#is Amerikkka great yet?!?!?!

[godidontgaf]

heyy while on the hip hop + rap recommendations subject, ive always been interested but never really known where to start. right now all i listen to is CJ the x, quebrada queer (Brazilian!! super recommend), and definitely putting some more interest in Kendrick Lamar. anyone you'd recommend?

Okay first of all CJ the X is a badass name and second of all I listened to some of his music and I’m definitely getting some Rav vibes! I’d recommend trying a lot of Ravs music but especially listen to ‘Put it Down’ ‘Cinnabar’ and really the entire album ‘Solar Flare’ ! :D

But if you wanna branch out to more rap music then Kendrick lamar is definitely a good start! I suggest listening to the albums I recommended in my last post!! ‘DAMN.’ ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ ‘good kid m.A.A.d. city’ ‘Section.80’ ‘Untitled unmastered’ ect ect. JUST LISTEN TO KENDRICK HES GREAT!!!

Another great artist that I love with all my heart is Danny Brown! His writing is incredible and his beats are so unique! ‘XXX’ was definitely my favourite, but ‘uknowwhatimsayin¿’ ‘The Hybrid’ and ‘Quaranta’ are also amazing and worth listening to! He’s got some weird lyrics but shh just focus on the beat trust me!

I’ve been waiting this whole rant to mention this but if you wanna get into rap PLEASE TRY THE OLDER STUFF!!! 70s-90s!!! There are so many tracks from back then that I’d say still rival the quality of most rap today! One of my favourite albums from back then (which is turning 34 in 2 weeks <3) is ‘Amerikkkas Most Wanted’ By Ice Cube! The storytelling is phenomenal, clear political commentary, amazing yet simple beats, it’s got EVERYTHING a hip hop album should have! It’s everything hip hop should BE! 100% worth listening to, even if you’re not into rap.

I also want to mention this one hip hop group that I absolutely LOVE!!! A Tribe Called Quest! Their music has more of a jazz-y vibe than someone like Ice Cube or Kendrick but nonetheless, still amazing! I’m sure Q-tip and Phife Dawgs unique voices will get you hooked instantly! ‘Midnight Marauders’ and ‘The Low End Theory’ are such incredible albums with every track having a unique beat, yet still keeping the same feel and vibe!

Theres so so so many artists I could go on about for hours, but I’m just gonna keep it short and give you a list of a bunch of pre-2000s songs from my playlist! :)

Street Struck - Big L

Runnin’ - The Pharcyde

Appetite For Destruction - N.W.A

Mama Said Knock You Out - LL COOL J

Dolly My Baby - Super Cat

Rebirth of Slick - Digable Planets

Groove Is in the Heart - Deee-Lite

Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ - Wu-tang clan

Double Trouble - The Roots

Hope this helps you get a little more into rap! And please keep asking me ANYTHING hip hop related I love talking about this stuff! :D

#Kendrick lamar #rap #hip hop #Kendrick

[malikismindful]

Peace and Love, Black Family! Don’t be fooled by Florida’s beautiful beaches and tropical 🌴weather! Florida has always been a runaway State for all types of people looking to get away from SOMETHING! Many have come to Florida from all races and backgrounds to make this State what it is. However, Governor Ron DeSantis is seeking to turn Florida into a slave State right before our eyes. By attempting to ban conscious thought and conscientious objection across the board. After the well-organized Black Lives Matter hype died down and numerous Statewide protests of police brutality, inequality, and racism were disbanded, it became his mission to set up reinforcements to prevent any form of “wokeness” from being taught in schools/universities or shared publicly in the workplace. What he is saying is that he wants to silence Black consciousness by cutting off the spread of such information by manipulation of the law. As governor, he is aggressively seeking to make Florida an anti-CRT State on all levels of education and society. Though his “Stop Woke Act” was banned, he will not stop! What is his problem with teaching TRUTH? Critical Race Theory speaks to the very core of who, what, where, when, how, and why the United States of AmeriKKKa is unequal in its treatment of African descendants from its establishment to the present day! Yet, he wants to paint the picture that Florida is this welcoming melting pot! Don’t be fooled Black Family! Ron DeSantis is one of 49 other plantation owners (governors) in charge of 3.381 million African descendants (according to the 2020 US Census) and wants to silence the TRUTH about the EVIL THAT MADE AMERIKKKA GREAT, period! Read the full article on malikismindful.com! GET ON CODE. STAY ON CODE. 🩸💣🔫✊🏾 BLACK POWER! #blackpower #blacklove #blackman #blackwoman #empowerment #blackrevolution #raceonly #blackpeopleonly #black #revolutionary #power #truth #knowledge #blackconsciousness #blackpower #blackqueen #blackunity #blacknationalism #african #panafrican #blackpeople #blackowned #malikismindful https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp7ZCmkO3EdQw7Zg4aFkGrmJ227x0iC89D_m0Y0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#blackpower #blacklove #blackman #blackwoman #empowerment #blackrevolution #raceonly #blackpeopleonly #black #revolutionary #power #truth #knowledge #blackconsciousness #blackqueen #blackunity #blacknationalism #african #panafrican #blackpeople #blackowned #malikismindful

[renegadeurbanmediasource]

FIVE REASONS WHY SO-CALLED RIGHT-WING PATRIOTS ARE BS

They preach about how “free” Amerikkka is and how great the 1st amendment is. Yet if someone (BLACK) doesn’t want to stand or sing the anthem they immediately turn to violence! Really? They cry and lament how horrible the so-called “cancel culture” is. Then turn around and use that same tactic on those who disagree with them. They love preaching to anyone who will listen that God made Adam and…

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#christian hypocrisy #evangelicals #maga #trump #WHITE RACISM

[grandhotelabyss]

Good question! Given the nation-summing implications of Great American Novel, Nightwood—but not Gravity's Rainbow—is an odd choice. Yet it seems to me to be a particularly urgent book right now. As the era of left-identitarian moralism gives way to renewed varieties of right-wing culture, whether revolutionary reaction at the avant-garde fringe or Christian populism in mainstream electoral politics, the political complexity of Nightwood—a lesbian and transgender novel also plausibly described as a fascist one—deserves our attention for conceptual reasons alone. In my almost eight-year-old essay on Nightwood, I tried to sum up its extraordinary complications:

A modernist anti-democrat, like her champion Eliot, Barnes sees the masses as perennial forces of conformity, enemies of art. This is not really surprising; what is surprising is that anybody ever wanted to identify bohemia—sexual and aesthetic—with the political left in the first place. The intention of its various partisans notwithstanding, the left has historically empowered the state and its centripetal agencies. The state, tolerating nothing outside itself, not only threatens to use the masses as justification for the cleansing of bohemia’s cruising-ground pissoirs and carnivalesque circuses, but, as I said above, it also extirpates the tradition against which bohemia necessarily defines itself. It razes the edifice of Christianity, brings the wandering Jew home, and abolishes the night in which Robin Vote and Dr. Matthew O’Connor sport like fauna in the forest. Even internally, bohemia is not democratic: it is, rather, an aristocracy of spirit. For these reasons, Nightwood is among the most reactionary of American classics, despite or even—what will confound the identity politics of today—because of its having nary a straight white male in its cast of characters.

Perhaps now that the American literati, chastened of its moralism, is undergoing a strange fit of Ernst-Jünger-mania—I essayed on The Glass Bees around the same time I wrote on Nightwood; I'll write about On the Marble Cliffs if someone gets it for me from my wish list—they will be prepared to hear out this side of our own homegrown conservative revolutionary, Djuna Barnes.

Your question also gives me a sensory memory, reminding me that literature is not primarily conceptual: the first pandemic summer, when stores and cafés and libraries were still closed, and I would walk around the city for hours and for miles, dripping with sweat—they always tell you how cold Minneapolis gets in the winter but never how hot in the summer—listening to any podcast I could find. My recollection is that Judge said on his show, whatever he would Tweet later, that those were the three greatest works of American prose, which isn't quite the same thing as greatest American novels. Nightwood's prose, the vision it discloses, is incomparable, something like late James in a fever dream:

Like a painting by the douanier Rousseau, she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room (in the apprehension of which the walls have made their escape), thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration; the set, the property of an unseen dompteur, half lord, half promoter, over which one expects to hear the strains of an orchestra of wood-winds render a serenade which will popularize the wilderness.

I first read Nightwood for my oral exams in grad school; when I conferred with my advisor after reading it, her only comment on the novel was, and I quote, "It's a hoot!" I second that.

The virtues of Gravity's Rainbow qua Great American Novel are more obvious. I explored them here:

Gravity’s Rainbow, set in Europe, is a Great American Novel because it criticizes America (or, in the orthography of the period, AmeriKKKa) in the name of universal emancipation. [...] Slothrop, “Providence’s little pal,” descends from the Puritans—his ancestor, William, came over on the Arbella, the ship bearing John Winthrop, though William, a dissident among the elite, stood up for the preterite (the novel’s system of allusions doubling Slothrop with JFK suggests a more historically proximate example of a dissident elite done in by Them). Yet what could be more faithful to Puritanism, to John Winthrop himself, than such a jeremiad? Only a disappointed lover could turn into such a castigating prophet: why rail so furiously against the New World unless you really were expecting a City on a Hill?

Much as Pynchon's brand of stoner comedy sometimes grates on me, much as I find that book harder to read than is strictly necessary even for its radical political purpose, our reclusive author seems to me to have earned the title.

Personally, I wouldn't exclude either book, I would just make a longer list: The Scarlet Letter, The Portrait of a Lady, My Ántonia, Light in August, The Adventures of Augie March, Invisible Man, Song of Solomon, Blood Meridian, Underworld, etc.—each of us can add or subtract.

#djuna barnes #thomas pynchon #american literature #literature #literary criticism

[newsource21]

In our Brave New World — actually a Cowardly Old World — where DEI rules education, the great Ivy League universities have moved toward DEI Great Pretenders as presidents. At a minimum, a woman. Better if black. Even better if colored and Muslim. Or black and gay. Or, if not gay, then black and Gay.

Competence is not the criterion. Adequacy is sufficient. Magill? She is adequate. Gay? Even less so, according to standard academic standards. Scholarly integrity barely matters. The selection committees look not at the content of their character but at the color of their skin and the shape of their reproductive organs. In a world in which no one who is woke knows what a woman is, the DEI selection-and-appointment committees keep landing on the “Person of Pregnancy Potentiality” card.

The universities now are evil. They teach evil. They brainwash children into pursuing an agenda of evil. Amerikkka is the Great Satan, as the tenured anti-war demonstrators of the 1960s and ’70s chanted 50 years ago, taught their apostles of the ’80s and ’90s, and now see inculcated into contemporary zombies. By now, those radicals of the ’60s and ’70s are making do on Social Security, are too weak to fight off muggers, fear the subways, and cannot afford gasoline at more than $5 a gallon. In other words, they have become conservative Republicans. That entire hippie anti-war generation now poll as the GOP’s loyal seniors, having confronted their Frantz Fanon reading lists in real life. They planted the seeds of evil that have germinated — and, with anti-Semitism added, Nazi Germanated — on the campuses, even as they now vote Republican, early enough in the day to qualify for the 5:00 p.m. dinner special at Denny’s.

I have said forever that Jews are society’s canary in the coal mine. Nor am I the first who so has observed. When evil is perpetrated against Jews on Monday, you can be certain that everyone else will feel it in spades by Thursday. Hitler murdered 6 million of us. He murdered 75 million of everyone else. Do the math. Those haters never stop with Jews. There simply are not enough Jews around to satisfy their lust for hate or to quench that thirst.

The universities have been toxic and poison for the past 40 years, centers of The New Hate. They were liberal before, but reasonably so. Professors accommodated conservative students; I know because I was one at 1970s Columbia. Students did not apply political litmus tests to friendships. I know because Mitch was a Communist with a Trotsky beard, and Steve the Radical Leftist (“But don’t call me a Communist!”) was his best friend. And yet, we were a threesome — with our girlfriends — when the neighborhood Olympia theater, which showed two old movies for a dollar, played Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

In today’s world, Communist Mitch would not be caught near me. Even only Radical Steve would avoid me. In fact, Mitch would avoid Steve like the Plague. And no one anywhere would be seeing Blazing Saddles because such movies no longer are allowed above ground. Yeah, the fat guy passing rectal gas after eating beans — that would be socially acceptable. But a black sheriff with an implied elongated frankfurter? An Indian speaking Yiddish? The repeated articulation of the forbidden N-word that hip-hop “artists” and rappers repeat throughout their “works of art”? Fuggediboudit.

There should have been an outcry long before Claudine Gay’s and Liz Magill’s minions began beating up Jews publicly. The anti-Semitism steeped into the colleges’ and universities’ curricula are a pittance compared to the anti-Americanism, the anti-capitalism, the anti-Christianity.

These universities have been bought by Arab Muslim sheikhdoms intent on exporting their Islamism to America. They pay the professors’ salaries obliquely by buying and paying for the Middle Eastern Studies departments that breed hatred for the West, taught by Arab Muslim professors who hate the America where they are, and also by a fair share of extreme radical non-Muslims. Beyond that, the Arab Muslim sheikhdoms pay full tuition for tens of thousands of their own Arab Muslim citizens to be students at American universities. Those troublemakers are cash cows because they do not apply for scholarships or need DEI approval; rather, their governments pay full freight for them.

You want proof? Look at the list of more than 30 Harvard student groups that signed a letter against Israel and Jews: the vast majority foreign students, Arabs and Muslims. You scan the list:

African American Resistance Organization Bengali Association of Students at Harvard College Harvard Act on a Dream Harvard Arab Medical and Dental Student Association Harvard Chan Muslim Student Association Harvard Chan Students for Health Equity and Justice in Palestine Harvard College Pakistan Student Association Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association Harvard Graduate School of Education Islamic Society Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine Harvard Islamic Society Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine Harvard Divinity School Students for Justice in Palestine Harvard Jews for Liberation Harvard Kennedy School Bangladesh Caucus Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Caucus Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Women’s Caucus Harvard Kennedy School Palestine Caucus Harvard Muslim Law School Association Harvard Pakistan Forum Harvard Prison Divest Coalition Harvard South Asian Law Students Association Harvard South Asians for Forward-Thinking Advocacy and Research Harvard TPS [Temporary Protected Status] Coalition Harvard Undergraduate Arab Women’s Collective Harvard Undergraduate Ghungroo Harvard Undergraduate Muslim Women’s Medical Alliance Harvard Undergraduate Nepali Students Association Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee Middle East and North African Graduate School of Design Student Society Neighbor Program Cambridge Sikhs and Companions of Harvard Undergraduates Society of Arab Students

So we have these way-out leftist universities with Muslim Arab imports who hate America, sprinkled with apostate Jews who hate Jews and especially their parents, and an even larger majority of people born to Catholics and Protestants who also are society’s dregs, outliers protected by Ivy and Ivory walls, all in a community teaching American kids four years (often delayed into five years) of pure unadulterated garbage.

They do it because they cannot be fired —  practically the only job in the world where a person cannot be fired, no matter how lazy and incompetent. “Tenure” is a lifetime guarantee as long as the dolt avoids moral turpitude. And, armed with that vocational invincibility, they construct absurd reading lists that present their zombies with only one world of thinking.

Even the Columbia University I attended in the 1970s was like that. I majored in political science. Almost every reading list in every class seemed to have The Marx-Engels Reader as required reading. Almost always The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.

I once had to see a doctor in the University Health program for a sinus condition. He was a nice guy, and as he was helping cure me, he also started playing “Conservative Footsie” with me. It was something like what homosexuals did in the 1940s and 1950s, afraid to reveal their orientations, yet searching for fellow travelers on that journey. It was scary for them. They looked for clues, hints — and G-d forbid if they read someone wrong. So they “played footsie.” A hint here. A giggle there. And if they were wrong, as long as they did not explicitly reveal, none the worse.

That was “Conservative Footsie” at 1970s Columbia. The doctor dared not risk his job in Health Services by revealing himself a Republican. And yet, though non-Jewish, he saw my yarmulka, and he knew that we Orthodox usually are the most right-wing Americans. We were MAGA even when Trump was donating to the Clintons. So this doctor, while pumping some saline solution into one nostril — a moment when I was atypically compromised — asked what I was reading for class. I told him: “Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. Frantz Fanon. Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. Frantz Fanon. Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. And Frantz Fanon.” He asked me, warily, “Have you ever been assigned to read Ayn Rand?”

“No.”

“Have you ever heard of Ayn Rand?”

“I’m sorry. I never heard of him. Was he a Columbia alumnus?”

“Actually, it’s not ‘he’ but ‘she.’ And I don’t want to prejudice you about her. I am just asking you this one favor: If you wake up tomorrow with clearer sinuses and an ability to breathe easier, will you agree to read a book called Atas Shrugged?”

Oh, come on, I thought. I have so many reading assignments every day. All I do is read, except when Commie Mitch and Radical Steve are up for Mel Brooks. I had to ask my question:

“How many pages is it?”

I had no idea what I had walked into.

“It’s a million pages. And that’s only the radio address. So, instead, do me a favor and read either We the Living or The Fountainhead. OK?”

“Yes, it’s a deal. If I can breathe better tomorrow, I will go down to Fourth Avenue, where all the used books are sold, and will dig one up and read it.”

I ended up reading We the Living. As soon as I was done with Kira Argounova, I was so transformed that, yes Regis, I went for The Million … pages. I read Atlas Shrugged.

Four years of Columbia University, and the best education I ever got was when my nose would not stop dripping even with Sudafed.

It took rabid anti-Israelism and pure Jew-hatred at the Ivies to bring out what else is now going on in the coal mine. The gas is not just leaking but is being spewed. And it is almost all our universities, except for those listed in the last edition of The American Spectator print magazine. The non–Ivy League universities are no less evil than the Ivies. It is just that the Ivies are more prominent, have a longer and more storied history, and, therefore, live off their reputations. The Ivies get away with so much that would plunge other universities into oblivion. Because they have names like Harvard and Yale, Columbia and Penn, Princeton and Cornell, and Dartmouth, they are deemed above reproach. Not to mention Brown — the perfect Ivy name in the Age of DEI: Brown. Poor Stanford and Berkeley barely get mentioned, having arrived later on the West Coast and apparently unable to grow ivy on their walls as easily as weed in their dormitories.

Some of America’s smartest kids pay insane amounts of money — or, more accurately, their parents do — not for a Harvard or Yale edjimication but for a Harvard or Yale degree. That is what they are paying for: the degree. Eight Poison Ivies. Eight Degrees of Separation — from reality.

When American presidents name Supreme Court justices, most lack the courage to name great jurists from law schools other than Harvard or Yale. President Donald Trump alone had the courage to name a great judge, Amy Coney Barrett, graduated from Notre Dame Law School, where she could study great ideas while in an environment supportive of her deeply devout Catholic faith. But most of the cowards in the White House, Democrat and Republican alike, “play it safe” by naming graduates of Harvard and Yale. That way, no matter how mediocre their picks — Sotomayor and Ketanji are Exhibits A and B — they are blanketed with an aura of protection.

No one may dare inquire into their lack of academic achievement or intellectual substance if they are Hispanic or Black women, particularly grabed with a Harvard/Yale degree. That is how the DEI candidates now slink through the Senate. They are immune from a Clement Haynsworth or G. Harrold Carswell strict scrutiny.

And how did they get into those schools? Did their LSATs match those of white males who were denied admission to ensure that more Sotomayors and Ketanjis got in? Really, what were their LSAT scores? Can’t dare to ask.

Ivy League educations are marked by artificially inflated grades, as are all colleges’ and universities’ grades in this era of the Participation Trophy: just show up, and  — Mazal Tov! — you have a law degree from Harvard and Yale and now are Supreme Court eligible.

The entire situation in academia is rotten. Rot from the bottom to the top. Rot in the faculties. Rot in the reading lists. Rot in the course requirements. Rot in the “majors” now offered. Rot in the administrations. Rot among the presidents. Rot among the boards of directors who oversee the rot.

It started with beating up the Jews, the canaries. But it has exposed that DEI and woke ideology have destroyed academia. And the billionaires whose larger-than-life egos fund the garbage, knowing full well that it is garbage, but desperate to see their names on a dorm building or a students’ union or, at least, some campus toilet somewhere, lack the decency to stop funding it.

Each and every one of them who made his billions by virtue of American capitalism is a mini-George Soros wielding his money to destroy America.

[dustedmagazine]

Fly or Die — Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) (International Anthem)

Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) by jaimie branch

In an oft-referenced interview with Aquarium Drunkard, jaimie branch – an innovative and dynamic trumpet player, composer and bandleader who didn’t like capital letters – said that she’d initially shied away from the vulnerable emotional component of improvised music, “because I thought it was cheesy or corny or something like that. Like playing a simple melody is probably not something I would have done in 2007 or 2008.” 

Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)), the last record by the branch-led quartet Fly or Die, released almost exactly a year after her death on August 22, 2022, is marked by just these sorts of simple melodic phrases. You can understand why a young, punkish, avant-garde artist might avoid crowd-pleasing earworms, but emotional sincerity suited branch well. As she put it, she meant every note that she played.

Lead track “aurora rising” opens with the sound of an organ (convincing, though it’s really branch on keyboard) dirgy at one end and bright at the other, laughing, almost, over Chad Taylor’s stormy timpani. branch announces herself with a regal flourish of trumpet. It’s a moment of almost smirking formality before the organ marches into “borealis dancing,” bringing bassist Jason Ajemian and cellist Lester St. Louis along into a heavy Latin groove.

Through the rousing major chords of the first half of “baba louie,” branch’s ebullient trumpet dances along with sparkling percussion, then the song dramatically shifts to showcase the sultry end of branch’s vocal range. We hear another side of her on the clamoring, frantic “take over the world.” It’s not without a little well-aimed menace that she vows to give the world “back back back back to the la la la land.” A version of the Meat Puppets’ “Comin’ Down” (here titled “the mountain” ) – a track which feels both out of place and well-placed on the record – we hear yet another side of branch as she harmonizes with the handsomely-voiced Ajemian.

branch’s work was always characterized by seamless genre fluidity, thanks to a  mishmash of influences. She was born in New York to a  Colombian mother and then raised in Chicago; she picked up  trumpet from her brother and was naturally very good at it. Her family introduced her to Michael Jackson and the Beastie Boys  and Streisand and Elvis, and then she discovered punk, grunge and Ornette Coleman. Throughout her life, she collaborated with many different artists and made music that sounded both familiar and excitingly new. She was, by all accounts, a great listener, as one in her artistic position would have to be.

Political protest was baked into her music, often in very explicit ways. Performing “prayer for amerikkka pt 1&2,” from 2019’s FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise in Switzerland, she reminded her audience, “it’s not always time to be neutral.”

Speaking truth to power (or audiences, anyway) is one thing, but branch engaged in the arguably more difficult political project of community-building. On the snakey, heart-thumping “burning grey” she warns that there are people out there who will tear your heart out without a second thought. “Everything feels broken,” she sings, but “trust me/just for one moment/believe me/the future lives inside us/don’t forget to fight/don’t forget to fight/don’t forget/don’t forget/don’t forget.” She lets out a wolf-like howl, and I believe her.

Margaret Welsh

#fly or die quartet #world war #international anthem #margaret welsh #albumreview #dusted magazine #jaimie branch #chad taylor #jason ajemian #lester st. louis #jazz #trumpet #the meat puppets

[ilikechocolatemilkh]

Oooooh I am angry enough that I got the fuck over my anxiety for telephone calls and straight up called Burr about this bullshit SCOTUS pick 😡😡😡 like, I want to cry and scream and it took EVERYTHING IN ME not to cuss and rant and rave.

#notorious rbg #rbg #senate call #SCOTUS pick #conservative agenda #is Amerikkka great yet?!?!?! #fuck these assholes I am ANGRY #politics #us government #fuck that Orange nutsac and the blowaway hair he glued on top of that fucking head

[omegaplus]

# 4,042

Ice Cube: “True To The Game” b/w “Givin’ Up The Nappy Dugout” (1991)

Without a doubt 1991′s Death Certificate is one of the best accomplishments Ice Cube has done in his career. In an era where he acrimoniously left N.W.A., releasing his 1991 debut Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, and starring in his first full-length feature film Boyz ‘N’ The Hood (Singleton, 1992), there was no stopping him. Ice Cube held nothing back when he chronicled the-then current condition of life in South Central Los Angeles; detailing many a vicious tale of gang violence, explicit sex, cultural sentiments, and the state of black society. 

This double-A single makes up two examples that pieced together the critically-acclaimed Death Certificate. The former, “True To The Game”, had Ice Cube staking his claim about golden-era hip-hop generation’s hottest topic of artists selling themselves out to the industry and the white man. It happened to be one of the funkiest cuts on the album laid down, sampling The Gap Band’s “Outstanding” (’82) and George Duke’s “Reach for It” ('77) while Cube reminded everyone to never forget where they came from. The other,  “Givin’ Up The Nappy Dugout” references Big Daddy Kane and Funkadelic and gets its funk from Booker T & The M.G.’s “Hip-Hug Her” (’67). It’s Cube’s ridiculously comical yet sharply-pointed triple X-rated take of slut-shaming to a daughter’s father. Both tracks are great, and it’s only a build up to the album closer “No Vaseline”, considered one of the greatest rap diss tracks ever recorded.

#omega #music #mixtapes #reviews #playlists #Ice Cube #hip-hop #rap #N.W.A. #Gap Band #Booker T & The M.G.'s #Big Daddy Kane #Parliament Funkadelic #sampling #samples #funk #gangsta #George Duke

[kofibeen]

“Sankofa”

The roots I was born into are

Strong.

Durable.

Everlasting.

The remembrance of their

pain and suffering

Tears & tears

Stripes and bruises

Makes me sagacious.

Makes me careful yet fervent

To keep calm and carry on

The legacy they planted into this earth.

Forcibly relocated to a mysterious land.

A foreign land;

amerikkka: the land of the “free”

The land of:

religious hypocrisy

white privilege

Mass incarceration of black people

And the trump administration

Yet my roots paved the way

With anger and determination

My roots fought for life

Death

And knowledge

For knowledge is power.

And power is knowing that the past

Is the key to reconstructing the future.

And the future is in the hands of

Fury and determination.

Determination to free their minds from the tick

That attached itself to our sanity.

The roots saved me.

They attached themselves to my heartstrings

And grew from the dirt.

They grew through the earth’s ceiling

And broke the atmosphere.

The roots connected themselves to The Rock

And drunk from the living water

Which created mutants.

Ultimate beings

Superhumans.

Loved and envied.

Yet sold to the highest bidder.

My roots lended me the instructions

To greatness and soul food

Tatted on the edge of the earth.

Love is the key.

An original poem written by kweenbutter.

We must go back and reclaim our past so we can move forward, and understand why and how we came to be who we are today. We must do this, to make the change we need. #returnandgetit

#black poets on tumblr #black poets society #black writers #spilled ink #black femininity #black woman poetry #black woman power #black woman shit #blackgirlpower #black girls #sankofa #black history #learn from the past #poetry #blacklivesmatter #black poets matter

[phoenixrobles]

I Wonder While I Wander: Untitled Camden Project

My wanderlust led me to a place that seemed so familiar, I had been here before, figuratively speaking. A place where people go when they may have neared what seemed to be the end of their rope and simply seeking to find someplace to be out of the way. Camden- often reminds me of the depression that anti-blackness of AmeriKKKa causes.

The initial days of my occupying space in Camden led me to some unjust interpretations of this city. It was received as a place that represented how I felt moment in a life. Fresh out of Hudson County Jail after a week long but hard, cold, and spiritually challenging and defining stay, I felt what seemed to be deep and unrelenting gloominess and as if the rest of an unnecessary me was being torn apart. Times I visited Camden I often stayed in a little blue house on a block that seemed isolated from the rest of active civilization and next to and abandoned building with trash strewn around...that seemed to be most of what Camden looked like.

Since my initial arrival on the east coast I was often warned Camden was not a town that was even worth my inquisition let alone a visit. Situated comfortably across the Delaware River from Philadelphia another city that was representative of AmeriKKKan anti-black sentiment, Camden manages to leave residual memories of Urban Americana. A time when Black dreamers seeking liberation from Jim Crow South's vice grip of pain and death, Camden became one of the many landing points of the Great Black Migration.

Fast-forward to the Camden of modern times. In 2019 INSIDER MAGAZINE listed Camden as #8 on it's list of " 50 Most Miserable Cities in the World". With a population of 74,000 residents, whose median income is under $30k, Camden has been tossed away by the government and slapped with the reputation of high-crime rates, high substance abuse rates, high unemployment rates, and a deteriorating life.

The idea of Camden reminding me of other cities that once seemed so promising for the improvement in the quality of life for Black Americans that have now turned into forgotten war zones, like Detroit and Gary, and yet I am somehow intrigued by the willpower of this city.

There is so much to unpack visually, so I have decide to begin digging to find the gems in Camden the rest of the world doesn't often have the privy of seeing. As I walk down streets taking visual stock of this land filled with racial absurdities, I notice that these working class poor, manage to find a smile that is pillowed with a "hello"- signs of the community love that still lives in the southern influenced hospitality that followed grandparents and great grandparents on their journey to this new promised land.

For me that is good enough proof that there is love still residing in a misunderstood land that the rest of the world needs to see.

-Phoenix Robles 2021

#photo essay #photography #wanderlust #self love #black and white #documentary photography #photojournalism #women photographers #black women photographers #black photographers #Canon #journaled #thoughts #written #writers on tumblr #Phoenix Robles

[septiembrre]

A non-exhaustive list of all the things I liked about GG 3X04

This was the first episode this season were I solidly liked the whole episode and I wanted to celebrate that for a minute. Here’s my list and futile speculation for future episodes. 

It’s under a cut because... I have a lot of feelings. 

- I loved the Ruby+Annie+Beth scenes in this episode. This was the first episode this season where I felt they finally nailed the dynamic between the three. From the scenes in Beth’s house to the sports bar, to washing cash - funny, wonderful, I want more! 

- I’ll get Dean out of the way here at the top - I didn’t even mind Dean because it was a cementing in of his dumb-assery. The guy might as well be signing the divorce papers. I also was somewhat entertained about Rio the moose, and overall the commentary on how easy it is to buy a gun in Amerikkka. 

- Speaking of guns, Ruby and Annie’s reactions to Dean walking in with a shot gun! So good!  

- I loved the caper in the sports bar. It was fun and funny. I love it when Retta does drama, I love it when Retta does comedy, I love Retta and I liked that she got to shine in this episode.  I also loved that the caper wasn’t ultimately successful but it moved Ruby’s storyline further. I also loved the nod to how much Retta irl loves hockey.

- “I like to see the whole number” - my sweet baby Beth. 

- Annie in the bar saying, “Do you still want to hear it?”

- Mick. His friendship with Mrs. Karpinski. The deep-seated faith I have that one day he’ll be friends with Beth, Ruby and Annie. I can’t wait. 

- Beth asking Mick to drive her to go see Rio.

- THE SCENE. My tired babies are just so tired. I love it. I love Rio actually being vulnerable in that scene. I loved that Rio had a visible reaction to Beth’s line about how he could get someone to chop her up into pieces any time he wanted. Their dialogue. I wondered at how we could ever get a vulnerable Rio again and have it make sense and they just went there last night. I know it didn’t land with everyone watching, but I just loved it. I love them. Easily one of my top scenes between Beth and Rio. Also, I can’t believe we’ve already gotten another bar scene between them! Season 3 - who knew? 

- I adored the music choices this episode from, “Mind your own business” to “Morning Train” to “El Musgo”. A total win for Jonathan Leahy. 

- Beth’s glasses! My sweet queen! They need to come back. 

- The washing cash to “Morning Train”. I loved it. It fully landed with me. It had me laughing along with the ironic lyrics and really feeling for the girls and how much they’re busting their asses. A lot of the time, I don’t feel like the show lets us seem them work enough, and I really liked the montage last night.

- Sarah stashing her money in the same place as Ruby. I love her acting out. Lidya is so great in her role! Also, Ruby’s reaction to finding the cash. 

-  Rio at work in the bar! I can’t believe we hadn’t gotten a scene like that yet, but still consider myself #blessed. 

- The overall posture Manny brings to Rio. 

- The mover guy saying “it’s just a bunch of bitches” while he’s gagged, LOL. 

- The sinister lighting in the bar scene, and the way they half-lit Manny’s face. Just superb.

- The Dean kiss being completely underscored by the Brio scene. Thanks GG team!

- Rio showing up to the Paper Porcupine. The tones of their voices when they talk to each other in this scene. Him not leading with the gun but ultimately taking it out. Him putting it down.  Christina and Manny are so damn beautiful in that scene.

- The song culminating in those big brassy tones when it is revealed that Beth has saved her life.

I was on such a high after that ending scene that it took a minute for it to sink in that Rio’s probably going to swing back into his extra-salty behavior next episode. How much do you want to bet he’s going to buy out the elderly person who owns the Paper Porcupine? 

Personally, if I was Beth, I would be grateful to still be alive considering the ridiculousness that has happened over the past 4 episodes, but the episode summaries indicate that she’s going to try to get out from under his thumb again. I’m sure this will be well-prompted because I can only see this moment of vulnerability passing and him being back at 100% asshole. But, as a person who grew up in an area that has high cartel activity, I’m just like girl!!! Keep your head down and survive. But, regardless, I’m excited for their drama (and holding my breath because I’m sure it’s also going to be painful especially with words like “grisly” being used in the descriptions).  I can’t help but feel bad for Beth - that she finally set up this business and he’s going to completely strong-arm her in it. Eesh, we know our girl is going to fight back. 

[theuncannytruthteller]

So let me get this straight..

They take a black British woman, with a white man, and have her play the role of one of the strongest Black American women in history.. and in the movie they had a "good white man" (every negro slave movie has one) help her, and the weak black man betray her.. IF YOU CAN'T SEE WHAT'S GOING ON YOU NEED TO WAKE THE HELL UP!! I'm already seeing black women making post talking about the movie saying that Harriet was a Gangster.. Harriet was a G.. if you take this movie as an accurate representation of what really went down with Harriet Tubman that means you don't know 💩 about history..

DISCLAIMER:

THIS ISN'T BATTLE OF THE SEXES.. PLEASE DON'T COME ON MY POST TRYING TO MAKE THIS MAN VS WOMAN.. all that double standard, if it was a man it would have been different, don't even come on my post with that stupid 💩.. (Original Poster)

See this right here, yeah this is what we shouldn't do. Making post and memes like this is why YT people aren't threatened by us. You refuse to blame them you refuse to put things into its true perspective. This Black Woman doesn't own any studios, she didn't write the script, she doesn't own any of the lights or cameras, yet you attack her rather the people who do own those things. You also expect Hollyweird to tell your story of greatness that's the part where you played yourself expecting someone else to tell your story. Cynthia Erivo is a product of brainwashing indoctrinated into YT society like anything one else African born into this world. She's Nigerian whose seen and heard propaganda against Black in America. Like any Black person in Amerikkka the Yt man chose her meanwhile in her mind being close to Ytness is being close to success, she's received an education in Yt society she believes the beauty standards of their society and to choose a YT mate to not being affect by racist society. Yet again you attack her as if this is all her doing what YT people have essentially done was make our people fault their own for what they have done to us never putting the blame on them. (My 2Cents to this ignorant topic)

[jcombs55-blog]

West Coast, Represent

How is “representing” related to the construction of one’s subjective  identity in hip-hop?

In the earlier times of the LA Hip Hop scene, Ice Cube established himself as one of the fathers of the Gangsta Rap movement. In his days with NWA became known as one of the great poets of the genre. It wasn’t until the falling out between Ice Cube, Eazy-E, and manager Jerry Heller that Ice Cube would venture out on his own to re-define himself, and even validate his claim of prolific poet.

Ice Cube was known for being a lyrical genius after works like Express Yourself, Dopeman, and Fuck tha Police in his days with NWA. After leaving it was important that he continue to represent what hip hop was about. It was about representing “the hood.” His first album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. He wanted to show that he was still the same person, if not better, now that he has his own freedom. He kept writing songs that spoke to his audience in a deep and meaningful way. He continued to rap about life in the ghetto, drugs, racism, and poverty. In the article “Represent,” by Murray Forman he says “Since rap’s invention, it has become somewhat of a convention for the rapper to be placed at the center of the world, as the subject around which events unfold and who translates topophilia (love of place) or topophobia (fear of  place) into lyrics for wider dissemination.” Ice Cube would try to make that happen with him as a solo artist. In songs like AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted Ice Cube lyrics depict a life of the hood that is dangerous, judgmental, and survival of the fittest. The life of someone in the hood involved avoiding prejudice police, opposing gang members, and simply staying alive on a day to day basis.

I'm a menace crook  I did so much dirt I need to be in the Guinness Book  From the s*** I took from people  I reap all your fat s***, jack

Back to the criminals sect  I leave crew after crew but they can't catch me yet  'Cause I'm slick as slippery  They can't get wit me, cops ain't s*** to me

 One of Hip Hop’s key themes is representing the hood. Being true to who you are and where you came from, no matter how far you have made it, was an integral part of success. Another famous rapper named Ice T knew that the history was important. Murray’s writes in his article about Ice T saying it was important for him to continue to even represent hip hop’s own first home, New York. This naturalized his connection to hip hop and validating his identiy as a “tough, adaptive, and street-smart LA hustler.” Ice Cube used the same idea by representing the West Coast as his home. Ice Cube’s also well known for the song It Was a Good Day where he narrates a day in South Central LA. In the end he says it was a good day because he didn’t have to “use his AK.”

With the hardships of living in the hood, these artists helped normalize, and even celebrate, the things that made the hood undesirable to those born in better conditions. They helped them change the outlook the ghetto had about itself. However, time would show that continued representation of these conditions would eventually take its toll on the community, and the hip-hop world, through violence, misogyny, and homophobia. Rap had changed from its political past to a hard and violent future.

 #mcst3300 #icecube #represent

[kurtydurtymusic]

So you're mad becaue Nike sponsored a man who was black balled out of the NFL for believing in equality? Please go back to the beginning of Colin's protest. He never said Fuck Amerikkka or the Flag. This had to do with police brutality and the injustice that all you bitches are trying to cover. Last time I checked it was black people serving in the military too, not just white people. Please hit that unfollow button if you cant see this man is good. Better yet, say something negative so.i could block your bitch ass. If you never experienced racism or disrespect becaue of your color then you cant relate. If you cant relate, then shut the fuck up and stay out of it. This doesn't concern you #kapernick #nike #power #themovement #salute #kings #believeinsomething #standforyourrights #legend #instagood #love #instapic #pic #dope #great https://www.instagram.com/p/BnUr6hSnCDI/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=19fkkxsvxkiwt

#kapernick #nike #power #themovement #salute #kings #believeinsomething #standforyourrights #legend #instagood #love #instapic #pic #dope #great

[big-jays-blog]

What Sayest Thou? Would Amerikkka still be great if the shoe was on the other foot? Or would you be looking for change and equity? Are you CONVINCED yet? https://www.instagram.com/p/CRoCTTYsA3w/?utm_medium=tumblr

[bibleteachingbyolga]

I woke up on November 1, 1973, a happy 23-year-old within the Communist Party. I had entered the University of Michigan graduate school after reporting for The Boston Globe, along with travel on a Soviet freighter and the Trans-Siberian Railway. A comfortable fellowship let me have my cake and advocate eating the cake of others. Professors complimented me on my Marxist analysis. Free love beckoned.

I had just received a visit from two leaders of the Michigan Communist Party. They admired not only my volumes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but my three volumes by Bulgarian communist boss Georgi Dimitrov. I told them of my just-approved plan to create, with university funds, a mini-course featuring Soviet scholar Georgy Arkadyevich Arbatov. He had just published in English (translated from Russian) a book with a best-seller title: The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations: The Imperialist Doctrine, Methods, and Organization of Foreign Political Propaganda. Great stuff, as I considered it at the time.

Plus, everything was coming up red roses around the world. At a meeting of the Young Workers Liberation League in a University of Michigan seminar room, we heard good reports about the coming North Vietnamese victory over US forces, and progress in key targets for communist activity over the next decade: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Nicaragua. In Washington, Vice President Spiro Agnew had just resigned in the face of bribery allegations, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson had resigned during the Watergate “Saturday night massacre.”

As an undergraduate at Yale, I had gained exposure to the best and the brightest that “bourgeois culture” could put forward, and found them wanting. Marx and Lenin taught me that the crucial determinant in human history is economic and social class, and I concluded that the bourgeois class had swung and missed: war in Vietnam, poverty at home, corruption in Washington. Time for the working class to take over, under the leadership of the vanguard of the working class, the Communist Party, those willing to do whatever it takes to take over the Capitol and eliminate the betrayers in power.

Frozen in My Chair

At 3 in the afternoon on November 1, I was in my room and sitting in my red chair, rereading Lenin’s famous essay “Socialism and Religion.” In it he wrote, “We must combat religion — this is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently Marxism.” Following Marx, Lenin called religion “opium for the people . . . spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image.”

Nothing new. I had abandoned Judaism and declared myself an atheist when I was 14. But suddenly the strangest experience of my life began. Since I had never taken LSD or had a concussion, hallucination, or near-death experience, I can rule out those possible explanations for why I sat in that chair for eight hours, looking at the clock each hour with surprise that I still hadn’t moved.

During those hours, over and over, I saw myself as walking in darkness, but invited to push open a door into a room of brilliant brightness. Meanwhile, questions battered my brain: What if Lenin is wrong? What if God does exist? What is my relationship to this God, if he’s there? Why, when he is kind to me, do I offer evil in return? Why goodness in, garbage out?

Then I started thinking about my journalistic attitudes: Is America really Amerikkka? If not, why am I turning my back on it? Mixing theology and ideology, I started wondering why capitalist desire for money and power is worse than communist desire? Why had I embraced treasonous ideas? Why?

From where were these thoughts emanating? In my brain, Marxism was settled social science. Lenin’s hatred for the “figment of man’s imagination” called “God” was not new to me. It’s hard for me to convey the strangeness, the otherness, of this experience. I have trouble sitting still during lectures. I like to walk while thinking. Yet here I was sitting in the chair, hour after hour, suddenly believing I had done something very wrong by embracing Marx and Lenin.

At 3 in the afternoon, I was an atheist and a communist. When I arose eight hours later, I was not. I had no new data, but suddenly, through some strange intervention, I had a new way of processing data. Over and over, the same beat resonated: I’m wrong. There’s more in heaven and earth than I previously recognized.

Hound of Heaven

It seems mystical, and I can’t even describe well the experience, but it reversed the course of my life.

At 11 that evening, I stood up and spent the next two hours wandering around the cold and dark University of Michigan campus. To borrow an image from nineties basketball, I bounced past the Michigan Union, off the Literature, Science, and Arts building, past Angell Hall, off the Hatcher Graduate Library, nothing but nyet: a firm No to the atheist and Marxist weeds that had grown in me for ten years.

During the next three weeks, I resigned from the Communist Party and read criticisms of the Soviet Union: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Whittaker Chambers, The God That Failed. I felt I should pursue the question of God’s existence, but disciplined myself to spend the following three weeks writing term papers.

By then the initial glow had faded. I escaped all-encompassing questions by joining the board of the Cinema Guild, a student movie-showing group, and thus gained two free tickets to any of the four or five movies shown on campus each night, with resultant dating opportunities.

But the Holy Spirit wasn’t finished with me. While I ran from reality, God pursued, in a process described by Francis Thompson’s powerful poem “The Hound of Heaven”:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways.

God came after me “with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace.” He turned each of my attempts to escape into new encounters.

Russian Gospel

God came after me. First, I had studied Russian to speak with my Soviet big brothers and had to continue with that to fulfill a PhD language requirement. One night in my room, I picked up the only unread Russian-language work in my bookcase, a New Testament given me as a travel souvenir and retained because it seemed exotic and might be useful for reading practice. With a Russian-English dictionary in front of me, I dived into the Gospel According to Matthew. I was delighted to find chapter 1 easy going: in the second verse Abraham begets Isaac, and other begats lope down the page.

Then came the Christmas story I had never read, followed by a massacre of babies and John the Baptist’s hard-hitting words: “You brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7). It held my attention, and after a while I didn’t punctuate the verses with sneers. Needing to read slowly and think about the words was helpful. The Sermon on the Mount impressed me. All the Marxists I knew were pro-anger, devoted to fanning proletarian hatred of The Rich. Jesus, though, was not only anti-murder but anti-anger: “Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Marxists held to a two-eyes-for-an-eye kind of justice, but Jesus spoke of loving enemies and turning the other cheek.

Reading the Puritans

My next push to faith came in 1974 when, as a graduate student, I had to teach a course in early American literature: it was in the course catalogue, but none of the professors wanted to teach something they saw as dull and reactionary. I had to prepare by reading Puritan sermons, including those of Increase Mather and Jonathan Edwards. Since the Holy Spirit had prepared me, those dead white males made sense to me. Some love Puritan arguments and others hate them, but my childhood prejudice that Christians were stupid people who worshiped Christmas trees faded fast.

The little I knew of Christian thought came largely from my observation of Boston Catholicism, heavy on ritual. The Puritans were different: they believed God is the agent of conversion and regeneration, with humans responsive yet not leading the process. God does not ticket for heaven those with good social conduct: God saves those he chooses to save, regardless of their acts. Salvation then leads to better conduct, sometimes slowly.

That was good news for me. I had broken each of the Ten Commandments, except literally the prohibition of murder (but Jesus called anger a form of murder, Matthew 5:21–22). I certainly was glad that God, if he were anything like the Puritans described him, would not judge me by my works. I assigned to students Thomas Hooker’s sermon on “A True Sight of Sin,” in which Hooker describes our insistence on autonomy: “I will be swayed by mine own will and led by mine own deluded reason.” That was my history, and Hooker seemed to be preaching to me.

Unstoppable Spirit

I was slow. In 1975, instead of visiting a church to find out what flesh-and-blood Christians believe, I started reading about Christianity in the University of Michigan library. I headed down a rabbit trail with Gabriel Marcel and other Christian existentialists, as well as neoorthodox theologians who said they had wedded Christ without much concern for whether the Bridegroom actually existed. I was also in no hurry to leave behind some of the transient pleasures of atheistic immorality.

But I had not left communism merely to believe in pleasant myths or flings. The question was and is truth: as the apostle Paul put it, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:17–19) So, the Holy Spirit worked on me, and in 1976 I finally made a profession of faith. I relished and still love Psalm 73:24–25: “You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you?”

That sums it up. God offers wisdom now and heaven later — and what good alternative do we have? I had relied on my deluded reason. I was a fanatic who, apart from God’s mysterious intervention, could not be reasoned with. Happily, the Holy Spirit, while not unreasonable, is unstoppable.