Archive for July 28th, 2004

It just occurred to me that there is a sickening irony in the fact that Ice Cube’s The Product is based on a sample of Sly & The Family Stone’s You Can Make It If You Try. Now, I’m thinking that if I had done it, the whole thing would have been intentional. Somehow, I’m thinking Cube & his producers probably weren’t setting it up that way, but what a contrast. There’s a sickening blog post in there and one of these days I’m gonna bring it out.

Let me put this out here right now: I don’t do politics. Some of my thoughts may tend to align more closely to one end of the political spectrum, but that’s about as far as it goes. I claim neither the jackass nor the pachyderm. At the party level, it’s all self-serving and fraudulent, as far as I’m concerned. Not saying that all politicians are crooked, but a politicans have the same job as everybody else: to get paid. Some take their jobs more seriously than others, but that’s the same as it is everywhere else. When I go to Foot Locker, one of the salespeople will really take his time and make sure the shoe fits and answer any questions I may have about fit or what I can expect in terms of the mileage per week, while the other person will just toss the shoebox at me and walk off to look at the girls that just came flouncing in the door, wandering back in my direction only if he’s not getting any play. That’s life. So to point out that such-and-such a politician is really principled or whatever…doesn’t move me. His job is to get me to vote for him and he’ll do whatever he has to to keep it. I vote solely because my grandparents couldn’t. I don’t just walk in the booth and punch levers at random, but when I vote, I’m doing it for Granny and all my other (s)kinfolks who didn’t have the opportunity when they were my age. I won’t say that voting is not useful, but I think that more hands-on person-to-person contact trumps governmental action five days a week. (Some things have to be done by the government, plain and simple.)

Now. I will say that Barack Obama, who’s running for the US Senate in Illinois, gets my attention. Not because of his political stances on anything; I’m not watching that carefully. I was born in Illinois, but I’m not in his constituency any more, so it really doesn’t matter to me. What is interesting to me is that he may represent paradigm shift in the stylings of Black “leaders.” In this article from the Times-Picayune, we see:

“I think this is really the end of an era of race and politics,” said Angela Dillard, a history professor at New York University whose specialty is race and politics. “Something’s shifting and changing, and people like Sharpton can’t change with it, and something new and different is being created and it is about people like Obama.”

The old model of the black protest leader making demands no longer makes sense in an age tapped out and tired of race, Dillard said. But Obama can argue for policies virtually indistinguishable from Sharpton’s in cooler, nonracial terms, while still affirming a message of racial identity and uplift implicit in his very being.

Like I highlighted in the Q-Tip interview, it’s as much about style as it is substance. I don’t mean that in the superficial sense here. I mean that how a person comes across is just as important as what they bring. The book of Proverbs is full of admonitions about just that very thing. It’s not just about race any more, it’s about the complete package the candidate brings to the table. For all I know, Obama may be to the left of Al Sharpton. No matter what his ideology, I like the fact that he’s not taking it to the old 1960’s style technique.

Now, I don’t know what’s being planned for the Republican convention, or who’s gonna be speaking or what, but for some reason I don’t suspect that a Black Republican candidate of the same “star” quality would get quite the same type of coverage. Invariably, there would be some mention of a difficulty reconciling Blackness and Republican-ness, like they’re mutually exclusive. Maybe I’m being unnecessarily pessimistic about that. I doubt it, though. Thinking about the Black Republican politicians I have seen, they definitely did not follow the Dinosaur (read: NAACP) model, but they tended to be rejected out of hand because they didn’t drink the Kool-Aid and vote Democratic. We’ll see what happens.

This is from an interview with Q-Tip, formerly of A Tribe Called Quest.

Q: You hear two things all the time on the internet. One is that, whenever a rapper is up for a role in a movie, people get up in arms about that casting. The other is when someone, like Jadakiss, speaks out, people say “Why should I listen to a rapper?” Hip hop has been around over twenty years. Why is it not getting the respect that rock n’ roll got?

Q-Tip: There’s a couple of reasons. I would be naïve to say that it had nothing to do with the fact that the rappers are African-American males and the majority of this country is white. If you can hear the music and not see the face, if you can just hear the message you can have empathy, but sometimes if you see the face it becomes a different thing. We all unfortunately have a bit of racism in us,

I think the other part of is the things we endow ourselves with. Jay Z is quick to call himself a pimp. Tupac was quick to call himself a thug. L’il Kim is quick to call herself a bitch. When you start saying these things about yourself that are clearly negative, it’s going to be like a magnet. You attract those things to you. You’re going to bring all that commentary to you and what you do. Being that those images are probably the most prevalent in the form – the hustler, the pimp – it’s going to bring all the commentary. What’s going to happen is that when cats don’t get to first base, they’re going to be disgruntled. “Why is motherfuckers hatin’ on us? Knowhuyahmean? You just lucky I ain’t out robbin’ you all.” I speak on that because I’m from the same situation. I grew up right in it, watching my uncle and them squeeze off and mainline and shit, seeing hypodermic needles and hearing gunshots. I grew up in the same New York City that a lot of us did, but I just knew that I was better than all of that. I didn’t want to project any of that. I think that those things are relevant, and they are important, but there’s a tact, and there’s a creative way that you approach it

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He’s dead right. I think there’s definitely a degree to which these personae that rappers have taken on have severely limited their ability to effectively speak on certain issues. Right now I’m thinking specifically of when Jay-Z couldn’t move into that apartment building because the other residents were concerned about what might happen. On the one hand, that reaction is foul. At that time, and probably even moreso now, Jigga could probably buy the building if it came down to it. Nevertheless, it’s his own fault. If Q-Tip had had that type of money, I don’t think there would have been as big a problem (although there may have been. Who knows?) because he has never projected that hustler/pimp image. And the truth is, Jigga may not even have that much going on in his life; certainly he did at one time, but this is Jigga we’re talking about, not Beanie. I’m thinking that Hov is smarter than that. The thing is, it’s not just about the substance, it’s about the presentation. (This is partially the appeal of Obama. I’ll get to him a little later.)