[VIDEO]
SBTRKT - Never Never (SBTRKT, 2011)
[VIDEO]
Synkro - Why Don’t You (Broken Promise EP, 2012)
Absolutely phenomenal piece of post-dubstep. Just can’t believe the subtleties here. Why isn’t Synkro as widely known as some of the genre’s mainstays?
[VIDEO]
Prince - The Electric Chair (Batman, 1989) (Live on Saturday Night Live)
We were discussing today how so much of Prince’s material seems ahead of its time, even now. Comparisons to Tesla or Verne might be apt.
[TEXT]
It seems like at least a couple of the hip hop “controversies” of the past few years have involved young women finding new ways to express themselves (“Gucci Gucci,” “Okay Cupid”). Of course these are young WHITE women, but maybe that’s a straw man (no one’s gotten riled up about Mac Miller). Where’s the gender convo? Y U Mad?
[PHOTO]
“Why does there always seem to be enough money for military expansion, prisons, bank bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthy, but not enough for education—or for jobs, housing, healthcare, or old age pensions? These are not “welfare” but are part of the social contract for which we pay taxes and make social security payments.
In an article reprinted on Truthout on May 10th titled “Why Isn’t Closing 40 Philadelphia Public Schools National News?,” Bruce Dixon posed this answer:
The city has a lot of poor and black children. Our ruling classes don’t want to invest in educating these young people, preferring instead to track into lifetimes of insecure, low-wage labor and/or prison. Our elites don’t need a populace educated in critical thinking. So low-cost holding tanks that deliver standardized lessons and tests, via computer if possible, operated by profit-making “educational entrepreneurs” are the way to go.”
[…]
Legislation for public banks has now been introduced in 18 U.S. states, on the model of the highly successful Bank of North Dakota (BND). Elaborated on at the Public Banking conference by Ed Sather and Rozanne Junker, the BND is currently the country’s only state-owned bank and has been a major factor in allowing the state to escape the recent credit crisis. North Dakota is the only state to boast a significant budget surplus every year since the economic downturn of 2008.
[…]
“Speakers Michael Sauvante and Mike Krauss noted that efforts are underway in several Pennsylvania and Ohio municipalities to create public banks. One possibility is for public banks to take an aggressive role in ending the foreclosure crisis by acquiring abandoned and foreclosed homes by eminent domain. These homes could be added to the asset base of the bank, which could extend credit to restore them and then sell or rent them at reasonable rates.
Krauss noted that Philadelphia already has a strong effort underway to create a “land bank”—a bank to acquire, rehabilitate and create productive uses for the city’s more than 40,000 vacant properties—and legislation (HB 1682) has been introduced in the state legislature to enable this effort.”
[VIDEO]
if only denver was a bit more humid… this is brilliant.
How To Make Moss Graffiti.
[QUOTE]
Q: People can be pretty skeptical nowadays about people who claim to be awake, and it may appear to many that you’re setting yourself up for an awful lot of criticism. And isn’t that telling?
A: I think it’s unfortunate that a person can spend hour after hour, day after day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime dedicating his life to enlightenment, and yet the very notion that anybody attains enlightenment is a taboo. We’re all going after this, but God forbid somebody says they’ve realized it. We don’t believe them, we’re cynical, we have doubt, we go immediately into a semi- or overt attack mode. To me it highlights the fact that people are chasing an awakening they don’t believe could happen to them. That’s a barrier, and the biggest one.
Q: What might explain this tendency?
A: People want liberation, but they are also terrified of it. If they completely let go, they fear they’ll find a dangerous, deluded person underneath it all. The sense of Original Sin is alive and well in us. We think that there’s something fundamentally black about our nature, that something monstrous will emerge if we let go. We walk around all day in this virtual reality, physically experiencing what the mind is telling us. If we stop, see through it all, and give it up, what will become of us? It’s scary. Everything in the end is a defense against nothingness.
— Adyashanti, “The Taboo of Enlightenment”
[QUOTE]
There’s no such thing as never getting angry. Enlightenment can and does use all the available emotions. The idea that enlightenment means sitting around with a beatific smile on our faces is just an illusion.
— Adyashanti, “The Taboo of Enlightenment”
[VIDEO]
Killer Mike & El-P - Reagan (R.A.P. Music, 2012)
There are a lot of problems with the particulars of Mike’s politics, not just in this track, but across the board. For example, it should be obvious that the Reagan administration and the Obama administration “went after” Muammar Gaddafi, for vastly different reasons (and had it not been for Obama’s extremely poor handling of just about every campaign promise he made to the left before US intervention in the Libyan civil war, it’s probable that no one on the left would have cared one way or the other how his administration handled that one issue, but anyway). To wit, Noz recently posted this on tumblinerb:
I’d say I’m more sympathetic to that sort of worldview in theory than in practice. I don’t personally believe in the Illuminati or any of that dumb shit. Ultimately I think the scramble for the almighty dollar isn’t as organized as anybody would like it to be. There’s no global conspiracy or secret society, the underprivileged people who are getting fucked are only suffering that fate circumstantially. If it were more somehow more profitable for the powers that be to bring them up they would do so but, y’know, capitalism doesn’t work that way. [The hilarity being that the scramble is organized by how capitalism works: the underprivileged are fucked by design, not circumstance, anywaying again.]
Mike seems to subscribe to a similar worldview—as the “Ronald, 6, Wilson, 6, Reagan, 6” ending of the song implies—but his general sentiment is some of the most potent messaging in hip hop today that it’s no wonder listeners are so drawn to his rhetoric.
“Reagan” is a distillation of everything that makes Mike’s material so biting. It’s a master stroke for a number of reasons: the plodding piano-based beat that explodes in its last third as Mike faults the feds for continuing the war on drugs and a senseless foreign policy from Reagan through to Obama, the connections drawn between that same war and the prison industrial complex that has grown up around the indenturing of black men and the way that these two together act as a foundation of US domestic economic policy, the repetition of the three-note buzz synth tying together the disparate parts, and a genius use of Reagan’s public addresses during the Iran Contra affair. What’s most striking, however, are the opening lines:
The ballot or the bullet, some freedom or some bullshit?
Will we ever do it big, or keep just settling for little shit?
We brag on having bread, but none of us are bakers.
We all talk having greens, but none of us own acres.
If none of us own acres, and none of us grow wheat,
Then who will feed our people when our people need to eat?
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect summation/indictment of our current situation, especially with regard to popular entertainment. It becomes increasingly be apparent why Mike is such an important figure within hip hop, and what an absolute gift to his fans to be working over such an impressive group of instrumentals, courtesy of the man El-Producto, no doubt one of the best producers to ever work in the genre. An absolutely killer combo, and even though we can’t wait for more, we’re more than happy to chew on material for a long time to come.
thank you trent reznor for everything. thank you dalek and el-p for everything else. thank you lex luger's arpeggios. thank you synths and drums on "808's and heartbreak" and "graduation." thank you clams casino's vocal samples. thank you neptunes on "hell hath no fury" and "lord willin." thank you young l's drums and samples. thank you aesthetic of "xx." thank you shawty redd's theramin game. thank you everything about block beattaz. thank you burial's "archangel." thank you young jeezy's voice on "the recession." thank you dj toomp's synths. thank you laptop. thank you. thank you paulstretch. thank you time stretch. thank you pitch shift. thank you dj screw's whole fucking idea. thank you city of syrup. thank you nolia. thank you wayne's metaphors. thank you timbaland and aaliyah and missy in the late 90s. thank you animal hide. thank you clay. thank you burzum's first four albums. thank you organ-based end section of "hvis lyset tar oss." thank you double picking. thank you double bass. thank you sub bass. thank you reason. thank you peak pro. thank you software piracy and torrents. thank you danja's weirdness. thank you avant and bloodshy. thank you britney spears' "blackout." thank you "no wow." thank you based god. thank you reverb on every arena rock song. thank you "endtroducing" for being completely sampled. thank you chorus of "all the things she said." thank you the-dream, tricky stewart, and radio killa.
