Dead Weight

Can't tell me shit about hard work.

I was part of a recent show with what I'd call an abysmal turnout. We broke even & paid the audio tech, but by the time our hard-working headliner hit the stage, even the promoter had ducked out. That left me & the bar staff as an audience for a duo that deserves better.

There were other performers too, and each had various and good reasons for not bringing a lot of people to the show. 

One stood out in particular. He never said a word to anybody. He just showed up late, cut his set in half & left. Throughout his lack-luster performance, he looked deeply disappointed & bitter about the lack of numbers in front of him. I would too.

But here's the thing...

When half the people who come to our show are my fans & friends and they don't wanna stick around for you, you got no business acting like the disappointed one.

The lesson here is simple: I'm not here to push your dead weight around, and my people aren't here to pick up your slack.

See you in another present.

 

A Cautionary Tale for All, but Especially for Parents.

This has eerily stalked the back of my thoughts for more years than I care to mention. What is it about the story of Frankenstein that made it so goddamn scary for two centuries?

Leave aside the fact that it's about a guy who builds a monster out of dead bodies. Peripheral, if also atmospheric.

And a really cool idea.

Leave aside the fact that anybody who's ever faced rejection can relate to the monster. That's scary if you're into disproportionate retaliation.

In every tragedy, the protagonist suffers a loss. If Victor is the protagonist here, he has lost more than anyone ever has in any other tragedy. Agamemnon lost his life. Faustus lost his soul. Hamlet lost his mind. Job lost his family & wealth.

Victor lost all of that at once.

Whatever shape the monster had taken, he represents the sum of all fears: That your whole universe will be destroyed.

What makes this particularly horrifying is the fact that Victor's universe is destroyed by that which represents his greatest triumph: the creation of a human life.

All parents should read this book and be terrified.

Behold: The thing that will destroy you.

See you in another present...

Hate Art: Why You Can't Shut Em Up & Get Away With It

 

First, a word of apology:

 

If you've read this blog before, you know how I love to drop in pictures. I hope you like the way I play with them. But today I can't do it. Technical difficulties. On with the show.

 

Fuck Tha Police

Huge hit back in 1990. Dr Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, Eazy E, Yella and the DOC received some personal correspondence from the FBI over it. Got a lot of negative press, and eventually became sort of an anthem for disaffected youth, anarchists and whiny little shits (different people, BTW).

Ice T got kicked off his label a few years later over Bodycount's "Cop Killer," leading to a very public beef with Charlton Heston (and the launch of Ice T's own, independent label*).

 

Neither track purported to be an objective assessment of facts. In both cases, the artists involved expressed that they were relaying a message from their neighborhood. Wasn't how they felt personally, etc etc... Dismissed as a convenient excuse to spread hate.

 

Funny thing about music and lyrics: They aren't dissertations. Rather, they are often at their best when they're conduits for raw emotional response. Neither FtP nor Cop Killer were particularly helpful in the grander scheme of things, but they did give voice to a group living under intolerable circumstances.

 

The problem of police excess is obviously getting a lot of attention again. So is the problem of talking about it.

Free Hate

Yeah, free speech is an inalienable right, but it's also a problem. A complicated one too. To the point, there's a line between free speech and hate speech; one's a right & other is a crime. The problem is in determining which is which.

Was "Fuck tha Police" a hate crime? The guys who wrote it would argue that it was a response to institutionalized hate crimes. Police officers across America obviously disagreed. And later on in 1992, as chunks of Los Angeles burned in the wake of the acquittal of four cops who beat an unarmed man to a pulp on video, the track would be simultaneously condemned for inciting the violence, and praised for predicting it.

They were illuminating a situation where the strong prey upon the relatively defenseless, and doing it the best way they knew how. From what I can gather, those guys grew up in a culture of Sun Tzu's first rule of warfare.

 

I'd say it was fighting fire with gasoline, but what do I know? That ain't my world. But the medium through which they gave it voice most definitely IS my world.

Ne Touche Pas

 

It's going to look like a sweeping generalization, but here's what I propose: The Arts are off-limits for censorship. Put a sticker on it warning parents if you have to. You know the rest of that argument.

 

Not even sure how I feel about censorship in general, but for art I know exactly where I stand. Art is a subjective (often non-literal) expression of the human condition, which is as broad and varied as humanity itself. It is the main conduit through which we are able to externalize our private commonalities, make visible what is invisibly real, and reconcile the paradoxes that make up our existence. It's how we share our appreciation of the universe's ineffable and infinite field of possibility and beauty.

It's also the way humanity collectively expels some of our most toxic fears.

 

Trying to shut that off is like sticking a cork in a volcano. Without that weird and imprecise capacity for expulsion of the toxins in our minds, we harbor and multiply them involuntarily. Even humans can only take so much of that. Short-term peace, long-term damage.

 

Individually we don't always understand a particular bit of art. It bites into you and fills you with anger or fear or a sense that you are hated. When that happens to me, my first response is to lash the fuck out and argue vociferously, spilling bile all over the place & multiplying the toxin.

All the more reason to just let it go. You can't respond to art with politics, but I continue to forget that, and so do you. Could have used that energy for a work of art.

 

Not saying "Fuck tha Police" is the best response to police brutality. Far from it. But it's hard to argue the virtues of shutting it off either, if you consider that it is an unreasoned response to a real concern. Take it for what it is, put it in context, and understand where the fuck it came from.

You can vomit when art makes you sick. That's your call. But it'll rot your teeth. Then how are you gonna bite back?

See you in another present.

*Not even trying to get into a fight about Ice T's choice of artwork for Home Invasion, but he could hove gone another way with it... somewhere that was more in line with his theme.

 

More Old Jokes Retold

If the stone which the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone, either the builders are corrupt or the building is.

Or both. And I'm funny as hell.

If work, learning and fun are separate, then so are body, mind and spirit. And if that's the case, each one of us is three persons in one conduit... Kirk, Spock and Bones.

But hopefully less predictable.

 

We're taught as very young children that everyone is different and special, and then spend the rest of our lives learning that isn't practical. Some people can afford to be different and special, while the rest of us have to work for them.
 

Incidentally, this is sort of a

refutation of that reasoning.

On a similar note, Einstein would have been a real genius if he could keep his life together.

That doesn't detract from the

amazing shit he said and did though.

If we talk about the world, we're talking about two different things.

I say "tomato..."

If great power brings great responsibility, why does everybody wanna be Snoop Dogg?

Rhetorical question. Everybody has their own reason.

That's it for today. See you in another present.

   

Beef: The Declining Importance of Confrontation

 
Maybe you don't, but I remember when Hip Hop wasn't embarrassing. Less than twenty years ago, this bullshit between Common and Drake would have been glanced at and passed over like a rivalry between pro wrestlers.

That's right. I wanna talk about butchered & charred bovine flesh.

 

That's "beef," for the illiterate.

What's Hardcore?
 

Say what you like about Waving Flag getting played to death. I completely agree. But K'Naan has a way of putting shit in perspective.

He's also the only one I've ever seen
bring a whole band to Rock the Bells.
Also, thanks to EXN Renders
for making this easy to steal. 

He had a track on Dusty Foot Philosopher that basically called out anybody playing the beef game. Wish I could find it & embed it here, cuz my synopsis won't do justice. But in a nutshell, he says the game is childish and cynical, and downplays real conflict.
 

Also suggests you check out the Gaza Strip or the Sudan. That's beef. 
 

Couldn't let the reference go by without playing something though.

Even when so many lives aren't directly at stake, beef doesn't have to be an embarrassment to your peers.
 

The Golden Age of Kill Whitey
 
Public Enemy was my favorite band in high school. That actually explains a lot, now that I think about it for a second.

It wasn't the music that snared me at first, but the razor-sharp, intellectually-augmented anger. Focus, education, determination, and knowledge of self. They were a nuclear warhead among cherry bombs.

On a side note, Bob Dylan was asked once what he was doing in the early 90s, when he just sort of dropped off the radar for a while. He said he was listening to rap records, particularly Ice T, NWA and Public Enemy. "They were banging on drums, throwing horses off cliffs... real poets, and they knew what was going on."
 

It was a different time.

When Chuck D hits the road these days, it ain't for concerts. A good indication that his message didn't reach everybody back in the day is the response he gets on a speaking tour now. Like when he's trying to impart a little wisdom on what it means to "be a man," and the whole front row is calling out for him to do 911 is a Joke. 
 

You can't talk rebellion with thugs. A rebel has direction and an unselfish purpose. That's the difference, according to Chuck. And he finds both wherever he speaks.
 

Less than twenty years ago, Chuck D was considered by many to be one of the most dangerous people in America. And he was. When Bush Sr was president, Chuck D was the man with his finger on the other red button - the one that could transduce four hundred years of inhumanity into burning cities.

Back before "Hope" and "Change" were trademarked.

He was the embodiment of the frustration felt by the majority of African American youth. If he said Kill Whitey, he wasn't speaking his own mind; he was relaying a message. It wasn't something people wanted to hear, and he got called out for it... Not by other rappers with something to prove, but by entrenched political elites with something to lose.
 
That's beef.

Don't know what it is about Arizona.

Every damn decade it seems like somebody

wants to kill the governor.

Soap Opera Territory

 

The Biggie/Tupac beef in the 90s was real, but orchestrated. Everybody knows what happened there, so I ain't gonna spell it out. But it marked a turning point in Hip Hop. And the turn was down. It took the spirit of confrontation inherent in Hip Hop, turned it inward, and stripped it of purpose.

 

It made Hip Hop a tabloid parody of itself.

 

It's been a downhill slide ever since. Jay-Z (peace and blessings be upon him) was able to manipulate a bump in his relationship with Nas, taking his place as the King of New York. This had all the hallmarks of classical Hip Hop confrontation, except that it didn't matter to anybody but Jay-Z and Nas.

 

But Hova is a master of PR, and made it matter. Then he made it an empire.

 

After that, it became requisite to piss off somebody and build a career on it. No Beef, No Gain.

 

I'm not here to make enemies, but is this soap opera what you want for a culture?
 
The thing going on between Drake and Common is beneath both of them, and it's beneath us to pay it any mind. You wanna be in on the gossip, knock yourself out. Just know, that's all it is - gossip.

Not too late though, as usual. Long as you still got a verse in you with substance, and aren't too dumb to let it out. Maybe the real thing is buried, but still breathing and capable of digging itself out.

See you in another present.