binary star
just found this had to share. ahh….good music…reminds me of the late ninetines living in nyc.
kidz in the hall
i am really digging ‘kidz in the hall’. in many ways their music embodies many of the elements that i love in hiphop. the kind of music that you dance to, bob your head to, music that is about the everyday moments in life. even when the music is ’political’, the ideas in the lyrics dont outshine the sound. at their best, of course the lyrics and the beat fuses into something irresistible that i keep returning to time and time again…it is the kind of music that puts me in a good mood.
one of the important functions of black music is that it elevates the self-esteem and self-regard in the face of so much down-pression. yes, there are segments of white-controlled hip hop that reaches far into the bag of braggadicio and rests their sense of self on material possessions (including women) and this artifice rarely produces the best of our culture’s work.
but…but…but…there are also alongside these degraded and overwhelmingly white supported black artists, music like kidz in the hall.
kidz in the hall is part of a category that everyone desires that they are part of, namely: hipster rap. hipster rap is hip hop that is ‘retro’, a throwback to the golden age of hip hop: late eighties and early nineties. i guess it is kinda like a cousin to backpacker hip hop because everyone claims to not be part of that musical movement either.
ummm…lets just call it good music and leave the labels to people who label things for a living. i call it: the shit that gets play on my itunes.
the amen break
I realized that I had never realized this history of this break. The Amen Break. And it is a holy break. This break created a fissure in the continuum of the history of the music, giving rise to the power of hip hop, a vehicle expressing the desire of millions and billions of people to change the course of fascist, corporate, oppressive, imperial history.
The power of hip hop is that it is the creation of those downpressed to celebrate their lives, struggles and dreams. This too has been co-opted by the very powers that the music was confronting and resisting.
Amen.
keep livin
This is one of my favorite songs of all time. It has sustained me, caressed me, fed me, uplifted me. Jean Grae has created some of the most beautiful and honest music in this decade. I listened to this song everyday for more than a year, in Chicago, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, West Bank Palestine, Washington, DC etc. This is the song that I would play on my ipod whenever I needed to support my desire to speak my mind. As I write this I feel that it sounds cliche-ed.
I remember walking through the streets of Goma, DRC, Chicago, USA, and in my bedrooms as I was getting ready to go in the world. I would dance to this song in my living room after a hard day, after interviewing rape survivors, after ordinary office racism. She reminds me that the daily struggle to live, to love, to travel, and to forgive is not an isolated event. This daily struggle is what we as artists and black women share.
Jean Grae gives me the language to love and fight for my body and my story. My story may be broken, it may be inappropriate for polite conversation, and it may be difficult for folks who have lived soft lives to hear, but it is a story that needs to be told. Her story is told, through her voice, so clearly and lyrically. So often we want to tell the ideal happy tale, but hip hop reminds us that story is only a tiny part of the human experience. The story of oppression, of heartache, and of redemption through survival is authentic and valuable.
hip hop in review
An exploration and discussion of the documentary–hip hop: beyond beats and rhymes…
beyond beats and rhymes
“I sometimes feel bad for criticizing for hip hop”
the death of hip hop
I have been struggling with what does it mean to be part of the hip hop generation. On the one hand, I love hip hop. I love the sounds, the beats, the creativity, and the global reach of the music. On the other hand, there is so much radio/pop hip hop that is horrible. I understand why Nas created an ode to the death of hip hop. I too feel that my generation is dying. My people and my culture are dying and I worry about what is going to take their place.
Why is hip hop dying? In my humble opinion its death is due to large music companies that started in the mid-nineties to throw alot of money toward hip hop artists. Before this, hip hop music represented the diversity of black and latino cultures. There was political hip hop. There was misogynist hip hop. There was party hip hop. There was womanist hip hop. There was fantasy hip hop. Hip hop was the amalgamation of the conflicts and unity of our cultures. But, corporations owned by powerful white men noticed that the musical expressions from our marginalized cultures were making alot of money. And so they bought it. But they didnt buy all of the different forms of hip hop. They focused on one form of hip hop: gangsta rap. Now, I love gangsta rap. I remember when Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre came out with the Chronic. Every party that I attended that summer bumped that album. It is a classic. It was just one more expression of our culture. It wasn’t the ‘end all be all’ of hip hop.
Honestly I become defensive when people (especially white people) start critiquing hip hop. This is because they define hip hop through the narrow prism of what gets played on the radio. They define hip hop as what makes the top 10 on BET or MTV. I swear that is like the tip of the iceberg. It is what is most visible, but not my culture. And when you critique hip hop, it feels like a personal attack on me and my generation. When I start talking about hip hop, these same white folks often roll their eyes as if their limited experience of hip hop defines my culture and my generation. I identify with the good and the bad of my culture, the tip of the iceberg and the other 90 percent that is not visible, but so powerful.
And I, like so many others, am struggling watching the death of our culture by powerful white folks. It hurts. It hurts to see our multi-colored, polyphonic, poly-rhythmic culture reduced to white folks’ fantasies of black crime. It hurts to know that there are a few artists who are willing to sell out their communities in order to escape poverty.
I believe in us. We are survivors. We survived so much, we can survive the death of hip hop. We created jazz from blues and funk from jazz and hip hop from funk. I am grateful that I am a part of one of the greatest cultural expressions of our age.
We are hip hop.
lil waynes world
article on lil wayne. this spring when the album first dropped and we were living with my moms and my brother he played this album everyday. i had to admit that i liked it. it definitely makes me bob my head. and my daughter would shake her groove thing too it. but isnt this guy from cash money and the hot boyz? two groups that make me want to cringe. really. my brother is a rapper, a mc, a poet. and this is his favorite album. why?
i find the lollipop song annoying. frankly, there are not alot of songs dedicated to some guy getting a bj that i would like…so that is just a personal bias. no it is more than a personal bias. why the fuck do we need another song about you getting your dick sucked? same thing goes for my brother…dear young mc’s, please stop talking about getting your dick sucked. i dont care. if it was happening as often as you claim, you wouldnt need to write about it. i mean how many songs do you dedicate to brushing your teeth? see, shit you do ‘all the time’ doesnt really make it into rap songs. so when you rap about getting your dick sucked, it just lets me know how rare it happens. peace. your big sis.
on the other hand ‘a milli’ is funny, unique, strange, southern gothic that i love. it is also so offbeat and quirky that it is fun to dance to because you have to listen to the music closely in order to catch the assymetric musical and lyrical changes, and by having to listen that closely to the music, you fall into the center of music, and a song that forces you and seduces you into its center, makes you fall in love with the song.
the album does that have that irrepressible sound that makes me want to buy it. partly, because it reminds me of my brother whom i love. partly because it is highly listenable. the kind of album that i want to put on in the morning as i am getting ready,
and his voice on duffle bag boy. yeah, that is the blues. his voice is better than the playaz circle rhymes…
so i am mixed as to whether i like lil wayne. but then the album is also mixed of good and mediocre.
so as i struggle through liking an artist i am not supposed to like. and not liking an artist i am supposed to love, i come to the conclusion that his music is trash.
trash resurrected as art. that stinks, but gives us incredible vision with decaying materials. like pop hip hop. and while i like my art to be a little more scrubbed clean, his music does seem to have a vision that arises out of: shantytowns, trench towns, barter towns … houses on trash heaps, in dried-up riverbeds, in caves, in the Bronx.
and i get the feeling that as i travel and live through these worlds, this album will be bumping out many a home and european luxury with the wrong kind of petrol in it destroying the engine quickly kinda taxicab…if you know what i mean.
vocab
when i was a freshman in 1994, i didnt know that the fugees were not popular yet. this album was so hot in the suburbs of dc where i grew up. it was perfect. i remember riding in my moms car bobbing my head to this song. this song fit into perfectly to the music that we were listening to at the moment. spare. unique. lyrically militant. man, it has been a long time since i thought of myself as militant.
we did not think of it as unusual that a woman would rap with a bunch of guys. nor did they seem like they were a studio company constructed group. they seemed like they could be chilling on a block (much cooler) like ours in our little suburban neighborhood.
anyways a few years later the fugees blew up and everyone was talking about them and i read in article after article how their first album had been ‘unsuccessful’ but check this video. dear god. may i be this unsuccessful someday.
in college we used to judge folks if they had this album ‘blunted on reality’ or if they just had the commercially successful next album.
ether-diss song
i loved this diss song. honestly most of my hiphop friends made fun of me for loving this song. at that time (2002?) nas was so played. but i love the fact that he slowed down and simplified his flow. but his rhyme scheme is still immaculate and conversational. it sounds effortless.
ask me if im trying to kick knowledge
nah im trying to kick the shit you need to learn though
the ether the shit that make your soul burn slow
honestly i could have started this blog on something much more positive and ‘conscious’ but i am not trying to impress anyone with my knowledge of hiphop. i have lived it. instead i wanted to give you something that gave me a life lesson.
nas won this battle. his diss was better than his opponent’s jayz.
‘eminem murdered you on your own shit’
because he changed up his style and proved why competition brings out the best in some people. and simply saying that he ‘murdered jayz’ is not wholly accurate. what he did was prove that a diss record did not have to go to the streets. instead he made it clear that violence is not only a metaphor in hiphop. but that verbal violence is necessary in order to destroy the myth of anothers self-image. in other words: i will not protect your ego.
the beat is sick…the rhyme scheme is neo-old skool…and yet all of this is flawless…
and i am a hiphop geek.
