Terence McKenna may be due for a posthumous appearance on the hip-hop charts, as a sample of the philosopher leads off one of the songs on the new Trap God 2 mixtape from Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane. Gucci is one of the leading proponents of the so-called “trap” style that has been the dominant sound in rap for the past year or so, and the McKenna quote serves as a manifesto of sorts. The track in question is the work of star producer Lex Luger:
Watch as security guards swarm the stage, cutting short Lupe Fiasco’s set at Washington D.C.’s Hamilton Live Theater Sunday night. The rapper had been invited to headline the concert celebrating Obama’s second inauguration. The offending lyrics likely were: “Gaza Strip was getting bombed / Obama didn’t say shit / That’s why I ain’t vote for him / I’m part of the problem / My problem is I’m peaceful”
Steven Lopez www.ikeepmoving.com
Solomon Comissiong, writing at Black Agenda Report:
It is undeniable that hip hop culture is one of the most powerful marketing tools America has seen in quite sometime. Had hip hop been around during the earlier part of the 20th century the unscrupulous public relations pioneer, Edward Bernays, would have probably also used it to promote the smoking of Viceroy Cigarettes to women. Various aspects of hip hop culture, mainly rap music, generate billions of dollars. However, who is generating this wealth, where is it going and at what cost?
“Their unfettered corporate feeding frenzy was similar to that of the European conquest of lands inhabited by people of color.”
Hip hop culture (rapping, djing, graffiti art, and breaking, etc.) was unequivocally created by youth of color in the Bronx during the early 1970s. Even though the origins of hip hop are entrenched in black and Latino communities throughout New York City it is currently pimped/used by large white owned corporations (media, record labels, etc.) to create astronomical bottom lines, reinforce capitalistic ideals, and adversely mass program black and brown youth.
Clearly, many people of all political stripes are seeing through the hoax put forward by KONY 2012 to legitimize another grand military adventure, now in Africa under AFRICOM.
Rap News Episode 12: YES WE KONY. It’s March, and the Internet delivers 2012′s first globe-consuming meme: the unstoppable, Stop-Kony 2012 video, which has highlighted the plight of African child soldiering like never before. But is it really good? Is it really bad? Or is the world really more complex than ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’?…
Did “the Government” kill the Ol’ Dirty Bastard? From RockStarMartyr.net:
Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s slurring, incoherent “singin’ rappin’” rhymes hit the mic so hard, you have to wipe oozing spittle off your face after listening to his deranged tracks. He spoke the tough truth from the mean streets, delving into the dark crevices of ghetto crackhouses and bitch’s booties, coming out the other side covered in doodoo brown and flashing a steel grille grin all the while. Some believe that the big “G” government” took notice and were highly pissed about it.
Raised in the housing projects of Brooklyn, ODB broke out with the “world domination” scheme masterminded by his cousins, RZA and GZA, whose hip hop exploits are succinctly described by Dirty’s biographer, Jaime Lowe:
“The foundation of Wu-Tang is in its lore, its urban mythology, its appropriation of kung fu, chess, Buddhism, Islam, bible studies, cartoons, comics, Staten Island; anything they came across was woven into an intricate web of culture and identification and a constructed community that bordered on cult.… Read the rest
Via Freemuse:
Hip-hop plays a central role in the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Libya. Rap songs create an important platform for communication creating moral support and encouraging a spirit of resistance and revolt against the regime…
Composite sketch of the suspect in the Christopher Wallace shooting.
View the documents in the FBI’s Vault, a new website for records never before released to the public. Via CNN:
The 1997 murder of Christopher Wallace, the rapper also known as The Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls, remains an unsolved crime despite Los Angeles police and FBI investigations that lasted for years.
The FBI, which joined the case five years after the shooting, opened up its files this week by publishing hundreds of pages of investigation reports and notes from its probe on the agencies website.
Readers get a behind-the-scenes look at the FBI and LAPD’s work, but the documents are heavily redacted, hiding the names of sources, investigators and suspects.
The drive-by shooting, in front of dozens of witnesses who were leaving a music industry party in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997, spurred several conspiracy theories, but no arrests.
Duncan Geere reports for Wired :
An artist named Tahir Hemphill wants to datamine 30 years of hip-hop lyrics to provide a searchable index of the genre’s lexicon.
The project analyzes the lyrics of over 40,000 songs for metaphors, similes, cultural references, phrases, memes and socio-political ideas. For each, it registers a date and a geographical location. Hemphill has raised more than $8,000 in funding for the project on Kickstarter, from 349 people.
The idea is so that important questions can be answered, like who was the first to mention “haters,”…
Jet Blue flight attendant, Steven Slater, received time in the spotlight aboard a flight for quitting his job and exiting on an inflatable slide. However, his fifteen minutes of fame didn’t seem to be enough. In a country where fifteen minutes can be stretched into 3 seasons worth of fame, he has now decided to become a rapper. Line 2, a cell phone app that provides in-flight texting ability on airplanes that have Wi-Fi, has formed a contract with Slater. Steven Slater’s rap single, “I’m A Rapper Bitches”:
