Thug Life is Ours

I was on a slow laptop two mornings ago and put on VH1 soul to pass the time between pages, and this double barrel video suite played out that was probably intentional in programming but I'm pretty sure had nothing to with the show, which was a random slot of videos. I'll be honest, my inability to recognize songs immediately would not serve me well on the white rapper show, so when I looked up and recognized Prodigy I thought it might have been from the G-Unit days whose reputation caused aversion when I started back cataloguing.
I thought possibly the dank odor of corpses in the streets might have sent P on the waft into an ice filled chamber. Then I noticed Nas, and then the chorus came on and it listed Murda Muzik as the album and a serious disconnect set in since all I remember from that album was muzik, with murda buried underneath. Anyways, my vision of P. and Havoc ripping it from a street winter cold static was shattered, but the song is still fun and the video kind of funny, in a cavalcade of rap video cliches kind of way. Plus Nas at a Barbra Streisand concert.


Then this came on, and that totally broke it off.

One, it prompted me to look up Brandy and find out those manslaughter caused public blankouts were rumour (as per their not appearing on wikipedia) and her album is languishing in development. I remember completely disavowing this in middle school while slipping off to the comforting sounds of ALTERNATIVE ROCK. On the aural aesthetic, I enjoy this song a lot, lyrically, I wish they both decided to set off on the dude double timing them and calling him on his trifling ass instead of fighting each other for an inferior position in the patriarchal heirarchy. And then I read about the song's history and its taking off point having been a duet Paul McCartney sang with Michael Jackson in which they both vied for the same girl. Then it became kind of innocent and my gender studies 101 analysis collapsed in the wake of the term POP.
It also kind of warmed me over that two gangster rappers turned an R & B song into a hood anthem. I love it when that happens, kind of like when Z-Ro took Spandau Ballet's "True" and turned it into "Continue to Roll." There's no sacred ground then, and an appreciation of sounds regardless of their context. Despite the first song stressing a life of crime where money rivals bodies in the piling process and the second about two girls fighting over some multiple hen house clocking foghorn leghorn, there's community in their kinlike relation.

One day

With hangman stoops being brought out for charges of racism on account of Obama's pastor I was really disheartened to find possibly the only rational, straightforward and visibly passionate statements to be made on the campaign trail so far were from Pastor Wright. Even worse is that the political climate finds Obama being forced to distance himself from such statements on the possibility it will alienate the patriotically white vote that conflates the notion of a guilty conscience with treason.
I'm only going to include the portions included by the press as to highlight the ridiculousness of the harangue.

Some wikiresearch into the Pastor finds him indulging in some conspiratorial nonsense like AIDS being a secrect government project, but those other statements, for the most part, are fairly right on, and I think would advance talk about government and race instead of dumbing it down.
That Obama recontextualized some of the outrage as old school heatstrokes harkening back to the civil rights movement like dissonant moments of clarity in a bout of alzheimers was also kind of sad. But I suppose holding it down with a cool set of undivisive words instead of bypassing your audience's ribcage and making juice out of its heart is what you need to move on up. May the floodgates open if he makes it past the nomination, the election and the inaugural address.

Anyways, here's to a different kind of level-headed analysis from a street level hustler not apt to get caught up in sensational electoral sweeps, and still gully enough to call Obama the lesser of two evils in light of third party neutralization.

Bun B Live at Levi's®/The FADER Fort from The FADER on Vimeo.