Archive for the ‘Jig Lit Review’ Category

Remembering Youth, Remembering Yusuf…

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

yusuf hawkins

Editor’s note: I had to bump this drop back up to the top after learning that Trayvon Martin was talking on his cellphone with his girlfriend before he was lynched. The police ain’t even use the phone to contact his folks. WTF?!?

This reminded me of the story of how Yusuf Hawkins was first encountered by the Bensonhurst mob while talking on a payphone with his girlfriend…

We’ve reminisced on a good number of stories about the New York City of my youth but I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about the tragic story of YUSUF HAWKINS. He was a Brooklyn teenager who was brutally murdered by a mob of boys in the neighborhood of Bensonhurst. The exo-skeleton of this story seeks to blame one youth from the mob for the murder when the reality is that Hawkins was bludgeoned mercilessly with baseball bats before he was finally shot to death.

JOSEPH FAMA is the boy who would serve the most time for the murder while his confederates would mostly remain nameless and ultimately blameless. The racism in this story isn’t really at the ground level. The mob that murdered Hawkins was predominantly white, not totally however. Some of the assailants were Latino. The racism contained in the YUSUF HAWKINS debacle belonged to the district attorneys and the police who shielded the children of fellow police officers and firemen from prosecution.

Remember that the mob that assaulted HAWKINS was reported to be thirty deep. The mob was all working class boys. HAWKINS was from a middle-class family and he visited the neighborhood with some frequency since he had classmates that lived in the area. HAWKINS was actually in the neighborhood that particular night to look at a used car he wanted his parents to help him buy as his graduation-going away to college present.

YUSUF HAWKINS was “one of the good ones” but his case was being handled as though he were a street kid who arguably deserved this horrible fate. In steps AL SHARPTON, C. VERNON MASON and ALTON MADDOX. These dudes were odd but effective at attracting attention. The only problem was that AL SHARPTON’s grandstanding only focused on the assailants when the real racism and injustice was being committed by the D.A.’S office. I’m not trying to say the lynch mob wasn’t culpable for the murder but it was the district attorney’s responsibility to bring them all to justice.

yusuf hawkins

Poor people, irrespective of their so-called race will always mistreat each other. Limited resources and miseducation insures that better than AIG ever could. The real tragedy of YUSUF HAWKINS life was that even the negro with middle-class aspirations is denied the protection and equity of the law that his parent’s belief in the system had indoctrinated into him.

When HENRY LOUIS GATES received the nigger treatment this summer he was shocked and appalled. He didn’t realize that he wasn’t part of the equation of justice. He never was. God please rest YUSUF HAWKINS for reminding us.

yusuf hawkins

SNEAKER FIENDS UNITE!

Monday, February 27th, 2012

The Top 10 Hip-Hop Sneakers Of All-Time

DP Rocks The Dub…

Monday, January 9th, 2012

The big homie Khal from Rock The Dub asked me seven questions about what I do here on these internets and I think you’ll get a little more insight into the mindset of the maniac known as Dallas Penn…

#SevenQuestions: Dallas Penn

Back From The Future

Monday, November 21st, 2011

Editor’s note: All praise due to Combat Jack for getting me two(2) bylines in the latest issue of The Source…

Were you caught up in all the hype of the release of the Nike Air Mag shoes nicknamed the ‘Marty McFly’ after the lead character in the Back 2 The Future movie franchise? The pricetag might have been somewhat prohibitive however if you work at McDonald’s, or worse, write for a living. But if Hip-Hop has taught us anything it has enabled us to spot trends in advance of their blooming so that we can get in on the pop culture action from the ground floor.

Who better than The Source magazine then to spotlight some of the trends which will take over the culture in the next few years. Invest in these trends now and by 2015 you can flip these off to your friends for a sizable profit.

2012 – Apocalypto Rap – The Mayan calendar ends in the year 2012 which also coincides with the birth of Jay-Z and BeYonce’s first child. Will this baby be the savior of the Earth or the messenger of death? Neither, but the child’s birth will spawn the subgenre of rap music dedicated to decoding the book of Revelations. If you think Jay-Z’s book ‘Decoded’ was a bestseller get a load of this joint called the ‘Bible’. No, I mean read the Bible.

2013 – Scarface 30 year anniversary – What in the world is more Hip-Hop than the movie Scarface? And what is more romanticized than selling drugs to people you live with because going to school or working to build your community is just too fucking hard? On the 30th anniversary of this seminal film in Hip-Hop culture we will see a rebirth of recreational crack cocaine use. You can either smoke it or sell it (trust us, sell it) but you had better buy yourself a whole lot of it now before the price skyrockets. Beam me up Scotty.

2014 – Illmatic 20 year anniversary – Something that is also very Hip-Hop is nostalgia and reminiscing on the good ol’ days. You know, the days you used to catch lightning bugs in jelly jars and ride your Big Wheel on the sidewalk, before you would have to sell crack to your neighbors. On the 20th anniversary of what most rap bloggers have determined is Hip-Hop’s greatest album we see a flood of CD’s titled in homage to NaS’ classic… Trillmatic from Bun B, MeekMillmatic, Pillmatic, and IllBillmatic. I even predict Sean Price will release Brownsvillematic which is actually his Mic Tyson album that was due to drop in 2010.

2015 – The reconstruction of the World Trade Center site is finally completed and Biggie’s line from ‘Juicy’ is permanently deleted from the song, lest the new WTC site get blowed the fuck up again.

2016 – End of the world – Kiss your sweet ass goodbye because its all going to end this year around the time of the WNBA playoffs.

Whites Were The Original Niggers…

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

og

Instead of trying to stop people from using the word nigger we should be trying to have as many people use the word as possible. That is how you put the word in its proper place. For generations it has been a term of derision for African Americans and no Black people have been courageous enough to study the roots of the word. Not the Alex Haley ‘Roots’ which are powerful for sure, but the etymology roots, the beginnings, the genesis, the O.G. usage. It wasn’t a bad word in the beginning because it described someone’s occupation.

In America we have done such a good job of reconfiguring language that most of us don’t recognize what we are describing when we talk. That’s why your cousin Billy Sunday comes here to XXL Mag Dot Com. I come to bring the light to the dark. Not that Dark, because I don’t think he has the mental capacity to go in too deep. The dark in the figurative obfuscated sense. I imagine that’s why most of you come to these threads in the first place. You want someone to make some semblance of sense out of this fucked the fuck up American pie. Since you came through, let’s go in…

The roots of the word nigger are northern European. The Dutch settlers that came to America to find their fortune were land owners back in their old country. Who else would have the scrilla to contract a ship to bring them across the Atlantic? These wealthy land owners were enticed at the idea of the Americas being a land of gold and riches. In order to build their settlements and their communities over here similar to the establishments they held in Europe they had to bring their entire staff as well.

You don’t think they made their sons and daughters build their houses do you? That back breaking manual labor was the job for their indentured servants. The settlers charged their servants money to come over here. The idea was that the settler would grant their servants a plot of land to live and which to farm just as they did in the Netherlands or whatever they called that shit they came from. What the settlers realized was that there was a shitload of land here in the Americas and to settle all of it, because let’s be honest, when is white ever gonna be happy with just owning half of everything, they would need more laborers.

og

The Indians were bad laborers. Now when I say Indians I am referring to the ancestors of the dudes that drink too much and own all the fucking casinos. Not the dudes that can’t hold down their liquor and own all the Qwik-E-Marts. Those are hindudes. We’ll get to them in a minute. The Indians were lousy servants because they had this funky attitude like “Why should we work for y’all motherfuckers when we was living here, eating deer, and minding our own business?” The settlers then decided to merc’k the Indians something like how the Red Sox are gonna kick Cleveland’s ass. Except the settlers did that shit more fly than the Red Sox. The settlers handed out blankets filled with smallpox.

Back to the issue at hand… Where would the settlers get more of the laborers and farmers that they need to capitalize on all the open space that the Indians were giving them? The key industry that made the Americas so valuable wasn’t so much precious metals or minerals, but agricultural products. Unlike Europe, which was mostly craggy and cold, the Americas were a fertile, healthy landscape where all types of plants, fruits and vegetables prospered in. You know how much cake you could make in Europe selling agricultural products? Wild amounts. The settlers needed bodies to help them stack that guap, ya’ dig?!? But even better than bodies, the settlers needed specialized farmers.

In the old country farmers were the backbone of the community. You could trust the man that spent his waking hours digging in the dirt or driving the team. The plowman was literally the salt of the Earth. This motherfucker walked behind the team of animals and by the end of the day he was up to his knees in shit and animal piss, because you can’t tell an ox or a mule when or where to shit and piss. They do that shit and it becomes fertilizer for the crops. That’s why the plowman can’t come into the house to eat. Mom dukes ain’t having that fool track animal shit all around the house. The plowman sits out back and gets his meals sent through the kitchen window. In Germany, or Deutschland, or whatever the fuck they called that shit, the plowman was called the negger. That described his job. That’s what the people called him. No big deal either, and keep in mind this is whites calling other whites this shit.

At that point in time the human condition didn’t separate themselves by skin complexion, but by language and respective nationality. The idea of using skintone as a system for separating people was adopted by the Europeans from the hindudes who had a setup that divided their priests from their farmers and manual laborers. The hindudes caste system appeared to the Europeans as social stratification according to skintone since the priests were essentially lighter skinned than the farmers. No big surprise to me though since the farmers were outdoors all of the time. Anyhoo, the Europeans never really bother to ask questions about shit they don’t understand, they shoot first and let God do all the sorting and paperwork. The Europeans needed farmers in the Americas and there were some damn good farmers in Africa, or Nubia, or whatever the fuck they called that shit back then. The Europeans had found their neggers.

og

At that time the Europeans from the north called dark skinned people Schwarz. That’s the Deutschland word for black. The Europeans struck a deal with the a-rabs from the Mediterraenean region to deliver them some of the best farmers and laborers from the fertile regions inside central Africa, or Nubia, or… You know where the fuck I’m talking about. The a-rabs have been doing this slave ship since the Code of Hammurabi days so that was nothing for them. The a-rabs were slick and they played the Africans against one another. They basically had the Hebrew farmers in the central region stuck up by the gentile Africans. Most of you so-called Black people here in America are actually Jews, but that is a whole ‘nother Sunday school drop.

Check this foxy shit out… White don’t play that shit when it comes to keeping his stacks in order. Why you think he labeled an area of Africa the ivory coast? Or the gold coast? Because that is where he steals that shit from. That dude is so hardbody that he labels the map to tell him where to go to get the natural resource he wants. He labeled a whole region in central Africa NEGGER because that was the shit he was mining from that region. Negger eventually begets Niger just like tomatoe begets tomato. They are the same things no matter how they are spelled now. Shitloads of schwarze neggers are brought to the Americas from Africa.

FYI, Billy X. Sunday Fun Fact: Schwarze Negger = Black Plowman

Back to the lesson… The schwarze naggers aren’t just brought to America for their agricultural skills and their labor. They are brought here under a systemic organized platform of terror. Families are purposely separated. People from the same ‘hood are also divided and deposited in different areas. There was never a system of slavery on this planet that treated the human with such an utter lack of humanity. Being a plowman was never this bad. America’s neggers were the beasts of burden and not the oxen. Let’s face it though. If you are gonna do some shit that is fucked the fuck up you might as well do it like you’re doing it for t.v. Despite all the bullshit these neggers perservered. I call that God’s sense of grace, because there were millions of people that didn’t survive the four months at sea in the cramped hull of a boat while they slept in their shit, piss, vomit and blood. If you ended up in America you were meant to be here.

Fast forward past all that Civil War shit to the time in America when manufacturing and industrialization supplanted agriculture as the steam machine that powered our GDP/GNP. America began to develop a class of people that were not land owners nor farmers. The people that still worked in agriculture typically did not own the lands that they labored upon. There were African Americans that were becoming educated and even land owners themselves. This is when the word nigger becomes a slur. It no longer describes the persons occupation, but in a manner it assigns a caste to the person. To tell someone that no matter how straight their hair is, or how fancy their clothes are they will always be subservient is a statement of social mobility.

og

The word nigger was used mostly by the transplanted immigrants from Germany and Ireland. They escaped famine and disease in their former homelands only to find that America was not so much the land of wealth as it was the land where you maintained a racial hegemony. If you didn’t maintain this color line you jeopardized your possibility at achieving the ultimate cultural lottery ticket which was to step into the ruling class. This is how supremacy works and it is the obligation of white to keep this shit rocking or else we could have a chink as the president one day. Yeah racism sucks wild balls, but what other choices do we have? I don’t care who your favorite rapper is, racism, and the word nigger is here to stay.

The reason I give you this drop today is to support NaSir Jones and the projected title of his latest album. White created the word nigger and they used to call each other the word too. Most likely as a term of affection I might add. I can see some old European land owner standing on his porch and looking over his land as Johann or Bernhard or whatever the fuck his name was worked in the field. That’s when the land owner would say to his fellow land owner, “Johann is my nigger.” I don’t think it’s right to forbid white from using the word nigger, especially not from forbidding him to call other white nigger either. How else are white going to be able to request the title track from NaS’ new album on the radio? You know white is going to be buying that shit too.

Now that we have agreed on the name for NaS’ new album can we help my nigga select some beats?

stillmatic