…by someone who CLEARLY has no handle on it, I will vomit.
Quotes from a recent piece of crap journalism in The Economist , an otherwise reputable publication:
“Consider the hot album of the moment: “Tha Carter III” by Lil Wayne. Its central message is that if you are a rap star, you will get laid. The song “Lollipop”, for example, celebrates a young lady who treats Lil Wayne as she might a lollipop.
That’s actually not true…at all. If anything, the central message is: Weezy F Baby…best rapper alive. Or does it have one? Half of the verses on there have the signature Wayne stream of consciousness flow…REGARDLESS, it is obvious this writer has not thoroughly listened to TC3. I mean, he cites the album’s first single that has been pillaging radio airwaves for months to substantiate his claim– great job, buddy.
“The Roots, a group from Philadelphia, are often cited as an example. Their message? “If I can’t work to make it, I’ll rob and take it. Either that or me and my children are starving and naked.””
DIDN’T YOUR HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER EVER TELL YOU THAT IT IS NEVER OKAY TO TAKE A QUOTE OUT OF CONTEXT TO MISREPRESENT YOUR SUBJECT? Have you even listened to ONE of their EIGHT studio albums? If i had been reading the actual print magazine, I likely would have ripped up the page.
Do YOU know who this man is? Lexington at The Economist doesn’t.
I’m posting this because:
1. Paul’s haterific post has been at the top of this page for too long. (Much love, Paul….lol)
2. This is one of my favorite live videos of the High Priestess of Flyness…and I’m currently reading her autobiography.
3. It’s my birthweek, and I can do whatever I want.
Nina Simone — Four Women
By Chloe Wayne
I don’t really have much to say except…
1. Barack Obama > Hillary Clinton – So, Barack’s won the nomination. I suppose I should be more enthused than I am. Well, when I really think about how historic a moment it is, I can understand the hullabaloo. I mean, what if you were a five year old? I can’t imagine what it would be like to grow up with a Black president.
But for the most part, I’m completely turned off to anything that has to do with the election for awhile, until stuff really gets down to the wire. I mean, we all know what’s going to happen in the next few months…Barack’s camp will say McCain is too old and that he will be George Bush, III. McCain’s camp will say that Barack’s promise of “change” holds no weight and that he has no experience…and if that doesn’t seem to work, they will surely spew whatever dirt they can find his way. Wake me up in October.
2. Los Angeles Lakers > Boston Celtics – This is going to be epic. Enough said.
3. Wale’s Mixtape About Nothing > Lil’ Wayne’s Tha Carter 3 – If it weren’t for my penchant for catchy pop-R&B tunes– a la “Comfortable” and “Tie My Hands”, featuring Babyface and Robin Thicke, respectively– I really would not be playing TC3. “Dr. Carter” is the only gem on here, refreshingly creative and real: “And that was called recyclin’…some say it’s bitin’, but I say it’s enlightenin’“.
By Chloe Wayne
I’m a little late on this, but check out this photo a blogger at Daily Kos, “the largest progressive community blog in the United States,” made and posted on the site (only to be taken down hours later):
What can be worse than the overt racist is the well-meaning, “colorblind” white liberal who is “down for the cause” but is seriously ignorant. I was shocked to find that the blogger in question posted the photo as a medium of support for Michelle Obama, and an attack against the Republican Party for their campaign tactics. The person even wrote underneath it: “Copy and send out as you wish.” Are you serious??????
In the question of Black freedom, the textbook answers are 1863 and 1964: the years of the Emancipation Proclamation and a landmark Civil Rights Act, respectively. But when, if ever, have we been emancipated from the mental and psychological stronghold our racially muddied history has had on us? It boggles my mind that the poster could not foresee people’s outrage at such an image, as if the pain of such atrocities no longer weighs heavily on our hearts and minds, as if racism and white supremacy are vestigial flickers of decades past that bear no implications for today.
By Chloe Wayne
Yesterday would have been the 83rd birthday of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz…Dr. Melissa Harris-Lacewell gives us her thoughts on the significance.
Ossie Davis’s rather powerful eulogy for Malcolm:
So far removed from the Civil Rights generation, I find it difficult to assess the extent to which his legacy today reflects his actual impact during his short life, or his posthumous deification or commodification. Who was Malcolm Little, really? How can one grasp such a prominent, polemical figure when his words and images are thrown at us left and right– often scattered, disjointed, and even contradictory– without any historical context or sense of continuity in which to ground them?
I think it’s important for us to commemorate Malcolm, and it is equally so to acknowledge the difficulties we face in making sense of him. Whether we agree with his (varying) ideological stances or not, his relevance today reaches much farther than the one-dimensional personas we have erected in his place.
To duly honor him is to dig a little deeper to study him and the forces/structures that birthed him. Accordingly, if the 1980s and 1990s consigned his countenance to T-shirts and posters, let this generation reject the hoary catchphrases and angry-faced photographs as inadequate representations of the man, and return him– and more importantly, truly progressive and radical action– to the forefront of our political consciousness.
By Chloe Wayne
I’ve been meaning to write this for weeks. And I’m not referencing our tacky-ass lack of posting (due to final exams and such…stupid college kids), I mean that I haven’t been able to find the words.
As the fifth anniversary of Nina Simone’s death passed a few weeks ago, I struggled to catch the slippery sentiments afire in my brain, but failed to string them into anything longer than…What happened to activism in popular culture like that? Where are public figures who have grown weary of simple philanthropy and tired liberal rhetoric?
Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddam
I long for a new “Mississippi Goddam” (take a listen– link is above). The piano pulses and agitates as urgently and frenetically as Simone’s exhortations; it’s difficult not to believe a torrential one-woman apocalypse will be wreaked upon America if she does not get her way.
Today, how many people know that Simone risked her musical career and livelihood several times to headline benefit concerts—for the likes of SNCC, SCLC, and the NAACP among others—for free? When popular cultural memory remembers Simone, musical masterpieces such as “I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl” and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” come to mind (Common recently sampled the latter on Finding Forever).
But what about “Pirate Jenny” on one of her live albums, In Concert? The narrator, a poor black female laborer, imagines counter-violence against her oppressors, “deciding whether they should be killed ‘now or later.’ In a powerful whisper, devoid of any musical accompaniment, Simone offered her protagonist’s answer: ‘right now’” (Ruth Feldstein, “I Don’t Trust You Anymore”). I cannot think of any 21st-century pop culture figure who has put forth such an explicit, angry, radical attack on the status quo.
Speaking of radical icons of the African-American musical tradition– Flava Flav, I spit on thee! May the destruction of a thousand locust plagues descend upon thy being (just kidding….sort of).
Gag me with a fork.
Filed under: Chloe, Class | Tags: economics, opportunity, wall street journal
I’m a business economics student, and at some point, I came to view the standard pedagogy of economics as somewhat disconcerting—why, I have wondered, do our professors spend so much time explaining outcomes under “ideal” market conditions that never actually occur in the real world? Why are we so hesitant to fully scrutinize so many signs that these hypothetical models are materially different from the real-world market structures in which we daily operate?
Perfect competition & Pareto optimality: This rarely ACTUALLY exists in real life. So why are we taught otherwise?
Neoliberal economics preaches the sanctity of free markets, and operates on the assumption that everyone competes on equal footing, and that markets function efficiently and fairly when left to their own devices. We are obsessed with the divine gift of capitalism—a forever-burgeoning “middle class” with bourgeois sensibilities—thus, it is no accident that standard economics ignores the fates of the marginalized, and instead focuses on the “average” individual.
Maybe I’ll call the author of my textbooks and let them know that we are not all educated white males; ergo, shit isn’t as simple as they make it seem.
New(ish) video release from Blu & Exile’s Below the Heavens, “Blu Collar Worker”:
I think I’m a few minutes late…but happy birthday to Blu! That man is so attractive.
New LP release from CRAC (Collect Respect Anna Check)– emcee/ producer duo of Blu & Detroit native Ta’Raach– The Piece Talks drops in stores this coming Tuesday, April 22, 2008. Support the artists!
“Although there are often forces in the community which can counteract the negative influences, by far the most powerful being a strong, loving, “decent”…family committed to middle-class values, the despair is pervasive enough to have spawned an oppositional culture, that of “the streets,” whose norms are often consciously opposed to those of mainstream society.” — Elijah Anderson, “The Code of the Streets,” The Atlantic (May 1994)
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I hate reading about “welfare queens.” I hate reading about black men with more bullets in their bodies than years in their lives. I hate reading about pregnant 14-year olds—I hate reading about what we (all the way over here) think of the “ghetto” (all the way over there). Commentary on the “ghetto” is so often laced with political or moral agendas that are dangerously reductive and all but preclude the possibility of meaningful exploration and analysis. And what is worse, there exists a multidimensional (moral, cultural, geographical) distance that paralyzes us as observers or actors. Unless the consequences of this distance are recognized, we will continue to limit the validity of our observations, and our depictions will be muddled in faulty translation.
Really, Dr. Anderson? You did not find that dichotomy– “decent” vs. “the streets”– problematic? He repeatedly emphasizes that the “residents themselves” use this term– as if he can preemptively shield himself from an imminent swarm of denunciations. As if readers would not recognize the problem of extrapolating use of the term “decent” to the Black poor at large.
So many “studies” of the ghetto immediately locate it as separate and different. I suppose it is impossible to view an entity as heterogeneous when we judge from afar, or toe the boundary to take a quick ethnographic “peek” to substantiate our claims. We arm ourselves with statistics and our handy-dandy notions of morality to judge ‘their’ behavior—but this is where science and morality fail. Drug addicts, murderers, and Bloods are not numbers and statistics. And analyses that seek to compare and reconcile two entities at odds (one good, one evil) often do so prematurely.
To the first point, “the ghetto” that people often speak of is simply a homogenizing appellation (like “the Orient”), and our quantitative analyses are often useful but reductive. To truly understand something, we cannot just observe the structural conditions in which its inhabitants are immersed, analyze statistics taken from random samples to represent the mean disposition of the aggregate, and then impose our understanding of how “society” or an “economy” functions as a bottom line to which their “marginal” universe must adapt and adjust. To the second point, people’s intent on “fixing” something of which they have no extended firsthand knowledge seems silly. So often, analysts fail to acknowledge their distance from their subjects—or perhaps, they simply fail to recognize that this distance must be traversed! Thus, the implicit claims to authenticity in many ethnographic studies are rendered invalid.
Another problem is the tendency to “study” the ghetto with the intention of comparing it to how “normal” American society works, thus reinscribing its location as marginal. What if a Venn diagram representation of the “mainstream” and the “marginal” prevailed?
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