Combat Jack says that DP favors this lamestream media hump.
When DP has a haircut that nigga is hard to handle. If he lost fifty pounds he’d be a beast.
Plus, this dude ROLAND MARTIN is a teh ghey homofactual.
Archive for the ‘The Guest Room’ Category
SEPARATED AT BIRTH: TWO-BIT PUNDITS
Thursday, April 24th, 2008Diary Of A Mad Blogger…
Friday, April 18th, 2008
Editor’s note: RAFI KAM is a crucial part of the iNternets Celebrities collective as well as the driving force behind one of the web’s most highly regarded Hip-Hop blogs, Oh Word. I chose to copy a drop from his site today because speaks to me about understanding, and RESPECTING one’s value. It’s easy to get beat up by the machine to the point where you look to join up with your abusers. RAFI says no to the Stockholm Syndrome and busts back with his own gun. This man’s uzi weighs a ton.
into the devil’s nest · by Rafi Kam
Busta Rhymes has some kind of tirade at his listening session. Complex magazine reports on it but then pulls the audio “at the request of Interscope Records”.
Wait, you can’t properly cover the listening session you were invited to report on? Interscope doesn’t own that audio. Grow a fucking sack, Complex! I thought you’re supposed to be a big deal now? Look around, nobody’s selling records. Are you sure you still need Interscope more than they need you?
So I search out the audio elsewhere online. Some maverick operation must have it right. Ah, there it is on world star hiphop. I’m listening to busta spit some high energy nonsense as if it’s 1996 again, and then all of the sudden I hear in the middle of the clip “WorldStarHipHop.com”. EXCLUSIVE! WORLD PREMIERE! Evil Dee is on the mix – come on kick it!
See, this is why we can’t have nice things.
You want to know who’s holding down hip-hop journalism these days?
Don’t look over here to us or to any of the places in our blogroll. We got day jobs and we’re mostly in it for the groupies. Forget the magazine stands, the Complex/Rawkus/Harris Pub/Viacom/Quincy Jones conglomerates. The SOHH whats and AllHipHops… Forget all those page-view pushers, what the fuck are they good for?
The place holding down hip-hop journalism right now isn’t the Smoking Section… it’s The Smoking Gun. In the span of three weeks, the Smoking Gun has dropped the two craziest hip-hop stories of the year. First they exposed the shoddy journalism of the LA Times and how a con-man served as the source for the paper’s controversial Tupac story. Now they’ve exposed the phony, “notorious” back-story of Akon.
Hip-hop journalism? No such thing. No one is doing their due diligence out there. We got pundits, publicist lackeys, gossips, posers… How about a fucking journalist? Can we make room for just a few of those?
Or is the problem that any number of incestuous media sources would have had to kill that story since Akon’s Konvict Muzik is distributed under Interscope?
Speaking of all this shit, did you know that someone at the LA Times was incubating a multi-authored hip-hop blog?
Not sure whether this was a mission from above or just some maverick Times staffer trying to show what they could do. But they had reached out to some quality hip-hop bloggers like Robbie, Brandon and Doc Zeus. They had this publicly accessible blogspot site (I swear to god, with the damn black background) that was supposed to be secret while they tested out the operation with multiple posts going up week after week.
But then you also had blog contributor Slav Kandyba dropping a link or two to the test site. I’m not sure if that’s how the search engines and LA Observed found the blog but find it they did… Just in time to catch a post by one of the LA Times Beatbox bloggers, with a ton of bravado, claiming his allegiance to his “colleague” Chuck Phillips and attacking Sean Combs for his response to the Tupac story.
As per the LA Observed quote, the blog post shockingly read “You might be a smooth criminal, but when you pick on the media, you pick into the devil’s nest and you will get stung.”
So the cat was now out of the bag on the LATimes Beatbox, and here was this lone blogger on it, defiantly gung-ho about the right of him and his colleagues to spread lies without fear of reprisal. Bear in mind, this is already days after the LA Times has retracted their Tupac story, having been disgraced by the Smoking Gun expose. Now a blog with their name on it is saying “step off Diddy, we are the all-powerful media!” Naturally the Beatbox demo blog was obliterated that very same day and we’d have to assume the idea of an LA Times hip-hop blog along with it and, if the world makes sense, perhaps someone’s job as well?
The craziest part to me is that these would-be LA Times bloggers weren’t offered a dime for their words. For some, the supposed legitimacy of the LA Times name on their resume or maybe the idea that they’d get more exposure was the motivating factor. For others, it may be enough to belong to a powerful, infallible, and vengeful crew known as the media.
But I can’t get over the fact that these smart, successful bloggers were sort of rehearsing for an non-paying job for a commercial newspaper. As I said to Robbie (who backed out of the arrangement early), the LA Times doesn’t give him any added exposure over Unkut. When it comes to hip-hop, Unkut is super-credible… and what is the LA Times? Just a desperate print newspaper.
The gang mentality on display in that now vanished blog post is nonsensical but also horribly outdated. What does it mean “don’t mess with the media” when we are all the media? When The Smoking Gun is trouncing big media and hip-hop media alike?
There’s no fair exchange in a good blogger getting exploited by a commercial website or print publication. Most of these operations you think are powerful, are actually in a bad way. Ask yourself, are they creating any value in this world? Or do you legitimize them, instead of the other way around. You might find ultimately that you hold all the power, what then are you going to do with it?
SNEAKER FIENDS UNITE!
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Editor’s note: Today’s guest drop for SFU comes from our esteemed professor at Yale University’s Flavorful Studies department, the GrandMaster.
To the faithful, the addicts, and fiends:
You know I keep putting you onto that slept-on gold. You can basically consider each word posted in this little corner of the interwebs as a map to some chest of hidden sneaker treasure, forgotten by the ages only to be dusted off and put on display right here like a museum curator carefully placing a set of rare butterflies on the walls of a hallowed and worn exhibition hall. That is what a rare pair of kicks are anyways: exotic finds, glimpsed only by explorers of the concrete Serengeti and those fortunate enough to come into contact with us. The joints that stay popping on my feet are veritable lectures in motion. The subject? Style, grace, design, and flyness.
Anyhoo, our topic today is Nike’s BLUE RIBBON SPORTS Air Force III “Samurai Pack” High.
Before they got all Greek mythology on our asses, Nike was founded in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports. Forty years later, the name done changed but the game remains, and Nike is attempting to rejuvenate Blue Ribbon Sports as an urban line carried only by special Nike accounts (Niketowns and some specialty retailers), with a line from kicks to denim to outerwear and tees. One of the first packs dropped under this name was a set of four sneakers inspired by Japanese themes (as if 95% of the so-called “streetwear” industry isn’t these days), including an AF-1 Lo, Dunk Hi, Air Trainer SC, and this Air Force III High.
Air Force III’s are not exactly the most popular shoes out there, and i can understand why. The AF1 has a classic silhouette with clean lines and iconic detailing, while AFIII’s have some of the most random-assed fabrication I have seen in a shoe. I count at least 11 different panels and color-blocking positions on the sneaker that you can see just in the side shot above, and that leads to a shoe that can look real cluttered, if not outright poorly designed, given some of the ass colorways that Nike has dropped these in. Add in the fact that the Three has a wider, lower, profile than the 1, and you have a sports shoe that is outdated and combines some of the most awkward features of a Dunk and an Uptown.
But there is one factor of these shoes that makes all the difference…
Nike wants me to call these kicks ‘Samurai Highs’. Well I call them my DECEPTICONS aka the MEGATRON AFIII’s.
Without even bringing the New York of the 1980s into this and why the name MEGATRON still rings out through the City and culture of DP DOT COM, the Transformers cartoon was that ish for many of us growing up. I remember watching the Dinobots episode so many times we wore through the VHS cassette and had to make a back-up onto a second cassette just so that I didn’t wear down my parents’ VCR head[ll].
Throughout their various animated incarnations, Megatron and the Deceps always repped the purple and gray. Since 60-foot-tall robots do not usually wear rags, this was expressed in their paint jobs and color schemes.
I don’t believe that some Nike designer did not have the ‘Cons directly in mind when choosing the colors for this pair of sneakers. There are three shades of purple, ranging from a majestic maroon to a sort of blueberry-bluish purple, and they fit neatly against the clean black-and-white colorway of the other panels and the flat matte black laces.
The colorway is alone, either, in evoking primal memories of gargantuan Japanese fighting robots. The materials used on this shoe fit perfectly into a mechanical theme, with a gridded-off nylon (?) weave around the ankles and on the toebox, and an amazing carbon-fiber-like material around the heel and front pieces. Factor in the touch of patent leather on the lace guards and ankle support, and I am actually surprised that these kicks don’t transform into some kind of futuristic alien gun-toting wolf-cat hybrid.
I have not seen these joints in a store in a long minute, but when I found them in the Fall of 2006 on clearance in a store that has since burned down, they ran me $40. Seeing as how these are premiums that were supposed to retail around $100, I am OK with that. If luck is with you enough to see them at around that price, I’d urge you to cop. Or don’t, and holler at a brother. I need two pair.
“Eff The Olympics In The A!” – ERNIE P
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
Not since the Olympics were held in Nazi Germany has the need for a total boycott of the 2008 Olympics been so powerful.
The Chinese have subjugated and tortured the Tibetan people, tried to crush their religion, raped and murdered their nuns and tortured and killed their children. At the same time they have been brutal in their repression of human rights of the Chinese people themselves.
How can you help in the boycott. Two ways:
Active would entail writing letters to the media, your political elected officials and to the Olympic athletes, coaches and higher ups. Active would also entail something as simple as putting a sign in your window , car or porch saying “FREE TIBET”. It would also mean wearing a tee shirt with a powerful message. It would also entail rallies, protests and a boycott of any products advertised during the Olympics and letters to the sponsors letting them know Human Rights are more important than gold medals.
Active would also only be limited by your imagination.
Passive would entail passing this e-mail to a hundred friends and asking them to pass it on as well. It would also include not watching anything on television and speaking out to your friends and family. Television and sports have far too much importance in our current lives and boycotting these Olympics would free up valuable time we could spend as quality time with friends, families and loved ones.
Lastly in my eyes the treatment, subjugation and colonization of the Tibetan people is a living mirror of the horrors visited onto Native Americans by the Europeans and the brutality of Apartheid in South Africa or the destruction in Palestine as well as racist Jim Crow laws and segregation right here in America.
Remember the saying “No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”
Peace.
– Ernie Paniccioli, author, lecturer, photographer, human being
HO SIT DOWN!
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
Editor’s note: You may be familiar with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright as the outspoken leader of the congregation that BARACK OBAAMA attends in Chicago. Sneaker Fiends Unite! field general 40 Diesel stops by DP Dot Com to tell us that this Reverend Wright is just dead wrong.
I’d like to take this time to give the DP.com “HO SIT DOWN” to Reverend Jeremiah Wright who’s “Oooh Lawdie” ramblings are threatening to derail the Obama train.
To quote DeRay Davis on Kanye’s debut album – “You’s a n*gger, and I don’t mean that in no nice way!” This applies to Rev. Ike, I mean Wright. Plus when I do break out the venerable 14th Letter Bomb I use it in the same context that Uncle Ruckus uses it to describe Uncle Remus. No German plow-pushers here, I mean the full “ER” (no Mekhi Phifer). Why do I cast Rev. Wright in to the deep, dark end of the n*gger pool? Because like most n*ggers he doesn’t give a f*ck about black people here. He’s acting like your drunk uncle at your Ivy League school graduation luncheon. Yeah you love him for all he’s done but at this point he’s just acting wrong by compromising someone else’s gains so he can ramble on and “keep it real”.
I never got down with the Negroe clergy because I just didn’t see where all that whoopin’ and hollerin’ were gonna get us anywhere other than late for football. Also I never quite rocked with religion like that, and I don’t mean in the smarmy Bill Maher way that casts off any one with a belief system as “stupid”, but that we’ve been calling on “De Lawd” since Jamestown and we’re still fucked up in the game. Marx once said “religion is the opiate for the masses”, well then the Black Clergy is the kingpins of its distribution, and we all know how kingpins can be.
So I admonish this Kingpin Wright because instead of stepping up and making a simple statement like “These are not Barack’s words or beliefs, these are mine.” He’s gonna lay in the cut and line is coffers with more tithes and collection plate duckets. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has to answer for this fool and if he doesn’t show the right amount of contrition everything he’s built could be blown to bits by the media onslaught, thus derailing the first nationally viable brother in years. But see thats what n*ggers do, as Chris Rock said “N*ggers love to keep it real!”, yeah – REAL COWARDLY. I mean Barry-O took on the Farrakhan question smoother than Billy Dee with a case of Colt 45, and in doing that he didn’t shit on ole Louie, he just disassociated himself from the comments he didn’t agree with and kept it moving.
Rev Jeezie here needs to understand whats at hand here, and speak up for the man that thrust him in to the national spotlight. Quit being a chicken shit, and talk all that “Whitey this” in the comfy confines of your Negroe peanut gallery. Step up, stand up, and speak when there’s alot more hanging in the balance than locking down those tithes to remodel your tax free mansion in Chicago. We got a country hanging in the balance here and the integrity of a black man being challenged here. But if you and the rest of The New Day Co-Op of preachers wanna let him fall because you really wanted Missy Hillary then go ahead, we don’t need you. So I’ll end this with a paraphrase of Malcolm’s feelings over the demise of the Nation of Islam…
“Greatest candidate black folks had in years, and a n*gger ruined it.”
Remember y’all real n*ggers don’t die, they just fuck it up for black folk…