Archive for the ‘D-Cepz’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

God Has Mercy…

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

dpxalb

^ Thinking of a master plan…

This week has been one of the craziest ever in my life. My day job is crazy enough as it is without having a project like the one I am trying to prep for a ribbon cutting in another four weeks. The Mayor’s podium will be at that joint too so that makes everyone extra anxious. I don’t really have the time to speak to y’all right now. Especially if I’m going to keep my afterwork schedule so brawlick. On Thursday I left the dayjob and was motivating to the PNC Radio studios to listen to Che Grand’s new album ‘Everything’s Good Ugly’. God was already speaking to me and I wasn’t even listening.

I exited the subway and as I was walking down Jay Street I heard someone call me by my family name. Dallas is my government name, my Hollywood name, but that isn’t the name that my family uses to address me so I was immediately disarmed and stopped in my tracks. Who the fuck knows me like that in the DumBo section of Brooklyn?!? Wherever you are God sees you and sure enough it was my man GARY from forever. What the fuck is G doing over here? Although if anyone could be anywhere it would be G.

GARY is fearless and knows how to walk the planet. I shouldn’t ever be surprised if I see a picture of GARY on the space shuttle. G has the fake credentials to get him access on the space station. I hugged my lord in the middle of Jay Street for forever. When I asked G what made him drive through DumBo he told me he was looking to see what the fuck these white were up to. Lol. G said that earlier that day he was wondering what was going on with me. I know who put that seed in his mind too. KENNY WASHINGTON. That dude loved Rakim to death and used to transcribe all of his verses into a notebook. There was a Rakim show later this night at the Highline Ballroom. KENNY wanted to go with his dudes GARY and me.

G and I went back around the way and politicked with the dreads. We twisted up in the park on Franklin and Montgomery just like it was 1989. G’s peoples came down from the building. GARY admonished dude for coming to the cipher without a flame. They playfully argued back and forth before G went to the whip and got his lighter. GARY told dude of the adventures that he, KENNY and I used to get ourselves in. NYC escapades all day every day. Car thefts, boosting missions, 40ozs and blunts on the back of subway trains. It was an everyday operation to survive and thrive in the city without getting familiar with the beast. It still is. The beast rolled down Franklin Avenue and slowed down in front of us. I was just finishing the dutch right then and I tossed it into the grass.

Then my Blaxberry rang out. It was my dude HowFresh at the Rakim show. How had two tickets left and he wanted to know if I could use them. I asked GARY if he and his dude were down to make the trip into the city for this Rakim show? You have to ask some Brooklyn cats that. I knew G was down for the crown and his homey said yeah too. KENNY was definitely in the building. He engineered this whole evening. We drove up to Highline and HowFresh met us outside the venue. Right then Combat Jack and his lovely wife walked up to the spot. We all walked up in that joint and enjoyed the show performed by one of the greatest emcees to ever hold a microphone.

Thank you KENNY.

Thank you GOD.


*A special thank you to DIEGO from Cornerstone Marketing for giving me a press pass.
**Thanks to HowFresh for giving away another set of tickets off the TWitter responses.

Posted in 5 Elements, 5000, Combat Jack, D-Cepz, Fanboy Ish, Ghetto Celebs, iNternets Celebrities, Ninjas, Sneaker Fiends United, T.O.N.Y., When I Reminisce... | 5 Comments »

The Cipher Is Complete…

Friday, August 14th, 2009

bcc

The Boot Camp Clik performed their ‘A Tribute To Classics’ show on Wednesday night in Brower Park. In the heart of Crown Heights they did classics from ‘Enta Da Stage’ and ‘Dah Shinin’. This is the the very neighborhood that birthed these artists. I can’t imagine any other place that this show would be more like a homecoming. We’d have to be on the Franklin Avenue shuttle maybe. I don’t know how we’d get the whole band on the train though.

The Boot Camp Clik is what backpacker rap is all about for me. My Jansport knapsack with the sueded bottom held my Sony walkman cassette player, my Garcia y Vegas, and a boxcutter for whatever whatever. The Boot Camp Clik defines that era succinctly. Even to this day they remain independent artists that haven’t sold their souls, or their publishing, out to the lowest bidders. The Boot Camp Clik has taken the high road in Hip-Hop(literally and figuratively) and this is why they are so important as artistic role models.

Salute these brothers when you see them on the streets.

Posted in 5 Elements, Billy Sunday @ XXL, Blipsters = Hipsters, D-Cepz, Fanboy Ish, Ghetto Celebs, Ninjas, Sneaker Fiends United, T.O.N.Y., When I Reminisce..., Wig Owners | 7 Comments »

Love & Loyalty…

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

bbill

The fabled stories of the Lo-Lives have been recounted in rap magazines already. Their place in rap music myth is clearly secured. When I had heard of the passing of Boostin’ Billy back in June I had to tip my cap. The Lo-Lives were one of many groups that I encountered with my youth collective back in my teenage years. Those were the days of living dangerously and Boostin’ Billy was one of the people that made the lifestyle work for him.

When I gained the contact of his surviving sister I asked her if she would talk for a few minutes on the impact that her brother made on her, his friends and his community. Aside from the urban legends and the street myths is the story of people trying to survive in the ghetto. The days weren’t promised to anyone and the youth in New York City could experience the world of abject poverty and despair in one minute and the aspirational wealth of Madison Avenue in the next instant.

I want to create a series of videos called Brother’Hood which describes the value of brotherhood and love from the people that knew these ghetto superheroes firsthand. There is a humanity that has been discounted from these brothers. They all believed in things much bigger than themselves. All of these brothers had family and community at the core of their sentiments. If their methods for displaying their community values are what you consider less than honorable then you aren’t considering what NYC was like when crack was king.

This episode is the third installment of the Brother ‘Hood series but the first one that I am broadcasting. MICHAEL CULLEY aka Boostin’ Billy deserves to be recognized as a friend, father, brother and son who put his family first and in the same breadth created an everlasting movement in the streets of New York City. Respect what it meant to be official in the 1980’s and definitely respect this man for all the people he influenced with his style and determination.

Posted in 5 Elements, 5000, D-Cepz, Fanboy Ish, Fashion Faux Pas, Ghetto Celebs, Sneaker Fiends United, T.O.N.Y., When I Reminisce..., Wig Owners | 32 Comments »

BLACKNESS… WHO THE FUCK CARES?!?

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

JACK JOHNSON

Okay, so I have been on this “Blackness” trip lately. Why does it seem that all of a sudden a confluence of stories comes to unsettle me? Am I being paranoid? It’s not like anyone has said anything to my face that was malicious or even supremacist. Maybe I’m having a middle aged crisis? Part of the new Blackness is passing away from heart disease while in your mid-forties.

What I needed to do was to find something that would recharge my spirit. Something to validate my desire to keep on living. Thank GOD for the internets. If you search hard enough you will dig up something that falls right into your wheelhouse of emotions. This is the story I have been waiting to read…

A WHITE WOMAN EXPLAINS WHY SHE PREFERS BLACK MEN

Or so I thought.

This shit might as well have been written by DAVID DUKE or fucking JOSEPH MENGELE. I just wish that for once a mainstream media voice would relate to Blackness as not the ‘other’, but the same. This author has obviously been sampling cocks for most of her life and she still can’t get past the outside. There are too many WTF?!? quotables in that article.

This article also reminds me of a discussion that I listened to on Racialicious Radio. CARMEN hosted a podcast which asked the question why there are no “sexperts” of color working in the mainstream media. It’s obviously needed when the only mentions of color are submitted by a racist fetishist. I think the New York Press article was meant to be less serious and more tongue-in-cheek. What I really could have used from the author was more tongue in asscheek talk.

True story, funny story is that the day after I read that article my homey POLOTRON sent me an e-mail containing ANOTHER article from the same author. Holy shit! The way things were developing in my mind I was about to meet up with the author and possibly bump uglies. If there’s one thing I could do it would be to bring her ass back to the white side. White girls aren’t the only ones that got back to white after dating me, but I have been known to give Blak chicks the motivation to find something new too.

HARLEM: IT’S A HARD-KNOCK LIFE

In this article, the author blames the thug element for decreasing the quality of life for Harlem’s indigent residents, as opposed to gentrification by people who could give a rat’s ass about the Saturday afternoon drum circle that convenes in Mount Morris Park.

I always heard that all you need to happen in order to change someone’s voter registration card from Democrat to Republican is to mug them. The truth is that it’s impossible for me to feel any kind of way for the author NOT because I have a tacit agreement with thug life. I don’t. I recognize that it stems from poverty and is harbored by people who have a gut feeling that their options are limited.

The other reason that I don’t feel anything for the author is because I now know the backstory. The REAL story. The man that the author mentions is someone that I have known since we were teenagers. I call him Menasaur. Is he a thug? Yes. Is he a gentleman? The answer to that is yes also. Menasaur was providing the author with more than just hairstyling. He was styling on her with his manhood. The author enjoys Black rods, but apparently doesn’t like to pay to play. I think her white privilege told her that a Black man would see her clit as a gift from GOD. Truthfully, it prA’li looked more like another job. Driving Miss Daisy type shit.

So the author has a sexual relationship with her hair stylist and she is upset with Harlemites for not jumping up to get beatdown when everybody in the building already KNEW that she was behind on her dick payments. If anyone on this planet understands how lay-a-way works that would be Harlem folks. The author had exceeded her grace period and full payment was due.

The author complains that Harlemites accept thugs because they fear them. The author is a liar and a doppelganger. The poor people that live in Harlem, and Bedford Stuyvesant and East New York and wherever else thugs also reside are constantly under attack. Economically, educationally, social accesibility and democratically. They are victimized constantly by outside forces and they in turn victimize each other. If they police, or the government killed every suspected “thug” would there still be poor people? If your answer is yes then the thug would still exist as well.

Fuck what your heard, SUSAN CRAIN BAKOS is a liar, and a thief of services provided (I’m talking about haircuts, not escort services). Hopefully she will use some of the proceeds from her sex advice books to buy herself a place to live where Black guys view a forty-something years old white woman as the goddess Isis. I have no idea where that place is.

Posted in Black Bullshit, D-Cepz, Ghetto Celebs, Lust = Love, No Boutros Boutros... Ghali, Social Upheaval, white | 6 Comments »

I Got A Story To Tell…

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

court st

Chocolate Snowflake just reminded me of a little incident we had on our train ride up to Montreal. I sort of put it out of my mind, but it can serve as a lesson to all of us that in some instances our reputations precede our arrivals.

The Amtrak ride to Montreal is a picturesque twelve hour trip. The track bed runs along the Hudson River and through mountain passes in the Adirondacks. I quickly forgot who I was and immersed myself into the views of farms, with cattle and horses and little Main Street upstate New York townships. When we arrived at the Canadian border I signed off on my customs form and gave it to the border patrol officer.

The officer looked at my passport and me several times. He asked me for my social security number and he checked it off on the manifest printout he was holding. At that point he told me that he would need to take my passport to another officer for verification. I said “Okay” and shrugged my shoulders. This was prah’lee one of those cases where Canada has to limit the number of Blacks coming into their country. How else do you think they maintain a totally FREE universal healtcare system?

When the officer returned he told me to walk to rear of the car where the other officer was holding my passport. This was a bit odd since no one else in the car had been singled out for “verification”. The officer that was awaiting me had a longer printout in his hands. He asked me for my name and my social security number. After I repeated my particulars he asked me a question in his Canadian accent…

“Have you ever been before a magistrate?”

“Come again?”

“Have you ever been before a magistrate or justice?”

WTF is this nigga talking about? Have I ever been arrested? Hells chea! I start telling him the story of the first time I was arrested. You folks know that GOD lives in the details so I go in on the whole crack scene in 1986 (this is a story I have in draft form here at the DP Dot Com server. I want to give it to y’all, but it reminds me of my dad and how good a man he was, and then I get sad when I think about how I disappointed him).

After that I start to tell him about the time that ThunderCracker, SoundWave and I were nabbed in the Bronx in a whip we had stolen. That really wasn’t what the officer wanted either. He was interested in the charge that was called ‘Theft Of Services’. Oh shit! That was the last time I had been arrested. That was an embarrassing moment because it was some serious da-dunt-da-dunt shit. I was arrested in a sweep of subway turnstile jumpers. I caught a case for basically not having a dollar and a quarter.

That is some poor dumb nigga bullshit.

The Canadian border patrolman agreed that was some poor dumb nigga shit and he returned my passport to me and told me to take care.

True fucking story is that I stay winning because I stay losing.

When I Reminisce…

A Birthday Card For T.C.

Posted in Black Bullshit, D-Cepz, H.A.M., Straight Laced, When I Reminisce... | 13 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »