an album stream.
NPR MUSIC: First Listen: Ryan Adams, 'Ryan Adams'
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Friday, August 29, 2014
take u there.
a live take.
from diplo, skrillex, & kiesza.
PITCHFORK: Diplo, Skrillex, and Kiesza Debut "Take U There" Live
from diplo, skrillex, & kiesza.
PITCHFORK: Diplo, Skrillex, and Kiesza Debut "Take U There" Live
Thursday, August 28, 2014
church & state.
an ongoing discussion/moment of clairty.
words.
"The thing about Ferguson is it doesn't need messaging or intermediaries. You can understand everything that's happening even by staring at a muted TV—sometimes especially so, if Don Lemon's busy giving a lecture to black kids about saying "ma'am" with their pants on tighter, or whatever his job is. All you need is a functional long-term cultural memory. An unarmed black teenager is dead, shot multiple times by a white cop from a disproportionately white PD in an overwhelmingly black community. You know everything that that means.
All the usual dismissals fall impotently away. You can't dismiss these people as bored, privileged interlopers when you see an economically depressed local community responding to its own structure. The message is a centuries-long refrain about legal force used as an instrument of terror by an economic and racial overclass, and the moment you might dismiss that as the airy evocation of some college revolutionary, it is instantly reinforced by rubber bullets, by snipers on rooftops, by the brutal color binaries of white faces and long black guns firing clouds of white gas at black men and women who stand palms upraised. Journalists will exit the craft table area for that.
...The citizens of Ferguson are speaking to the instrument they democratically and economically empower, and in the process have been maligned by every element indebted to modern security theater—the conservative crowd that pushes law-and-order both as a governing plank and a handgun sales pitch. (Not to mention networks that just love gee-whiz military stuff on the teevee.) Beyond the bestializing of blacks as part of a centuries-long narrative of dehumanization, the ease—almost necessity—with which the right addresses Ferguson citizens' publicly impeaching the legitimacy of the state as "animals" speaks to the desire to see them caged. Someone can be paid to build that cage, so long as the right people are elected to fund it. The most seductive aspects of modern U.S. prison culture are temporary walls you can move to wherever they're necessary.
...it's easy to read the terrifying police response to Ferguson, as so many have, as not a local government responding to the voices of the community but rather an occupying force addressing an insurgency of the ineluctable other that needs to be subdued. It's an attitude made more immediate and more horrible by the spontaneity of Ferguson citizens' outrage at Mike Brown's shooting and by the legacy of racial repression in America. But it's an attitude we have accepted elsewhere because it's been expressed more telegenically about less sympathetic groups amid better planned repressive theater.
It's very easy for a wing of the American political population to say that the residents of Ferguson belong in a cage and that events in that town over the last few weeks have confirmed that. It's easy, because they're falling back on the same screaming leitmotif running through 400 years of African-American history. But it's only gotten easier in the last 15 years, because they've been egalitarian enough to throw the rest of us in with it, and for the most part, we've gone quietly."
ROLLING STONE: Insecurity State: The Politics Behind the Drama in Ferguson
words.
"The thing about Ferguson is it doesn't need messaging or intermediaries. You can understand everything that's happening even by staring at a muted TV—sometimes especially so, if Don Lemon's busy giving a lecture to black kids about saying "ma'am" with their pants on tighter, or whatever his job is. All you need is a functional long-term cultural memory. An unarmed black teenager is dead, shot multiple times by a white cop from a disproportionately white PD in an overwhelmingly black community. You know everything that that means.
All the usual dismissals fall impotently away. You can't dismiss these people as bored, privileged interlopers when you see an economically depressed local community responding to its own structure. The message is a centuries-long refrain about legal force used as an instrument of terror by an economic and racial overclass, and the moment you might dismiss that as the airy evocation of some college revolutionary, it is instantly reinforced by rubber bullets, by snipers on rooftops, by the brutal color binaries of white faces and long black guns firing clouds of white gas at black men and women who stand palms upraised. Journalists will exit the craft table area for that.
...The citizens of Ferguson are speaking to the instrument they democratically and economically empower, and in the process have been maligned by every element indebted to modern security theater—the conservative crowd that pushes law-and-order both as a governing plank and a handgun sales pitch. (Not to mention networks that just love gee-whiz military stuff on the teevee.) Beyond the bestializing of blacks as part of a centuries-long narrative of dehumanization, the ease—almost necessity—with which the right addresses Ferguson citizens' publicly impeaching the legitimacy of the state as "animals" speaks to the desire to see them caged. Someone can be paid to build that cage, so long as the right people are elected to fund it. The most seductive aspects of modern U.S. prison culture are temporary walls you can move to wherever they're necessary.
...it's easy to read the terrifying police response to Ferguson, as so many have, as not a local government responding to the voices of the community but rather an occupying force addressing an insurgency of the ineluctable other that needs to be subdued. It's an attitude made more immediate and more horrible by the spontaneity of Ferguson citizens' outrage at Mike Brown's shooting and by the legacy of racial repression in America. But it's an attitude we have accepted elsewhere because it's been expressed more telegenically about less sympathetic groups amid better planned repressive theater.
It's very easy for a wing of the American political population to say that the residents of Ferguson belong in a cage and that events in that town over the last few weeks have confirmed that. It's easy, because they're falling back on the same screaming leitmotif running through 400 years of African-American history. But it's only gotten easier in the last 15 years, because they've been egalitarian enough to throw the rest of us in with it, and for the most part, we've gone quietly."
ROLLING STONE: Insecurity State: The Politics Behind the Drama in Ferguson
rap city.
words.
Pitchfork: There certainly can be a disconnect between fans and artists in terms of backgrounds and being able to take something as seriously as it might be in real life.
Vince Staples: Listeners don’t take a lot of rappers seriously because rappers don’t take themselves seriously. And, to be honest, the majority of these dudes are lying. It’s not even that they’re just lying—because you can lie all day in your music and tell a story—they’re assholes who walk around like they don’t have any connection with the people. A lot of music comes from a selfish place, but there’s no sense of self within it. With rap, everyone’s fit in the same mold. And that’s one thing that you have to know about these people: They’re trying to portray this image because they’ve seen the prototype, they’ve seen what everybody thinks that community is, even though they’ve probably never been in it. So they feel like they can’t be themselves, when in reality those environments are made up of every single kind of person. I got homies whose parents have money that live two streets over. They did everything that we did. They don’t have to act like they don’t have anything, and they never will. Are they to be taken lightly? Hell no. They don’t have to pretend. There’s too much pretending within this music, and that’s why we get treated the way that we do.
PITCHFORK: Rising: Vince Staples
Pitchfork: There certainly can be a disconnect between fans and artists in terms of backgrounds and being able to take something as seriously as it might be in real life.
Vince Staples: Listeners don’t take a lot of rappers seriously because rappers don’t take themselves seriously. And, to be honest, the majority of these dudes are lying. It’s not even that they’re just lying—because you can lie all day in your music and tell a story—they’re assholes who walk around like they don’t have any connection with the people. A lot of music comes from a selfish place, but there’s no sense of self within it. With rap, everyone’s fit in the same mold. And that’s one thing that you have to know about these people: They’re trying to portray this image because they’ve seen the prototype, they’ve seen what everybody thinks that community is, even though they’ve probably never been in it. So they feel like they can’t be themselves, when in reality those environments are made up of every single kind of person. I got homies whose parents have money that live two streets over. They did everything that we did. They don’t have to act like they don’t have anything, and they never will. Are they to be taken lightly? Hell no. They don’t have to pretend. There’s too much pretending within this music, and that’s why we get treated the way that we do.
PITCHFORK: Rising: Vince Staples
"#tbt".
with diddy & the smashing pumpkins.
STEREOGUM: Hear Diddy’s 16-Year-Old Remix Of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Ava Adore”
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
mature themes.
an ongoing discussion/moment of clarity.
words.
"In the days after 9/11, it was common to hear people say that it was the first time Americans had really experienced terrorism on their own soil. Those sentiments were historically wrong, and willfully put aside acts that were organized on a large scale, had a political goal, and were committed with the specific intention of being nightmarishly memorable. The death cult that was lynching furnished this country with such spectacles for a half century. (The tallies vary, but, by some estimates, there were thirty-three hundred lynchings in the decades between the end of Reconstruction and the civil-rights era.) We know intuitively, not abstractly, about terrorism’s theatrical intent. The sight of Michael Brown, sprawled on Canfield Drive for four hours in the August sun, dead at the hands of an officer who was unnamed for a week, recalled that memory. It had the effect of reminding that crowd of spontaneous mourners of their own refuted humanity. A single death can be understood as a collective threat. The media didn’t whip up these concerns among the black population; history did that.
...I was once a linebacker-sized eighteen-year-old, too. What I knew then, what black people have been required to know, is that there are few things more dangerous than the perception that one is a danger. I’m embarrassed to recall that my adolescent love of words doubled as a strategy to assuage those fears; it was both a pitiable desire for acceptance and a practical necessity for survival. I know, to this day, the element of inadvertent intimidation that colors the most innocuous interactions, particularly with white people. There are protocols for this. I sometimes let slip that I’m a professor or that I’m scarcely even familiar with the rules of football, minor biographical facts that stand in for a broader, unspoken statement of reassurance: there is no danger here. And the result is civil small talk and feeble smiles and a sense of having compromised. Other times, in an elevator or crossing a darkened parking lot, when I am six feet away but the world remains between us, I remain silent and simply let whatever miasma of stereotype or fear might be there fill the void.
Fuck you, I think. If I don’t get to feel safe here, why should you?"
THE NEW YORKER: Between the World and Ferguson
words.
"In the days after 9/11, it was common to hear people say that it was the first time Americans had really experienced terrorism on their own soil. Those sentiments were historically wrong, and willfully put aside acts that were organized on a large scale, had a political goal, and were committed with the specific intention of being nightmarishly memorable. The death cult that was lynching furnished this country with such spectacles for a half century. (The tallies vary, but, by some estimates, there were thirty-three hundred lynchings in the decades between the end of Reconstruction and the civil-rights era.) We know intuitively, not abstractly, about terrorism’s theatrical intent. The sight of Michael Brown, sprawled on Canfield Drive for four hours in the August sun, dead at the hands of an officer who was unnamed for a week, recalled that memory. It had the effect of reminding that crowd of spontaneous mourners of their own refuted humanity. A single death can be understood as a collective threat. The media didn’t whip up these concerns among the black population; history did that.
...I was once a linebacker-sized eighteen-year-old, too. What I knew then, what black people have been required to know, is that there are few things more dangerous than the perception that one is a danger. I’m embarrassed to recall that my adolescent love of words doubled as a strategy to assuage those fears; it was both a pitiable desire for acceptance and a practical necessity for survival. I know, to this day, the element of inadvertent intimidation that colors the most innocuous interactions, particularly with white people. There are protocols for this. I sometimes let slip that I’m a professor or that I’m scarcely even familiar with the rules of football, minor biographical facts that stand in for a broader, unspoken statement of reassurance: there is no danger here. And the result is civil small talk and feeble smiles and a sense of having compromised. Other times, in an elevator or crossing a darkened parking lot, when I am six feet away but the world remains between us, I remain silent and simply let whatever miasma of stereotype or fear might be there fill the void.
Fuck you, I think. If I don’t get to feel safe here, why should you?"
THE NEW YORKER: Between the World and Ferguson
the daily show.
an ongoing discussion/moment of clarity.
“Race is there and it is a constant. You’re tired of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.” - Jon Stewart
ALTERNET: Jon Stewart Eviscerates Fox Pundits In a Searing Monologue on Ferguson
“Race is there and it is a constant. You’re tired of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.” - Jon Stewart
ALTERNET: Jon Stewart Eviscerates Fox Pundits In a Searing Monologue on Ferguson
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