ERNIE PANICCIOLI’s grizzly is unmatched. He is releasing ANOTHER book featuring his dramatic photographic headshots of popular culture icons. You need these books because they serve as time capsules for the definitive icons of American culture over the last forty years.
www.lulu.com
With less than a year to go in what may be arguably the worst presidency in U.S. history, the G DUBBZ administration can’t stop, won’t stop until the Constitution is washed away like a New Orleans seawall.
DICK CHENEY is intimidating Congress to not only extend the wiretap surveillance law, but also to idemnify telecom companies from civilian lawsuits since they are actually the ones working as the govenment contractors. On the real, please go IN on this article…
Cheney prods Senate to extend surveillance law
Now ain’t this a bitch from Nutbush?!?
You mean I am paying the phone company to spy on other Americans!?!
Ha! What’s next? People paying their own money to walk around with clothing brand logos on their chests.
*Gives credit to the OBAAMA campaign for busting out the green marker.*
Old folks stand up and throw some D’s on this bitch!
I am officially old and washed up. I have been in denial for the last several years in part because the music I enjoyed during my youth was still populated by artists that I enjoyed listening to when I was a bit younger. Even though these artists found it increasingly difficult to produce and release new music just their presence reassured me that I still belonged among them. When the realization finally hit me that I no longer belonged it was colder than ice cold water to my face. I remember this feeling many years ago when this little Philipino chick that I was crushing on sent word through one of my friends that she didn’t like me that way. Heartbreak doesn’t even go deep enough.
I found myself at the wrap party for The Wire last night(more on that later) and my homey from Brooklyn Bodega told me to leave rap music alone. I was too old. It no longer was for me. I resisted. In my mind I begged rap music to reconsider my feelings. We did have good times together didn’t we? Sure I dated soul, funk, jazz and rock music on the side, but that was for sample sources, so that I could become a better lover of rap music. I always came back didn’t I? Rap music unfortunately had moved on. There was no time for a guy like me who had all of these lofty demands.
Here I am trying to espouse complex socio-economic themes and heaven forbid, polysyllabic rhyme schemes while rap music has moved in the direction of songs based on guttural expressions like ‘Yaaah’. This isn’t the fault of Soulja Boy either even though he failed the 9th grade twice before dropping out of high school. I can relate to his plight since I have a G.E.D. my damn self. His triumphant satisfaction with lyrical mediocrity was already trumpeted by the crapper Mims when he said that “I can sell a mill saying nothing on the track”.
This is a scary moment for me. Someone cue up that song from Rose Royce ‘Love Don’t Live Here Anymore’.
Thank you.
So where do I go from here? I suppose I could go back into my funk mode, but lord knows that shit only sounds good with reefer. I love Coltrane ’til deaf, but his music just doesn’t make my head nod unless its sampled by the Bomb Squad. I supposed I could pull some 1980’s new wave shit out for a minute, but when you listen to too much Soft Cell that shit gives you a vagina like HGH. I think its time for me to pull out my Bad Brains and The Clash albums. No one is talking that hardbody social justice shit anymore. The revolution always gets co-opted and silkscreened onto a t-shirt like Che Guevara.
The future of rap music was going to be Joell Ortiz and Saigon with NaS leading the way through the darkness. My problem was that I refused to believe that Hip-Hop died way back in 1979 with the release of the ghost-written classic ‘Rapper’s Delight’. Ever since that moment when three total strangers were assembled to form the SugarHill Gang rap music has been a contrived, commodified commercial corpse. There’s no point in giving this carcass Detox. It’s been dead for thirty years.
Editor’s note: Harper’s Magazine might be one of the most important periodicals published in these here United States. Don’t be fooled when some outlets regard it as liberal muckraking trash. The only thing that I find liberating is the honesty that they bring to the pillars or privilege. It’s definitely not good reading material for people who can’t handle the truth. I thought that a weekly feature on this site should include the magazine that I get some of my news from. Let me know what you think…
President George W. Bush called for $145 billion in tax cuts, describing the measures as a “shot in the arm” for the U.S. economy, which caused stock values to plunge in Australia, Tokyo, Hong Kong, China, and across Europe. “There’s something approaching panic in the market,” said an analyst with Bank of America. “The short-term risks,” explained Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, “are to the downside.” Researchers found that foreigners invested $414 billion in American companies in 2007, up 90 percent from 2006. “This is a vote of confidence in the American economy,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmitt. “Do we want the communists to own the banks, or the terrorists?” asked financial commentator Jim Cramer. “I’ll take any of it.” John McCain won the South Carolina Republican primary, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton won in the Nevada caucuses, and the Supreme Court decided that Texas could exclude Dennis Kucinich’s name from the ballots in the Democratic primary because Kucinich refused to take a party loyalty oath. British researchers determined that children universally dislike clowns, finding them “unknowable,” and a German merchant ship set sail for Venezuela partially powered by a fuel-saving kite.
It emerged that the ongoing riots that followed the Kenyan presidential election, in which at least 650 people were killed, had been partially planned; leaflets calling for ethnic killings had been distributed prior to the election, and village elders had encouraged young Kalenjin men (allied with the defeated Raila Odinga) to hunt Kikuyus (allied with victor Mwai Kibaki) with bows and arrows. “We attack people, we burn their homes, and then we take their animals,” said a Kalenjin man. “The community raised the money for the gasoline.” A babysitter in Honolulu threw a toddler off an overpass into busy traffic, and parents in Australia were suing an embryo-testing clinic for allowing their child to carry a cancer gene. Researchers in San Diego announced that they had cloned human embryos from skin cells, the FDA determined that cloned animals are acceptable food, and Hungarian scientists created a computer program that, based on its analysis of 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs, can exceed human capability in accurately classifying sheepdog barks. The thoughts of a monkey in North Carolina controlled the actions of a robot in Japan.
The lone power plant operating in Hamas-controlled Gaza was shut down for lack of fuel. “At least 800,000 people,” said official Derar Abu Sissi, “are now in darkness.” Chess master Bobby Fischer died in Iceland, a man in Las Vegas was arrested for killing his girlfriend by driving a six-inch stake into her head, and a Winchester, Virginia, man was arrested for burning an 11-year-old girl with a Hot Pocket sandwich. A New York City construction worker was suing a hospital for treating his head injury by knocking him out and giving him an unwanted rectal exam, and the ACLU filed a brief in support of Senator Larry Craig (R., Idaho), arguing that people who engage in sex acts in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy. Scientists funded by mobile-phone companies found that if the phones are used before bedtime their radiation can reduce sleep and cause headaches and confusion; the Mobile Manufacturers Forum insisted that the “results were inconclusive.” It was observed that Tahina spectabilis, a giant palm tree of Madagascar, commits suicide when it flowers at the end of its century-long lifespan, and New York researchers using carbon nanotubes created the darkest material known to history. Scientists in Chicago found that lonely people are more likely to assign human qualities to their pets and to believe in God, and Louis de Cazenave of the Fifth Senegalese Rifles, one of the last two French veterans of World War I, died at age 110. “War,” he explained in 2005, “is something absurd, useless, that nothing can justify.”
— Paul Ford