Everybody Is A Star - Sly & The Family Stone

If You Want Me To Stay - Sly & The Family Stone

Who Is He And What Is He To You? - Bill Withers

Remedy - The Black Crowes

Honeysuckle Rose - Fats Waller

Electric Fro - Kool & The Gang

It’s Your Thing - Lou Donaldson

Held Down - De La Soul

Preachin’ The Blues - Bessie Smith

Composite Truth - Mandrill

She’s Just My Size - Count Basie

My Ex-Girlfriend - Tony Toni Tone

Daddy Rich - Rose Royce

Oh My God - Deborah Killings

My Melody - Eric B. & Rakim

Hip Hug-Her - Booker T & The MG’s

Chicken Grease - D’Angelo

It’s A Demo - Kool G. Rap

 

If I was excited about the upcoming NFL season before, I’m REALLY geeked up, now.  The Eagles have (surprisingly, I might add) actually gone out and gotten a starting-quality wide receiver.  Now I ain’t gon’ lie, I liked the Eagles for 10-6 back in June.  This move doesn’t really make me want to change my prediction, but it does make me feel a lot more comfortable.  Here’s why:  Donte Stallworth isn’t the game-breaking receiver that #81 is (when the player is healthy).  However, he is a quality starter, which I’ve maintained all along is all that Donovan ever really needed.  With very pedestrian talent at wideout, the Eagles consistently made moves in the playoffs. Then came the big name and then the big implosion.  Hopefully, this will be a good balance.  This is a receiver with excellent speed, who can catch the ball.  If he can give us something down the field, that would open things up for the lesser lights who have been playing WR all this time.  And who knows?  This might give one of those dudes a chance to develop into something resembling his Madden numbers.

*****

DarkStar drops science in his post on message t-shirts.  Despite the fact that I’ve claimed to have pretty strong t-shirt game, I’ve never been one to wear self-referential t-shirts.  I always thought it was corny.  The t-shirt itself is self-referential.  There doesn’t need to be any reference to the wearer or the viewer.  Like D*, I strongly dislike the current trend in t-shirts.  He writes,

It seems many girls are wearing t-shirts with words outlined in glitter or fake jewels. But the comments are biting, sarcastic, nasty, and “attitudinal.” I don’t like it and I think it is speaking to the growing darkness of these young women’s souls and they are too young, and in many cases, well off, to be sporting such attitudes in words.

The other t-shirts I’m not crazy about are the ones sold in the hood and at ‘hood malls with “ghettofied” permutations of popular brands, where they have a scowling Pillsbury Doughboy-type character and some slight adjustment of the name to make a drug-selling conotation.  In a way, it’s like Garbage Pail Kids, but with a much more sinister and I would even say nihilistic bent.   But then, I think our culture is bent towards the nihilistic, so I probably shouldn’t be surprised to see that fashion is headed in that direction as well.

 

Not that I actually believe this is true, but just the thought…

Did Osama Lust For Whitney?

August 21, 2006 — OSAMA bin Laden has more on his mind than just the destruction of the United States - the world’s most wanted terrorist is obsessed with Whitney Houston, so much so that he’s even mulled a hit on her hubby, Bobby Brown.

Kola Boof, 37, the Sudanese poet and novelist who claims to have once been bin Laden’s sex slave, writes in her autobiography, “Diary of a Lost Girl,” which is excerpted in the September Harper’s: “He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.”

Imagine that VH1 show.
(big up to Scott Wickham)

Games - Tonex

Chain of Fools - Aretha Franklin

Why I Feel This Way - Take 6, f. Stevie Wonder

Feelin’ It [Remix] - Ultramagnetic MC’s

Look To The Sky - Roy Ayers

Listen - Cymande

Swingin’ The Blues - Gene Harris

All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm - Martial Solal

Shimmy Shammy Ya - Ol’ Dirty Bastard

Again - Janet Jackson

The Ultimate - The Artifacts

People In My Hood - Masta Ace

Fat City Strut - Mandrill

Soundbombing - Dilated Peoples, f. Tash

Cold Lampin’ With Flavor - Public Enemy

Sorcery - Billy Cobham

Blind Man Can See It - James Brown

Headbanger - EPMD, f. K-Solo, Redman

I Can Hear You Calling - Three Dog Night

Transmograpification - Fred Wesley & the JB’s

Allure - Jay-Z

Let the Music Take Your Mind - Kool & The Gang

So Many Millions - Fishbone

There Is Nothing Before Me But Thang - Parliament

Clean Me - Lisa McClendon

Hihache - Lafayette Afro Rock Band

Here My Dear - Marvin Gaye

Pull Fancy Dancer/Pull -  One Way

Get By - Talib Kweli

Machine Gun - The Commodores

Let’s Get Cozy - Black Sheep

Niggas Bleed - Notorious B.I.G.

Step Into A World (Rapture’s Delight) - KRS-One

Together - Ohio Players

Smile Please - Stevie Wonder

Terraplane Blues - Robert Johnson

Crosstown Traffic - Jimi Hendrix

You Can’t Fade Me - Ice Cube

Just Kissed My Baby - The Meters

Had a situation where a student got caught up in the mix.  It wasn’t his fight - it had nothing to do with him directly, nor did it have anything to do with the people on whose “behalf” he was acting.  Not really.  But there he was, all in the middle of the action.  The resultant action by the administration was swift and decisive.  His parents thought it was too severe.  Because summer school is over and because I didn’t really have the time to talk to them, I didn’t get real deep on it when I saw them, but here are my thoughts on the situation.

Looking at it objectively, lots of people want to be at the center of the action.  People wanna be there when it goes down because that gives them some sort of notoriety when they describe the scene to their “unlucky” friends who missed out.  In a way, I guess they’re like sports journalists - they’re not actualy in the game, but because of their proximity, they can write themselves into the story and in turn get some type of celebrity.  Like that new Toyota comercial says, it’s not so much about what you did, it’s about being there when it happened - wherever “there” is.

For most people, it works out pretty well most of the time.  They come out unhurt, with good stories.  On the other hand, I’m pretty sure there are lots of people in jails, hospitals, and cemeteries who had the same plans.  “As long as I’m not directly involved, I should be okay, right?”   Only problem is, it doesn’t always work that way.  Lots of people fail to recognize that until it’s too late.  Personally, I hope that that student learns from this moment that the center of the action is not always the place to be.

Well, day by day, as I listen to the ole MP3 player and try to tax myself on sample sources, I’m starting to realize which songs I’m missing.  In terms of sheer volume, a person might reasonably say that I have enough music.  Of course, accomodation must be made for the fact that I’ve been too lazy to convert all of my CDs to MP3, and I’ve been too cheap to buy another record player so I can get the stuff off vinyl.  But, yahmeen.  I’ll get it all back eventually.

Check out Mark Anthony Neal talking about hip-hop in its various stages, forms, and states of matter.  Lots of good stuff here, but the goodness is this piece about “crunk.”

When you think about criteria of good hip-hop–lyricism, story telling, and flow–these cats ain’t got lyricism. I don’t know what the story is they’re telling, and some of them really are flow challenged. But, I had to come to terms with the power of crunk. What is it about crunk in its natural space that gets people off the wall? And I’m wondering….

I’m wondering too.  The thing is, I know that crunk and other similar genres are basically what the kids are listening to.  It probably has about the same influence on my students as LL and Run-DMC and (God forbid) Public Enemy had on me.  The thing is, with PE and LL and Rakim ‘nem, lyrics mattered.  Really, lyrics were the only thing that mattered.  These days, I don’t think that could possibly be the case.  Which means that for as much as I don’t have a problem with utilizing hip-hop in the classroom, I don’t think I can use crunk.  But really, I think that the kids are fairly interested to know what I listen to now and what I used to listen to.  It seems weird to me that they think that 1990 was such a long time ago, but most of them weren’t even born yet.

*****

At the Mother Jones Blog, there’s an interesting post on an NYT article about the rising number of men who are voluntarily unemployed.

The article mostly delves into the causes of this trend—in particular, there’s the decline of stable, unionized jobs, especially in manufacturing and technology, and the unwillingness of those who are laid off to seek work that’s beneath them, preferring instead to pursue other interests. In that case, the fault resides with an economy that’s chiefly creating low-paying, unfulfilling, and overly stressful jobs. There’s also the fact that roughly 2 million men in this age group have prison records, thanks largely to the surge of drug-related convictions in the 1980s and ’90s, and have trouble finding work.

Now, I got a little problem with that.  See, this feeds right into my contention that we have and are becoming a nation of punks.  We’re spoiled.  Because things have always been easy, we pretty much expect them to be and think that we can drop out when they’re not easy or fun anymore. I’m sayin -  I know times have changed, but have they changed that much?  Not to mention the fact that this trend, while not captured in unemployment statistics, has a not insignificant effect on the economy.

*****

Gotta send a super-fat shout to my man, Dr. Marc L. Hill, who’s joining the crew at Blackprof.com.  I knew that brother back when… (I’ve been waiting to say that about somebody.  Now it’s my turn to make somebody say that about me.)