A couple weeks ago, a reader emailed me and I said I would give up a playlist of what I consider to be the most essential tracks to help somebody who’s unfamiliar with hip-hop to understand what it’s about. When I said it, I knew it would be a challenge, but I ain’t know it was gonna be this hard. I think the hardest thing about it is differentiating between songs that are important to me and songs that are important to hip-hop. Having said that, however, here goes
It’s A Demo - Kool G. Rap Poison - Kool G. Rap Brand New Funk DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince Radio - LL Cool J Planet Rock - Afrika Bambatta Jam On It - Newcleus My Melody - Eric B & Rakim Lyrics of Fury - Eric B & Rakim Microphone Fiend - Eric B & Rakim Straight Outta Compton - NWA The Grand Finale - The DOC, f. Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy E Rebel Without A Pause - Public Enemy
If you can think of anything I missed, feel free to post it up.
Beautiful Morning - Little Brother Delilah - Take 6 The Moon Walk - King Solomon For The Good Times - Al Green For No One - Maceo & All The King’s Men Fear of a Black Planet - Public Enemy Pretty Inside - David Porter Sugar - Stanley Turrentine Hazel’s Hips - Oscar Brown, Jr. Beats To The Rhyme - Run-DMC Liver Splash - The Meters Fly Like An Eagle - Steve Miller Band Superman Lover - Johnny Guitar Watson This Can’t Be Love - Ellis Marsalis Turn Out The Light - Leon Ware Just A Love Child - Bobbi Humphrey Pushin’ - Society of Soul Valerie - Walter Bishop, Jr.
And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.
He gets it. While I may have my theological and philosophical beefs with liberation theology and some of its logical progeny, I know that in most cases, it ain’t wrong, even if it ain’t right. Considering that American racism is antecedent in the development of liberation theology in the first place, and especially considering the tepid-at-best response of the Evangelical community during the Civil Rights movement, I’m not exactly sure why some people are acting like they can’t figure where Reverend Wright is coming from. And I’m sayin’ - I don’t even necessarily agree with him all that tough, but what he said didn’t come completely out of NOWHERE. It’s just extrabiblical.
What they do, go and ban the AK/
The shit wasn’t registered ANY-fuckin-way - Ice Cube
In the case of the Supreme Court’s hearing on the constitutionality of DC’s ban on handguns, I’m on the “pro-gun” side. Maybe I should parse it a little more carefully and say that I’m anti-ban. I don’t have a gun (yet), but it’s really not that major because I don’t live in the District, proper. I live right outside of DC. So this is only marginally about me.
Generally, I don’t think a ban on handguns is effective in preventing crime committed with handguns. It’s certainly not effective in a city-sized jurisdiction. For one thing, there are too many places where people can get guns for a ban to be effective. What literal difference does it make for DC to have a gun ban when Maryland and Virginia don’t? It’s not like there’s an invisible shield on the Potomac, Eastern, and Southern avenues that disintegrates firearms. If I had a gun before I got to DC, I’ll have one while I’m in DC. So on a very literal level, a ban fails on the basis of geography. I know a lot of people like to bring up the example of places in the world where guns are banned to use that as an example, but a big part of what makes their bans effective is that there are geographical barriers in place that prevent firearms from entering in the first place. DC doesn’t have that.
Another limitation – a big limitation – to any sort of a ban on handguns is that the people who commit crimes with handguns tend not to be the people to whom they are registered. Meaning that they already have the gun illegally. So then you’re in the position of banning something that is itself already illegal. Well, actually, that’s where we are now. We have a law that says something illegal is (more?) illegal. The only people who don’t buy guns in the District are the ones who are following the law. I know this is one of the main arguments pro-gun people trot out all the time, but it’s true. What’s more, research has demonstrated that it’s only a certain subset of the population that uses guns for criminal purposes. It’s not like there’s this whole cadre of normal, mild-mannered people who all of a sudden jump bad and turn into raving, murderous, lunatics as soon as they touch a pistol. Naw. For the most part, the people who kill people with guns were already engaged in some criminal enterprises. Now that’s not to say that they all would have been murderers – their access to guns is what drove them over that line – but the point is that given the fact that it’s geographically impossible to keep guns from them, the fact that they used a gun in the commission of a crime is secondary to the fact that they were committing a crime in the first place.
Having said all that, I do recognize that the use of guns in the commission of crimes is a plague on our society. I was about to say that it’s particularly severe in the inner city, but it’s true in the suburbs too. The only thing is, because I work in the inner-city and live in a fairly (but not very) hoodish suburb, the city is what’s most relevant to me. Moreover, because I’m a Black male and still numbered among the demographic that is most likely to die by gunfire, I take gun violence very seriously. At the same time, I recognize that the question of how to curb crimes committed with guns is complicated. There are no simple answers, and if there were, a blanket policy wouldn’t be one of them. Let alone a blanket policy that’s so full of holes it’s essentially untenable.
So Major League Baseball has shut down a Philadelphia t-shirt vendor who parodied logos of baseball teams with the word ‘Obama.’ For real, though? That’s all they had to do? No worries about this steroids scandal that has embroiled two if its biggest stars. Naw. Get that t-shirt guy!
*****
I think Jeremy’s spot-on in his assessment of which missing persons the media focuses on. Young white girl? It makes the news. Not a young white girl? Not so much.
The really smart part is that Jeremy points out the racist nature of this focus while noting that most people wouldn’t recognize this as being racist.
*****
Here’s a great set of color pictures from pre-WW II America from a very old post at The Daily Kos.
I’m in the process of coming up with a list of remixes that totally crushed the album version. I can think of a few off the top of my head, one of which will only be on the list because a good friend of mine believes it to be so, but Give The People by EPMD is number one on the list. The album version, which basically jacks the track of “Give The People What They Want” by the O’Jays, is alright…it’s serviceable, but nothin spectacular. Especially being on the album, Business As Usual. But the Erick and Parrish mix, which is the version you hear on the video? Vintage Erick Sermon. Which means you hear UFO by LSG. Way, way, in the cut, under it all is the guitar lick from AWB’s School Boy Crush. And this time, they only used the best part of “Give The People.” This is what a remix is supposed to do — even without doing anything to the lyrics.
Speaking of which, Parrish’s first verse here strikes me as being particularly appropriate now.
As airwaves collapse rap shows at a standstill
Some racial circuits the frequencies can’t handle
The funk tracks produced by me and the E-D
But it’s a fat jam, that will never win a grammy
Unless we sellout and kill the black movement dead
Which means swallow our pride and become flunkies instead
And stop the rap about freedom, thoughts of a black president
And rap about a black crack, the mayor in our residence
Give me a break brothers, it’s time to take a stand
And kill that no sir, yes sir, and thank you ma’am
Cuz the word ‘if’ is a luxury a black man can’t afford
That’s why poverty’s on the rise and we still ignored
And it’s a setback and yet the clock still ticks
And if we let it, rap would be run by politics
I read it somewhere that every man’s created equal
But not in this day and age, maybe in the sequel
Which means next time, so observe these rhymes
And take a stand and go for yours cause I’m going for mine
That’s why I
Liberation theology (LT) is prominent in the news this week due to unearthing of one of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. Being that LT has long been one of my intellectual interests, I’m a little more familiar with it than somebody who’s hearing about it and getting all hyped up about the inflammatory aspects of Rev’s remarks. So let me be clear about this: while I think LT is, at least in part, a misnomer, since the former is emphasized at the expense of the latter, I don’t think it’s appropriate to junk the whole car. There are some very useful elements. After all, LT arose because of an improper application of the scripture. In a way, it’s like the natural response to state-sponsored (for lack of a better term) opression theology. Well, I’ll say it’s the natural in-kind response without defecting to another religion altogether. (Hello, NOI.)
Liberation theology’s chief weakness lies in its greatest strength: its focus on the oppressed. Specifically, I think LT goes beyond addressing the needs of the poor and actually casts God in the image of the oppressed. Hence the emphasis on the ethnographic and sociocultural aspects of Jesus’ incarnation at the expense of his deity.
Now understand, I don’t think any part of Jesus’ physical manifestation was random. God’s plan was (is) far too exacting and detailed for it to be any other way. Nevertheless, I think it’s possible to read too much into it. That is, because of our postmodern sensibilities and our emphasis on the census-type social address marker elements of a person’s identity, we have a tendency to act like those descriptions are definitions. But they’re not. They may help to enhance a definition, but, and this is a sofa, relying on descriptors as definition effectively takes the person out of the equation. What you have in that case, in essence, is a composite that should do a, b, and c, based on the fact that he has traits, x, y, and z. So while I don’t think it’s outta line to note the significance of Jesus having been incarnated into a certain flesh within a certain community at a certain place in a certain time, I don’t think it’s right to take those address markers as definitive. Primarily because inasmuch as he occupied a particular space, he also transcends that, so to limit him to that space, or even to act as if the community of the oppressed is his primary locus of activity, is reductive to the point of absurdity. Jesus didn’t just come for the materially poor, he came for the poor in spirit. While his goal had practical, material applications, it was always spiritual. Always. To miss that is to miss the Gospel itself.
(And as a side note, I can never seem to escape people who seem to think that Revelation 1:14 is about Jesus’ physical description. I saw a t-shirt with a picture that could’ve been JJ’s painting from the Black Jesus episode of Good Times, talkin about it was the description from Revelation. But if that’s supposed to be the case, where is the flaming sword and the candlesticks? Why does nobody who quotes that scripture as a physical description EVER wanna talk about those verses? They all go together. But naw. Can’t do that. Reading is fundamental.)
Liberation theology is ripe for critique on many levels, but first and foremost as a legitimate theology. Any time you have to interpret God through your lens as a [insert your brand(s)], then your god is an idol. God is way too big to be defined by our “otherness.” God is also way too big to be defined by our sameness. The point is not to understand God through the perspective of our own experiences, it’s to understand our experiences through the lens of God’s word.
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