire circumstances (again) because those affected were poor and Black. When Kanye West has the most notable statement on the issue from the standpoint of the Black Community, (though I do appreciate his enthusiasm) something is wrong. We can't let this opportunity go by but how do we harness it? I would argue that this might be the time for other (as in not Obama) Black politicians to offer up a set of new policies or initiatives in as public a way as possible. If they're smart, they'll use the figures and other representations of Black problems on TV as the focuses for their initiatives in order to try to make some headway on those issues. If I just haven't been paying attention and Black politicians have been doing so under my nose, then I humbly apologize and I'm glad to hear I was wrong (trust me, my ego can handle it). But if the situation is as I suspect, its time to get in gear y'all. Time waits for no man (or woman) and CP time will not cut it here.

Ba-Rock with them Obamas

Let’s be clear: Barack might be the first Black President of the United States at some point soon but when he enters his tenure he will face a country, fractured at best, with factions and divisions that he will have to navigate. He may be the first Black President but he will be the president of a predominantly white country with a rather large population of people who will feel “disenfranchised” by his presidency. I won’t bother getting into the moral or logistical problems of such silly sentiments but if you need evidence, look at how his vicious battle against Hillary Clinton was. People were beyond the point of angry about his victory, many were furious and in spite of relatively minor policy differences between the candidates they were in some cases willing to vote Republican just to spite Obama. He has a tough line to tread coming up so we as Black people really can’t afford to expect his presidency to be the answer to all our problems. To a degree his hands may be tied by the difficulty of maintaining his necessary “color of water/post-racial” politics. Besides that, there may be a significant problem with his presidency: we lose traction for the whole “perpetual victim” argument. Black people will not be able to argue as effectively that we are the victims of vicious circumstance and evil conspiring by other races due to the simplistic (read: completely ass-backward) assumption that a Black president means that we’ve made it. For most Black people at the grassroots level Barack Obama’s presidency won’t mean diddly squat outside of some sort of intangible “inspiration factor” and a decent amount of social capital. Too bad “inspiration” is not (as far as I know) edible and social capital hasn’t paid anyone’s rent lately. These intangibles aren’t enough bang for our proverbial buck, so what’s the solution? How do we get the most out of this situation? Two words: Michelle Obama. Michelle is hardcore and, to a degree, unapologetically Black (I see you B.Terry, haha) making her our conduit to presidential power. If Hillary Clinton is allowed to count any of that “foreign policy experience” (read: sawdust, bullshit and fraudulent sniper fire) she accrued while in the white house, we should be able to get at Michelle very effectively to push some of our social problem solutions and other reasonable domestic agendas. If we can’t go front door with Barack, Michelle will sneak us in through the window. If Eleanor Roosevelt is any example, the First Lady of the US, while not wielding any concrete power, does have the ability to bring subjects to light and attract funding, attention and potential solutions. We can use Michelle as our advocate because she thankfully doesn’t have any votes attached to her name and seems to care enough about Blackness and Black people to be down. The jury is still out on Barack but Michelle is rockin’ with us so let’s use it while we can. In the words of the eminent Hip-Hop scholar, young Cory Gunz: “We Ba-rock with them Obamas.” Ya dig?