#realer than the war on drugs

[yugelo]

What is Joe Biden's plan for saving Warrior nun???? We must end this War On wlw Shows

#warrior nun #avatrice #but fr i wanna die #realer than the war on drugs #please #ava silva #sister beatrice #what's the point of anythign

[crawldepth-blog]

Journalism Fiction

Stories about journalists almost cross a taste threshhold into self-licking-ice-cream-cone territory. Depending on your disposition toward The Press, journalism fiction can entertain or annoy one. Reporters, editors, newspapermen, on-air anchors, and all of their peers rarely find positive purchase in the hearts and minds of American audiences. As far back as the 18th century, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin regularly and unfetteredly manipulated newspaper media and their enterprise to achieve political goals. Still, for every negative perception of a journalist one hears these days, stalwarts will remind you of Dustin Hoffman’s and Robert Redford’s winsome portrayals of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men.

Two very different but equally powerful stories about journalism unfolded in the comics medium in the past 20 years. Both of these series exemplify the gritty requirement for modern journalism using near-future settings into which morally grey protagonists dance with darker elements of their reporting subjects. From 1997 to 2002, writer Warren Ellis and artist Darick Robertson delivered 62 issues of Transmetropolitan through DC Comics’ Helix and Vertigo imprints. Transmet (as it is sometimes called by fans) follows one Spider Jerusalem, a modern media journalist in an anonymous city of the far future, as he ruthlessly pursues the truth in a raucous upheaval of politics, neo-futurism, and drugs. The second series, DMZ (also a DC Comics Vertigo publication), ran from 2005 to 2011 in 72 issues written by Brian Wood and illustrated by Riccardo Burchielli. DMZ explores a Second American Civil War where New York City becomes a demilitarized zone between the USA and the insurgent, non-territorial Free States of America. Journalist Matty Roth embeds into the DMZ to capture and tell the stories of the people caught between the two warring polities. Both series are available in collected print and digital editions.

Warren Ellis, known for grotesquely humorous yet disgusting comics and novels, wrote Transmetropolitan as an homage to the work of noted gonzo journalist and madman Hunter S. Thompson. Transmet also enabled Ellis to place his Thompson shadow, Spider Jerusalem, into a neofuturist cyberpunk world replete with cancer-killing supplements that enabled widespread cigarette smoking, inhalable microscopic robot psychadelics, and evolved police dogs conversant in your local language. Spider, previously driven mad by The City and its reckless aphorisms of transhumanism, returns to write a column for reputed newspaper, The Word.

Spider’s stories initially focus on the WOW FUTURE! aspects of Ellis and Robertson’s world. Spider inserts himself into the activities of each story, influencing outcomes so as to find the truth wherever possible. He writes exposes about a movement of citizens seeking transformation through alien DNA called The Transients, and how their leader conspires with local police to incite a riot that leads to a mass murder of Transient citizens. He also writes about cryogenically preserved people who had prviously died and now recently revived and cured of their illnesses, and how these people become shellshocked depressives unable to function normally or healthily in The City society that has changed so much from the time they were frozen. In these stories and more, Spider’s text guides the Transmetropolitan reader through humanistic considerations of each of these future scenarios. His narration becomes not just mere reporting but also a summary of the emotions one might feel toward each issue or scenario that Spider reports.

While the entertainment value remains high due to Spider’s inherent Thompson-like interactions with drugs and weapons throughout his investigations, the reader often leaves Transmet stories with an unsettled feeling about the near-future technology and cultural phenomena that Ellis explores. It’s not meant to be an easy pill to swallow. The series’ small one-off stories become morality plays in which Ellis uses Spider to unpack the philosophical, cultural, and technological implications of these stories. This serves a dual purpose as both an engaging comic book story but also an iterative insight into Spider’s own mentality, something crucial for the slow-build, underlying long story of the comic.

Ellis’ Thompson homage becomes even more clear when Spider engages in a crusade against American presidential candidate Gary Callahan. “The Smiler,” as he is derisively called, bears frightening correlations to several conservative presidents, from Nixon to Bush. Spider spends the majority of Transmet waging a journalistic war against Callahan, seeking to expose crimes the president committed and fighting off an increasingly harrassing law enforcement community. Spider’s quest for “The truth, no matter what” makes him a target for Callahan, who becomes increasingly unhinged as Spider’s investigations hit closer and closer to home. Readers experiencing Transmet for the Thompson allegories will quickly find shades of Nixon in Callhan and tingle with excitement as Spider’s story mirrors Thompson’s own journey in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.

Even as a product of its time, at its conclusion in 2002, Transmetropolitan bears eerie comparisons to the Trump presidency. Sixteen years later, the only thing that has changed between these worlds is the propensity for the crimes Spider elucidates being more visible and yet somehow less important to the masses. Spider himself is regarded as a hero for his writing and the investigative paths he takes to find the truth, but he pays a high price for it. While we love our drugs, so too does Spider, and we all turn to them to forget the latest presidential tomfoolery. Spider’s indulgence, however, costs him his health, which becomes an unsettling metaphor for the high mental cost paid by today’s journalists and intellectuals in the Trump age. Spider’s bloody, bruised battles (painfully depicted in inky blacks and bowel disrupting browns by Robertson) over the surveillance state, climate change as a weapon, presidential overreach, and a president’s war against the media itself all provoke uncanny comparisons to today, Our Foul Digital Nightmare.

Transmetropolitan will stand the test of time with its subject matter, and it should stand as a rallying cry for journalists everywhere. Hunter Thompson died in 2005, an ignominius end to the father of “gonzo journalism,” which became a curious yet forbidden attraction for many journalists seeking to break the stolid necktie-wearing mandate of elder statesmen journalists and Do All The Drugs. Spider Jerusalem’s adoption of Thompson’s outrageousness begs the question of whether that typically disapproving behavior tarnishes a journalist in this day and age... or does it add something that this day and age needs? Journalists today are constantly humiliated and attacked by the sitting president, and female reporters often lewdly so. Perhaps Spider Jerusalem can teach today’s journalists a lesson in dealing with such a foul personality: maybe you need a trusty bowel disruptor gun to break through the bullshit screen these days. Maybe Spider’s drug abuse is necessary to deal with the mental degradation of today’s news landscape, the promise of self-care too passive and mentally insecure for A Smiler or A Beast. In any case, Transmetropolitan’s relation to today’s context will become intimately familiar to readers right away and its lessons clear.

Wood and Burchielli’s DMZ takes a different approach to the challenge of journalists becoming involved in the stories they investigate. Wood directs his setting toward perceptions of the U.S. military by depicting an aftermath of five years of armed conflict between Americans in Manhattan. An undercurrent of uncertainty and anxiety runs through DMZ every time a military element appears in Burchielli’s panels. It could be the battle-rattle-bearing soldiers escorting Matty Roth to the helicopter that is utlimate shot down in Manhattan,  stranding him in the DMZ. It could be the ever-present whispers of the U.S. Army’s perceived atrocities in killing not only members of the Free States Armies but also hundreds of innocent, unarmed protesters, an act that permeates the opening of the book and explains the uncomfortable stalemate between the USA and the FSA in which Matty finds himself.

Matty - a photojournalist initially only accompanying another award-winning reporter who is killed in the helicopter crash - discovers that he is the only journalist on the ground with an uninterrupted connection back to the real world. In this rubble-strewn, war-torn New York, Matty seeks to understand the lives of the people trapped in the DMZ, all of whom could not evacuate before the last USA/FSA showdown there. Many of these people just want to live their lives safely and securely. What strikes the reader as they encounter characters with Matty in DMZ is the indomitable post-9/11 spirit of New Yorkers clashing with the hopelessness and fear of a post-Katrina New Orleanian or a post-riot Fergusonian. DMZ features a much realer take on cultural wariness of order than Transmet because Wood and Burchielli enable story elements familiar to all of us: faceless soldiers decked out in combat gear pointing weapons at unarmed black children, bombed-out buildings overgrown with vegetation and disease, the impoverished left behind or manipulated unknowingly by those with power.

DMZ asks “What if it happened here?” and uses familiar uncomfortable social elements to answer that question. Matty’s journey changes from journalist to activist as he navigates this broken world, and he eventually sacrifices his own journalistic morals to take up with one of the many DMZ factions, first telling their story and later literally taking up arms and killing on their behalf. It is through this experience of shedding his journalist ambitions and becoming part of a movement that Matty understands how much everything around him is propaganda. He finds himself manipulated, lied to, and coerced time and again for a variety of unintended outcomes even as he, in parallel, expresses his own beliefs in supporting the coercing parties.

Matty, unfortunately, acts as a stark reminder of how the media can be controlled. Despite being DMZ’s protagonist, Matty exhibits plenty of douchey, unbecoming behavior that purposely turns off the reader midway through the series. While this serves DMZ’s story well, the slimy nature of the character’s turn hits one hard in the gut as they think about the journalism profession writ large. How many times have you been let down by your favorite reporter? How did it feel when Dan Rather resigned from CBS News in the wake of his arguably suspect story about George W. Bush’s National Guard service? Like Transmet, a lesson can be implied from DMZ’s problematic journalist as well. While Transmet argues for the importance of journalists being involved in their stories, DMZ seems to do the same at first but then pulls the rug out from under the reader by showing how Matty’s decision to get involved leads to mass murder. “Watch your back, Jack,” DMZ warns. Sometimes doing the right thing, even in the best of circumstances, can turn around and backfire on you if you do not think about all the angles of the story and the long-term implications of its publication.

To be fair, Matty ends up doing the absolute right thing in choosing to face his trangressions and answer for the crimes in which he has become embroiled, wittingly or unwittingly. Poignance abounds from the story’s conslusion as the reader considers a new New York, one that emerges from the back end of the Second American Civil War to prominence and beauty. Despite the twisted journey of Matty Roth, DMZ is still ultimately all about New York in its great melting pot parable that mirrors the United States as a whole. So satisfying are small stories of New York’s people like the DMZ’s powerless communities growing vegetables on roofs, a grafitti artist struggling to make art in a war zone, and even the special operations detachment that left the U.S. Army rather than engage civilians who live in and guard Central Park. All of these stories contribute to an unshaken sliver of positivity that it is not yet too late for the people of the DMZ... and maybe for all of us too.

[nothingman]

South Park turns 20 years old this summer, meaning that if those foulmouthed, crudely fashioned 8-year-olds that were first introduced on August 13, 1997 followed the rules of linear time, they’d all be adults farting down the barrel of 30. Similarly, there’s now an entire generation of people—spanning high-schoolers to middle-aged people who remember watching its early seasons in college, and who can’t believe they’re reading/writing 20-year retrospectives on it now—who were actually raised on South Park.

The show celebrated this existential crisis-inducing fact last year with a tongue-in-cheek ad, depicting South Park as a sort of benevolent guarantor keeping reliable watch over a girl from infancy until her first trip to college. It was a typically self-effacing joke, but it’s true: Our world is now filled with people for whom South Park has always been there, a cultural influence that, in some cases, is completely foundational to their point of view. The ad doesn’t end with the girl logging onto Twitter to complain that social justice warriors are ruining the world, but otherwise, spot on.

After all, for most of its 20 years, South Park’s own point of view has more or less been this: “Everything and everyone are full of shit—hey, relax, guy.” It’s a scorched-earth, deconstructionist approach steeped in equal-opportunity offensiveness that’s made South Park one of the funniest satires ever produced, and particularly potent in the time in which it debuted. “When we started, [it was] Beavis And Butt-Head, and us, and in some ways The Simpsons, and Married With Children—shit like that,” Matt Stone told Vanity Fair last year, putting the Comedy Central cartoon in the company of other ’90s series that diverged from the “bland… shitty sitcoms that were just so lifeless” Stone and co-creator Trey Parker were reacting against. But South Park has now lived long enough to see the experimental become the conventional. And it’s outlasted all but one of those series not just by subverting formulaic TV, but by feeding directly off current events. As a result, for many of those raised by South Park, the show has functioned as sort of a scatological op-ed—in some cases, maybe the only op-ed they’ve ever been interested in.

To these acolytes, Parker and Stone have spent two decades preaching a philosophy of pragmatic self-reliance, a distrust of elitism, in all its compartmentalized forms, and a virulent dislike of anything that smacks of dogma, be it organized religion, the way society polices itself, or whatever George Clooney is on his high horse about. Theirs can be a tricky ideology to pin down: “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals,” Stone said once, a quote that has reverberated across the scores of articles, books, and message-board forums spent trying to parse the duo’s politics, arguing over which side can rightfully claim South Park as its own. Nominally, Parker and Stone are libertarians, professing a straight-down-the-middle empathy for the little guy who just wants to be left alone by meddling political and cultural forces. But their only true allegiance is to whatever is funniest; their only tenet is that everything and everyone has the potential to suck equally. More than anything, they’ve taught their most devoted followers that taking anything too seriously is hella lame.

So while they’ve advocated, in their own fucked-up way, for stuff like the right to abortion, drug legalization, and general tolerance for others, they’ve also found their biggest, easiest targets in liberalism’s pet causes, those formerly rebellious ideals that had become safely sitcom-bland over the Bill Clinton years—all of which were steeped in actually, lamely caring about stuff. Taking the piss out of the era’s priggish, speech-policing, Earth Day-brainwashed hippies was the most transgressive—and therefore funniest—thing you could possibly do. And so, South Park joked, global warming is just a dumb myth perpetrated by “super cereal” losers. Prius drivers are smug douches who love the smell of their own farts. Vegetarians end up growing vaginas on their face. “Transgender people” are just mixed-up, surgical abominations. The word “fag” is fine. Casual anti-Semitism is all in good fun. “Hate crimes” are silly. Maybe all you pussies just need a safe space.

“Did South Park accidentally invent the alt-right?” Janan Ganesh asked recently in the Financial Times, articulating a theory that began gaining traction as an entire political movement seemed to crystallize around the show’s “anti-PC chic” and general fuck-your-feelings attitude. Way back in 2001, political blogger Andrew Sullivan had already coined the term “South Park Republican” to describe the supposedly emerging group of young people who, like the show, were moderate on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but also rejected the stuffy doctrines of diversity and environmentalism. They also believed, as Parker and Stone would soon illustrate in Team America: World Police, that the world needed American dicks to fuck assholes, over the objections of liberal pussies and F.A.G. celebrities. That voting bloc never actually materialized—though to be fair, the show was only four years old at the time. It would take at least another decade of people with Cartman avatars just joshin’ about hating Jews before the South Park generation would truly come of age.

Let’s be real, though. South Park didn’t “invent” the “alt-right,” even accidentally. The “alt-right” is the product of lots of things—disenfranchisement; internet echo chambers; aggrieved Gamergaters; boredom; the same ugly, latent racism that’s coursed beneath civilization’s veneer for millennia; etc. The growing, bipartisan distaste for Wall Street-backed career politicians and the epically bungled machinations of the Democratic Party certainly didn’t help, nor did the frustrating inability of the social justice movement to pick its battles—or its enemies. Furthermore, it’s always dangerous to assign too much influence to pop culture, even something that’s been part of our lives for this long. And as South Park itself derided in “The Tale Of Scrotie McBoogerballs,” you shouldn’t go looking for deep sociopolitical messages in your cartoon dick jokes. (Then again, only three years earlier, it also argued that imaginary characters really can change people’s lives and even “change the way [you] act on Earth,” making them “more realer” than any of us—so you decide.)

Still, it’s not that much of a stretch to see how one might have fed the other, if only through the sort of intangible osmosis that happens whenever an influential artwork spawns imitators, both on screen and off. South Park may not have “invented” the “alt-right,” but at their roots are the same bored, irritated distaste for politically correct wokeness, the same impish thrill at saying the things you’re not supposed to say, the same button-pushing racism and sexism, now scrubbed of all irony.

There’s also the same co-opting of anti-liberal stances as the highest possible form of rebellion: Parker and Stone used to brag that they were “punk rock” for telling their Hollywood friends how much they loved George W. Bush; Parker even told Rolling Stone in 2007, “The only way to be more hardcore than everyone else is to tell the people who think they’re the most hardcore that they’re pussies, to go up to a tattooed, pierced vegan and say, ‘Whatever, you tattooed faggot, you’re a pierced faggot and whatever’”—a quote that may as well have been taken from 4chan’s /pol/ board this morning. “Conservatism is the new punk rock,” echoed a bunch of human cringes a decade later. Whatever, you faggot, a dozen Pepes tweeted a few seconds ago.

But well beyond the “alt-right,” South Park’s influence echoes through every modern manifestation of the kind of hostile apathy—nurtured along by Xbox Live shit-talk and comment-board flame wars and Twitter—that’s mutated in our cultural petri dish to create a rhetorical world where whoever cares, loses. Today, everyone with any kind of grievance probably just has sand in their vagina; expressing it with anything beyond a reaction GIF means you’re “whining”; cry more, your tears are delicious. We live in Generation U Mad Bro, and from its very infancy, South Park has armed it with enough prefab eye-rolling retorts (“ManBearPig!” “I’m a dolphin!” “Gay Fish!” “…’Member?”) to sneeringly shut down discussions on everything from climate change and identity politics to Kanye West and movie reboots. Why not? Everything sucks equally, anyway. Voting is just choosing between some Douche and a Turd Sandwich. Bullying is just a part of life. Suck it up and take it, until it’s your turn to do the bullying. Relax, guy.

Again, it’s a world that South Park didn’t create intentionally, just by setting out to make us laugh, or by Parker and Stone trying to get rich off a bunch of farting construction paper cutouts. But even Parker and Stone seem slightly, if only occasionally uneasy about the overarching life lessons they’ve imparted—often expressing that anxiety in the show itself. In “You’re Getting Old,” South Park’s most moving half-hour, Parker and Stone grappled directly with the cumulative effects of perpetually shitting on things—of allowing a healthy, amused skepticism to ossify into cynicism and self-satisfied superiority, then into nihilism, then into blanket, misanthropic hatred. That dark night of the soul later formed the through-lines of seasons 19 and 20, where South Park wryly, semi-sincerely confronted the series’ place as a “relic from another time” by putting the town under the heavy thumb of PC Principal.

Then—after hooking its red-pilled fans with an extended critique of the emptiness of neoliberalism, epitomized by a sneering, “safe space”-mocking character that was literally named Reality—it tried confronting the audience who had most embraced their ramped-up anti-PC crusades. Last season kicked off with Cartman admitting to Kyle, “We’re two privileged, straight white boys who have their laughs about things we never had to deal with,” a confession rendered only slightly tongue-in-cheek by the fact of who was saying it. And it culminated in Gerald, who’d spent the year gleefully harassing people online, squaring off with the Danish prime minister, a stand-in for every troll the show’s ever nurtured:

I want to stand here and tell you that you and I are different, but it’s not true. All we’ve been doing is making excuses for being horrible people. I don’t know if you tried to teach me a lesson, but you have. I have to stand here and look at you. And all I see is a big fat reflection of myself.

Ultimately, of course, Gerald comes to a familiar conclusion: “Fuck you, what I do is fucking funny, bitch!” he cries, before kicking the prime minister in the balls. Fair enough. South Park is, and always will be, funnier than any of the maladjusted creeps who have spent decades internalizing the show’s many false equivalencies and ironic racism, then lazily regurgitating them in an attempt to mimic its edginess—or worse, by treating them as some sort of scripture for living. And to be certain, there are millions of Poe’s law-defying viewers for whom South Park really is just a comedy, one that satisfies the most basic requirement of saying the things you shouldn’t say, in a far more clever way than you could say them. But regardless of their satirical intent, or the humanity that grounds even their nastiest attacks, it’s clear that even Parker and Stone sometimes question the influence they’ve had on the world, and who is and isn’t in on the joke.

Which brings us (as all 2017 articles must) to Donald Trump, the ultimate troll, and one that Parker sees as a natural outgrowth of South Park’s appeal to a nation bored with politeness. As he recently told the Los Angeles Times:

He’s not intentionally funny but he is intentionally using comedic art to propel himself. The things that we do—being outrageous and taking things to the extreme to get a reaction out of people—he’s using those tools. At his rallies he gets people laughing and whooping. I don’t think he’s good at it. But it obviously sells—it made him president.

Trump’s blithe offensiveness, rampant narcissism, and faith that everyone but him is stupid makes him a natural analog to Eric Cartman. But instead, South Park made him into Mr. Garrison—a decision that makes some logical sense (Mr. Garrison is of constitutional age, hates Mexicans and women, and doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself), though it also felt a bit like dissembling. Nevertheless, as the election wore on, South Park again seemed to acknowledge its role in helping to create a world where someone like Trump could seem like an exciting, entertaining alternative to conventional blandness. And it made a real, concerted effort to stymie any suggestion of support by having Garrison declare repeatedly that he was “a sick, angry little man” who “will fuck this country up beyond repair,” all while openly mocking those who still loved him anyway as nostalgia-drunk idiots.

“Is it just me or has South Park gone full cuck?” wondered fans on Reddit’s The_Donald immediately after that episode aired, and probably not for the first (or last) time. But in the aftermath of Trump/Garrison’s election, those same, vigilant cuck-watchers were back to crowing over how South Park had really stuck it to politically correct types in a scene where Trump/Garrison tells PC Principal, “You helped create me.” That South Park positioned this as less of a triumphant comeuppance than a suicidal backfire didn’t seem to matter. And the show more or less left it there—portraying Trump/Garrison as a dangerously incompetent buffoon, but also as the ultimate “u mad?” to all those liberals they fucking hate.

All of which makes Parker and Stone’s recent declaration to lay off Trump in the coming 21st season a real disappointment at best, cowardice at worst. The duo is, of course, under no obligation to tackle politics—or anything else they don’t want to, for that matter. They’re also right that mocking Trump is both redundant and “boring,” and also that everyone does it. For two dyed-in-the-wool contrarians, Trump comedy feels every bit as bland, lifeless, and sitcom-safe as an episode of, say, Veronica’s Closet. Furthermore, Parker’s complaints of the show just “becoming CNN now” and not wanting to spend every week endlessly restacking the sloppy Jenga pile of Trump-related outrage is completely understandable. Believe me, I get it.

That said: Man, what a cop out. South Park has already spent the past 20 years being CNN for its CNN-hating audience. Meanwhile, Parker and Stone have proudly, loudly thumped for a “fearless” brand of satire that’s willing to mock everyone from George W. Bush to Scientology to Mormonism to Muhammad, even under death threats. To shrug now and say, as Parker did, “I don’t give a shit anymore”—right when, by their own admission, the influence of the show’s worldview has reached all the way to the White House—feels especially disingenuous, and suspiciously like caving to the young, Trump-loving fans with whom they have forged such an uneasy relationship. (“South Park bends the knee on their fake-news-fueled portrayal of President Trump,” one The_Donald post gloated, followed by many, many more.) If they truly believe that those trolls in the mirror are “horrible people” who are helping to “fuck the country up beyond repair,” it would be truly fearless to tell them why, with no hint of ambiguous, everything-sucks irony that can be willfully misinterpreted.

Instead, Parker now says he’s eager to get back to “the bread and butter of South Park: kids being kids and being ridiculous and outrageous.” Which is great! South Park is absolutely at its best when it focuses on that stuff, and I look forward to watching it all on my hurting butt. Still, after 20 years, even they seem to realize that many of those ridiculous, outrageous kids for whom it’s “always been there” have long since grown up—and some of them have gone on to do some real, destructive adult shit. Like their inspirations, South Park’s generation of trolls are tiny but loud, and they’ve had the strange effect of changing the world. It sure would be nice if South Park would grow up as well and take responsibility for them.

Or, you know, maybe I just have sand in my vagina.

via A.V. Club

#IFTTT #Feedly #Nothingman uses feedly

[og-my-borough-is-thorough-see]

Untitled, Unmastered

More than a common denominator

They can’t factor me out the equation.  

Born cold, in the city of thieves with no honor,

Given a rebirth, a new land becomes my encapsulation,

Institutionalized still won’t give me no more.  

Been living  trife, that illegal since a infant.  

Affiliations causing presumptions creating reputations.

Narratives painted, fact or fiction, either way  

It don’t matter in the public eye,

Guilty until proven innocent,

They never see you as innocent, even when the facts staring at them,

Complacent only if they get you, taboo Irregardless.

Don’t matter what you do, just who around you,

Friends or family,

It’s the ties that bind us and hang us from the same tree,

Tightening the deeper and older you grow till you take ya last breath,

Only if you let it.

Born into the business,  

What more can I want than a new chance,

The American Dream.  

Not for folks like me.  

Picket fence meant to be the docket keeping folks out,

Cutting us off but never uniting us,

You either a product or a variable of your environment

Stuck in poverty or a part of the billion-dollar slave system.  

Living on borrowed time, got to do more,

More to this life won’t find it stuck in they game  

Got to change, won’t have longevity being trife.  

Playing both sides of the fence through opaque lenses,

Movements surrounded in mist,

Morality all subjective if you ask me.  

A born sinner lookin for bliss.

Cut my losses, time to begin percolating wins

Came up different,

Last of a dying breed.

Greed ain’t posses me.

Ambition the clarity I found,

Hustle and to motivate is all I know.

Came up on a different plane than those I see on a daily basis.  

Food stamp only ramp that kept me from starvin,

Still the fact remains,

Only thing for sure lay in honor,

Living by the sword dying by the sword,

Death before dishonor.  

Take it in blood, we ain’ t come from much

We ain’t have but the clothes on our back,

Movin around tryin to find a foundation

Stuck in isolation in between the crowds,

Mental won’t give into their subliminal shots,

Never shoot straight at me, they minimal

Shook ones they ain’t no crooks son,

Always from the side out of view, they ain’t built for it.  

Cementing my lament  

Ask do they feel it,

Simply,

How can one be stable,

When everything around unstable,

When ya hunger pangs and all the pain keep you up nightly.  

Hoping for better days been past the river of Styx,

Deep in the levels this ain’t paradise this is hell,

The only thing I know in this divine comedy of life.

Ain’t no peace when you got to lease it,

Never find it, always at war with oneself,

Ain’t able to feel here, nor there,  

Only dreams keeping the breath going,

Seeing distant visions of a new life,

Hope the only thing keeping me sane through every dark night.  

Rebirth, the ill life shed behind that talk that a cocoon ain’t no other boon.  

A distant fruition, if dues don’t pay tuition,

From the school of hard knocks that make up my life.

All alone,  

Family ain’t family no more,

Blood ain’t blood no more,  

Got no shoulder to lean on but my own.  

Build or destroy,

The two paths, still ain’t done,

Vision only thing keeping me out of incarceration.  

Predicate felon in the melon,

No advocate a survivor by any means,

Never lean on none,

Been told by false prophets hyperbolic visions

That serve to reinforce the mass incarceration system

The oppresses my kinfolk in this nation,

That’s what they been telling me,

Trace it back to the days before I taught myself written words,

See look at my initials to check the credentials it was predestined before my birth,

Unintentional, look at the tools the fools gave me,  

Too blind to see the plot they just dots, no more no less,

Meant to write spoken word that would be the scripture to describe the raptures to come,

Revolutionary warfare it won’t be televised, that’s all distant,

For now,

Only one thing for certain,

Tomorrow isn’t promised.

There is more to this life,

Given the chance my children won’t know of me off spoken word,

Can’t let them have one foot in the grave off what they see.

In these tumultuous times have to be ambitious,  

It's simple, break it down to avoid message going into the void.

Every night leads to another day,

Another day another dollar,

Never had privilege had to make my leverage,

Applied pressure with my foot on their neck,

Fuck a slice I want the whole cake.

Taking back everything they stole from me,

Fighting to be more than a statistic,

Fight to live.

Living every day to the fullest,

Don’t matter if it’s my last.  

Ain't living in fear,  

What I reap, I will sow

Keeping the same mentality,

In the back of the mind it's still the same sentiment,

Seeing things from a different perspective, it’s an afflictive when they don’t get the feeling,

At peace with death, no longer scared to die

It’s a part of life,

Still it's not time, the sentiment off the placements in the mind through time.

See you go numb to the feeling over time,  

This ain’t thug life this survivor life,

The shit that calls for therapy we suppress where I’m from,

It ain’t spoken unless it’s a scream,  

Relived nightly in our dreams, that’s the only time we see gleams when we ain’t dying nightly,

Tell you the truth it goes back to the days as a youth,

Let me beg the question,

How you suppose to grow as a youth,

How you supposed to be more,

How can you grow,

How can you love,

When all you know is hatred.

Hatred for the knowledge that curses your mental,

Hatred for what you possess,

Mentally and physically.

Hatred for what you’ll can’t comprehend,

Hating no one understands  

Hating they can’t see you more than a thug or sap case.  

See they say that hood shit be that good shit,

Claim it make them diverse, that they understand the lexicon

They hide behind that privilege when they go home, they escape it,

Go home to the belly of the beast.

Looking for love from all sides.  

It ain’t surface layer, its deeper than that

When you get numb you feel nothing,

You lose love, you feel nothing but pain

Pain that poisons the heart

Pain becomes all you know.  

Rejection the only subjection I received.

Asked for guidance, same response,

You’ll make it hopefully,

That’s the next level, peers don’t see you as a person,

When they see you all they see is a primitive savage,  

Clutch they purse look straight ahead,

See the fear in the eyes and body we all the same to middle class,

Upper class use us as pawns,  

Rest never see us more than what media feeds them.  

Profane, vulgar, insanity what they paint on me.

No more than an abortion.

That’s what they see.

Always look away never acknowledge,

Won’t look into my eyes won’t see the soul.

It don’t matter,  

Had to switch up,  

From an orphanage that everyone is trying to escape from.

This mentality adopts us, and we foster it,

Not knowing any better,

Just knowing lesser.  

Solace in that piece, it won’t bring you much more than material,

Slinging rocks the only destiny in manifestation.  

Finding four fours in a pavilion trying to be a civilian.

Just a kid when I began to see the plot unravel,

How would I know everyone would do bids,

See everyone around me turn to feins,

Its in the vain different sides of the game I see the same.  

It’s in every neighborhood we in, do the math

Ain’t talking addition,

Schools don’t teach us that,  

Judges teach us that when they hand that sentence  

Geniuses with no muse,  

Hide that pain,

Self-medicate never mediate.

It’s all ends the same.

The routine funeral,

Routine to see another slain brother,

Routine to see another sister taken too soon.  

Routine to see folks disappear never to be seen again,

Routine to live in fear.

Coming from a place where no one makes it major

All my homies either dead, in jail, or stuck in the cycle,

Living dead the surface don’t tell,

Look deep into the eyes they don’t lie.

The body won’t live long once the mind gone, it’s all connected

Don't matter when the soul caged up,

The caged bird Angelou told the ode of,

We ain’t given shot to expand our thoughts, die for a little bit of clout,

End up blowing over as quick as you came up,

The target on the back remain the same at birth,

Too blind to see it.  

Don’t matter age of location, ain’t a thing change upon income.

Regardless of outcome,

We all was born in the same place, same opportunity

Only one left, ask me why all the views I see filled with blues,

Failure the only time you make it major on the news.  

They call us rapists and drug dealers, they hate us but never know us,

It’s generational but I can see far past and see the pawns at use by the dons,

They want to see us bleed, it's all a product of greed.  

What can I say,

When they see us for sacrificial lambs to try and get the glory days they ain't never had.

Fuck them, they fools to hustle a buck out of,

Blood in my eye still don’t cloud my sight,

My plight realer than anything they ever been through.

The guillotine what they plant for us.  

First generation with no role models  

Surrounded by the blind, cursed with sight.

Seeing more to this plain, they ain't with it

Go against the grain that’s ya head on a silver platter

Born with no silver spoon,  

Came from the mud in the trenches, one thing for sure,

only promise lie in your brain matter painting the canvass,

be another decapitation.  

Final hours marked by folk lure,

The war stories of anyone stuck in the tar.

The only way to grow is finding a new flow

That’s the only way to blow through the legal, it's all another hustle,

Ain’t another variable, my life ain’t expandable like they say.  

Another lost soul trapped in a cycle.  

They say,

Divine intervention only reason I'm still breathing,

From being another remnant forgotten in time painting the cement with redrum

A relic in a era where everyone want to be basic,

Living in the moment never looking ahead,

Everyone want to earn soon that’s the error,

Look in they mirror they don’t see into the soul.

No sound one just a survivor.  

It gets harder to move on when you switch gears,  

They fear you when you awaken,

Rather see you dead then see you bloom.

They don’t love you when you rise above them

Cold hard facts.  

They ain’t never believe I was more than another one,

They told me I wouldn’t live to see eighteen

Sixteen school told me only e-d-u would be from a g-e-d,

Spoon fed me lies, telling don’t try it,

It ain’t for folks like you, since day one.

Spat in my face telling me it’s a rain drops, get use to the bottom.

Ain’t believe the lies the devils fed.

Rejected what they try and subject me with.

Grew stronger by the day,

They told me I wouldn’t be shit,

Family from distant to the one that gave birth,

It wasn’t just them folks up at the top,

People here and there it don’t matter, only care about me and mine,

I’m selfish fuck who I offend.

They ain’t believe till I made something out of nothing,

Ain’t gonna be in the mud with filthy human swine.

The bottom always crowded, theres space at the top,

Just gotta pave my own lane up there,

They can never feel my pain,

Don’t matter how, gonna get my forty acres,

Ancestors came from shackles, I won’t buckle under their ruse,

The pain is my muse.

Keep it under the surface, they can’t see the truth,  

See they still think I’m crazy,

That’s what the world say, that’s hearsay,

Telling me my fate was in a six by nine cage.

They never believed it me but what does that matter?

They inadmissible, my peace ain’t expandable,

Ain't no subject, don’t listen to the fronts.

Look at it one way.  

I’m still here.  

I still got breath in my lungs.  

I still got drive.  

Not a Don just another saying my word is born,

Fuck all that talk, talkings cheap,

Move in my actions,

It ain’t all surface level, check how do they right by you,

Tell the whole truth,

They try and take my life, rob me of my shots

Split my melon, when I was four

Got up, got them stitches

Stabbed me when I was thirteen

Tended to my own wounds ain’t no one come help me.  

Beaten and battered till green and purple covered me,

Death threats a regular occurrence, they words have no meaning.

A crash ain’t stop me, three weeks off end of first week of uni,

It ain’t take me out

All the pain caused growth,

Destroyed tolerance,

Ain’t sweating defenses no more,

Shoot first, stay offensive to them.

Got back up through every fall and set back.  

Misery built me.

Gave me a foundation nothing can break,  

The child I was,  

Made me into the man I am today.

Here I stand at the crossroads  

Not knowing what's to come

They gonna have to kill me to silence me

It’s bigger than me,

These moves bigger than any picture I can paint.  

Talking that empire, talking that generational wealth,  

Power moves I can’t lose,

I came here with nothing,

Came as an infant on the verge of losing my life,

No nutrition brought me back,

Strength and will, they can’t stop me

Built my strength through tolerance,

Physical, mental, the layers there,

It’s Time

Time to build a new life,  

Time to build a real life.

Got to build a foundation for the future,

Ain’t no fates or destinies,

I’m making one.

Will go the distance.  

What more can I say,

Got to take a virtue,

Know who I am, Know who I will be.

Maybe I’m crazy, Maybe I’m the one to make the changes,

Maybe the one to spark the mind that makes changes,

Only one thing for sure,

Got

One life,

More than that,

Got one last chance.

One chance at redemption.  

[213hiphopworldnews]

Schoolboy Q Takes His First Steps Toward An Elder Statesman Role On The Insightful ‘Crash Talk’

Interscope

Schoolboy Q’s snarling, sneering collections of gravel bitten, war-ready gangsta rap rarely come with straightforward mission statements. If there was any takeaway from his haunting, knuckleheaded raps and hypnotic, off-kilter loops it was always the sense that Q was here for a good time, not for a long time, so he fully intended to go out at high speed, with both middle fingers pointed rigidly skyward.

That was before he hit 30, though. 30 does something to your brain. Some call it growth. Some call it perspective. There’s a moment of clarity that comes with that checkpoint that allows you to look back at all the dumb stuff you’ve done with a combination of chagrin and pride, a sense that yes, those actions were immature and mortifying but dammit, you did them and you survived. It’s ironic that the young often think of the future as something that will never come even as they embody the stubborn belief in their own immortality.

At 30, everything slows down and you realize: Hey, there’s a whole lot more of this life stuff in front of me. Crash Talk is Schoolboy Q’s moment of clarity. There’s some introspection, there’s some future planning, but more than anything, the album seems to be saying, for the first time in Q’s career, that he wants to find something to say, even if he’s not completely sure what that is yet.

The most obvious example of his newfound focus is the semi-title track, “Crash,” on which Boi-1da samples Royce Da 5’9’s seminal battle rap anthem, “Boom,” slowing the beat down to a sluggish stew that allows Q’s Nipsey-esque financial advice to play meat and potatoes. “Your tax bracket ain’t impressive,” he taunts young rappers who prioritize shine over stability, “You buy a chain, but won’t buy no land / That hashtag should say, ‘Desperate.'” It’s almost like he’s G-checking his younger self, who once gang banged on every track and spent his royalty checks on weed and bling.

Now, he hits the golf course to relax and preaches self-love to his daughter. It could come across as crotchety with bad execution, but he makes sure to remind the listener that this wisdom is hard won. He “tried the honest route, but chose house licks,” so now, he rhymes to warn the young away from the mistakes of his own youth.

Of course, Q pays homage to those moments from his own timeline with debauched anthems like “Numb Numb Juice,” “Gang Gang,” “Chopstix,” and “Dangerous,” the latter two featuring turn-up champions Travis Scott and Kid Cudi, delving back into the heavy drug use that has permeated much of all three rappers’ respective catalogs.

In fact, Schoolboy’s new identity as a weathered OG, which he’s clearly still growing into, shines best on the album’s solo tracks; he does some of the most potent rapping of his career on “Tales,” while his guests generally subsume Q’s normally boisterous persona. For instance, “Lies,” featuring Ty Dolla Sign and YG, sounds more like a Ty Dolla Sign featuring Q, right down to the faster tempo and day party vibes of the beat provided by go-to TDE producer Sounwave.

When Q actually sounds comfortable in his burgeoning elder statesman role, he truly demonstrates the most growth, such as on the introspective “Black Folk.” He comes the closest in his career to a more expansive world view beyond Hoover, skating over America’s racist legacy its pernicious effects on the psyches of young Black men: “The water is where we crossed it and got to build it / With dreaming but lost the feeling, we stopped believing in.”

Ultimately, though, he stops just short of formulating that ever elusive mission statement. Perhaps the closest he gets is on the menacing, Lil Baby-featuring “Water,” when he says “Just keeping it real, if it’s realer than me then it’s fake.” While he may not have an overarching theme or thesis he wants to convey just yet, he does know one thing: When he does, it’s going to be authentic and 100% Q.

Crash Talk is out now via Top Dawg Entertainment and Interscope Records. Get it here.

source https://uproxx.com/hiphop/schoolboy-q-crash-talk-album-review/

#hiphop #hip hop legend #hip hop history #hip hop #music #trending #hip hop news #ballin #hip hop scen