I was assisted in writing this post by a bottle of Planeta Burdese Sicilia Menfi Doc 2015. An affordable killer ($20.00). Red blend, combining typically French grapes – Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon but these are instead grown in Sicily. Bold and beautiful. A good value for the money. Never heard of this – the manager at the store recommended it. Dry. Full-bodied structure. Solid tannins. Sparkling acidity. Leading in with black currants and leather. A sustain of ripe elderberries and cocoa. Ending in dark grapes and figs. Long – soft vanilla finish.
“The taste of death is on my lips… I feel something that is not of this earth.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Whenever something strange or different happens to or within Freedmen society – whatever is happening is not new. Just the same nasty white supremacy at work. What is happening are creative repackagings and presentations to new generations that have never seen whatever is happening before. But! It is still the same shit though. Historicity. At times the presenters may be surprisingly non-white but not Black. Old tools. New agendas. But with each new generation that may be the most recent victims – I think political understanding is progressively sharpening. Yes. Pushbacks are getting more loud and aggressive. And the young people are now closing up the same gate that I wanted to close forty years ago.
Careful Reparationists – It’s Distraction Time…
Part One
Just so you know a little more about me: Not only am I a sure oenophile (wine aficionado) – but I am also a “music-holic” and a rabid audiophile (look it up). I cannot live without music. With my tastes leaning towards 1930’s to 1970’s jazz of all types. Rhythm and Blues. 1970’s jazz-fusion, rock, funk, blues, and electronica. “Classical” composers Mozart, Bach, Mahler, Beethoven, and Liszt. First-generation 1979 to 1997 rap and hip hop – like Public Enemy. Never attracted to “gangsta rap” – I considered that genre to be fratricidal. I did not want my subconscious mind to be continuously fed with self-denigration and self-elimination. Black folks spittin’ on killing other Black folks cannot be a source of entertainment for me. Along with the constant stylistic grind of “Nigger” “Nigger” “Nigger” – how many times a day do I need to hear that fucking word? No wonder white folks love rap so much.
My ears are addictively attracted to complex music. Listen. The more intricacies and turns the better. In Mozart’s Requiem (D minor, K. 626), within the first section called “Introitus” (Requiem aeternam) – there is the slow – beautiful weaving of a soprano solo singing a line from the Te decet hymnus text in the tonus peregrinus (the wandering tone or ninth tone – a reciting tone in Gregorian chant) style. This hypnotic recital is accompanied with a threading clarinet, and a sweet oboe doing it again in imitative counterpoint opposition. Complete compositional genius.
This – Circa 1792.
But that’s no different than the syncopationist complexities presented by the entire album “Giant Steps” (done in 1960) by John Coltrane. Yes. Even though I had been immersed in jazz all my life via my family – a music education by osmosis. I never knew of the existence of this album until I was thirty (in 1986). First heard the title track on the radio. Broke out and bought that badass record THAT DAY. Wore that motherfucker out. No mediocre cuts on the whole album? Impossible. I’ve heard Coltrane all my life – I mean “A Love Supreme” and “My Favorite Things” and “Ole” and “The Africa Brass Sessions.” Got it. But I never heard him LIKE THAT. His deep phrasing and ultra-fast chord changes were fucking me up. The breezy multifold interplay between Tommy Flanagan on piano and himself – off the chain. “A Love Supreme” was immediately replaced by this as my favorite Coltrane.
The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Between Nothingness And Eternity?” Shit!!!
The Sunlit Path – La Mere De La Mer – Tomorrow’s Story Not The Same? Fuck!!!
(Live at the Central Park New York – August 11, 1973)
And please don’t say anything bad about Prince around me…
So now that we have that straight. 1980. Hip Hop lands and mouth to mouth and ear to ear propagates from there. But it first takes flight in 1973. Powerful. Multi-Layered. Insistent. Complex. Imaginative. Different. A Black creativity in all respects. The first to hit my ears was The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” – pieced together from end to end with well organized samples of records I personally had (still have) in my collection, overlain with a bouncy, catchy rap that made you dance. Yes. It was poppin’ fun. Loved it (and not one “nigger” bomb drop). I still have the original album. I still play it. Yeah – I still play it.
Don’t remember hearing any Latino influences in this creation. OK?
Then – let’s move to Big Daddy Kane’s “It’s a Big Daddy Thing.” And onto my favorite cut on this album “I Get the Job Done.” Yes – I know the cheating theme of this song is juicy and profane. But this adulterous whip is no different than the relationship stuff talked about in blues and country music. OK? At least it is not fratricidal or shot through with bullets of “nigger” every quarter second. It’s just life. The producer of this cut – Teddy Riley did an excellent job of constructing an infectious rhythm, pace, and timing in the arrangement. The rush and swish of layered scratching is right at the right spots. Starting in and stopping out on time.
You focus on the beat rather than the lyrics. You capture the pulse rather than the message. Don’t throw this bad boy on at a Chicago stepper’s set. It’s over. It is also a good recording to test an audiophile-level stereo system’s leading-edge transient response, amplifier rise-time speed, output transistor current delivery and midbass authority. One of the best Old School rap get-downs.
And lastly. I cannot not talk about my all-time favorite rap group Public Enemy. For me it is a two-fisted deal with their single: “Fight The Power” and the album “Fear of a Black Planet.” Both produced by “The Bomb Squad” (Keith Shocklee, Eric Sadler, Carl Ridenhour). The lyrics are the best of what the rap genre should be. This. Revolutionary. Politically Activating. Freedmen-centric. That, in addition to the masterful sampling and soundscape values added by The Bomb Squad.
Killer.
At the same time, I consider Public Enemy to be placed at the end of the era when rap was productive, inspiring, political, fun, and enlightening. Rap became self-destructive and degenerate when a certain group of music executives, promoters, and producers – many of whom are members of a particular white sub-group (no surprise), decided that rap had the potential to put certain ideas into the minds of young Black people that would not serve white supremacy. Can’t have this:
“As the rhythm designed to bounce. What counts is that the rhymes designed to fill your mind. Now that you’ve realized the pride’s arrived. We got to pump the stuff to make us tough. From the heart – it’s a start, a work of art. To revolutionize make a change nothing’s strange. People, people we are the same? No we’re not the same. ‘Cause we don’t know the game. What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless. You say what is this? My beloved lets get down to business. Mental self defensive fitness. Don’t rush the show. You gotta go for what you know. Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be…”
Ahh… “What counts is that the rhymes designed to fill your mind?” Oh Hell No. Can’t have that. “The powers that be” to be fought still have control over the police, intelligence agencies, courts, politics, and propaganda producing entities. “Fill your mind” with what? Revolution? Politics? Racism-white supremacy decided that this message is too much. Understand? Something had to be done about the direction this music is pointing young Black people towards. “Fight the power? Nigger are you fucking kidding me?” The racism-white supremacy system does not want you to “see” anything but what that system wants you to “see.”
Understand?
The “powers that be” also know that you need “awareness.” But racism-white supremacy insists that it must get and keep you to “careless.” And that’s exactly what it did. Question: So did it? Shift Into Chaos. A storm hit our community. This. Quiet raging since 1978. The hot continuum of creative rap energy then condensed into a slick community-destroying tornado that cut through the Black to Black ties that we are still attempting to re-connect. Wind. Ongoing Intellectual Destruction.
This 50 Cent verse (2005):
“Niggas screw they face up at me. On some real shit son they don’t want beef. I cock that, aim that shit out the window and spray. There ain’t a shell left in my heat. Y’all niggas better lay down, yeah, I mean stay down. You get hit with a K round, your ass ain’t gon’ make it. You niggas’ll get laid out, your blood and your brains out. Have you on the concrete shivering and shaking. I’m from Southside motherfucker, where them gats explode. If you feel like you’re on fire, boy drop and roll. Niggas’ll eat your ass up, ’cause they heart turned cold. Now you can be a victim or you can lock and load. The party jumpin,’ shorty bouncing that ass, I wanna fuck. Gimme a second I’ma holla, I’ma see wassup. I got my razor in my hand, got my pistol in the trunk. Carve your ass up nice you play me…”
That’s Better – isn’t it? Exactly what white people want to hear. Exactly what our children need to develop into racially-responsible adults. Exactly what we need for community-building. Exactly what we need for our politics. Exactly what we need to be generationally reparations-minded. Exactly what we need to protect, support and appreciate our women. Exactly what we need for our inner-tribal intellectual development. We need to do this. OR – “You niggas’ll get laid out.“ Right?
OR – Is Mr. 50 Cent merely reiterating a memory of his Life? A Survival? A Life that was squeezed to the limit by racism, redlining, and the resulting poverty – In Survival? Well – that’s what it sounds like to me. At least the remainder of his reaction of a Black life in America channelled into music. Speaking on how it is.
At this time though, we have some real cultural evil going on. We have a triumvirate of Caribbeans, Latinos, and certain white music executives literally trying to wrest the creation of Hip Hop and its accompaning culture away from Foundational Black Americans. To make things specifically clear – I am not a Rap aficionado. But I do recognize wholesale forms of erasure. I do recognize open insidiousness. And this attempt is that. Please understand that this is not just about music. White Supremacy operations are methodical, long-term project managed, and diabolical. “Hip Hop was created by Caribbeans and Puerto Ricans?” Even those Black people that are not into Hip Hop should know better than this.
This attempted cultural theft is an example of the backfire that happens when a people are too inviting and loving to other groups. This is not just about the wrongful appropriation of Hip Hop – this is a cultural theft that is against all Freedmen. Fat Joe and Busta Rhymes are the front office faces of a wider subsystem whose purpose is to first dismantle then transfer our culture – and then to move on to assist in physically erasing us as a people. Not just about Hip Hop Family – peep the game here. This is a prelude. A Dr. Derrick Colon (who is a Puerto Rican Latino supremacist) produced a disingenuous video [documentary?] in which he stretches the truth to breaking point and outright lies about the origins of Hip Hop and the role that Latinos (!?) played in building its foundation. My goodness – here it is:
It took me three barf bags to get through this. Hopefully the rest of the Family have stronger stomachs. This is just more of the same history we’ve always experienced.
Does the cultural-theft attitude of this 1952 uttered statement below sound familiar?
“My music and all Jazz music is an exclusively white creation. Black people had nothing to do with it. Many writers have attributed the music that we introduced as something coming from the African jungles and crediting the Negro race with it. My contention is that the Negroes learned to play this rhythm and music from the whites. Negroes have never played any music equal to white men at any time…”
Dominick James (Nick) LaRocca
That statement was uttered by Nick LaRocca, cornetist and leader of “The Original Dixieland Jazz Band” (ODJB). A true white man. No Surprise. This ODJB billed themselves as the “Creators of Jazz.” Themselves. (well – this is what white folks do) It was the first band to record jazz commercially (well yeah – because they’re white) and to have hit recordings in the genre (and – because they’re white). Nick LaRocca strongly asserted that the ODJB deserved recognition as the first band to record commercially and the first to establish jazz as a musical idiom or genre (and again – because he’s white and he says so).
And Fuck You Niggers.
White folks invented Chinese opera as well? They Did?
OK.
Part Two
Before we start on Part Two – A Warning: The Wikipedia page on Hip Hop Music has been poisoned with open lies and revisionist propaganda. A historic wreck. Looks like someone that works with or for Fat Joe just went ham on the keyboard and boldly weighed the history of Hip Hop towards Latinos and Caribbeans. With American Freedmen damned near just participating as guests in their own cultural house. As of this writing – the last Wikipedia edit was done on October 20, 2023.
That’s it for Part Two.
Part Three
Distraction time? Why Now? Why Are? Who Is? I must admit it is hard not to pay attention to this nonsense. And it is hard to take my focus away from Reparations. But staying over here for awhile – just as it is important to develop and spread a Reparations culture – it is equally important to develop and spread a Gatekeeping culture as well. Theft is one thing, but allowing theft is quite another. We’ve had 500 years of experiencing nothing but theft. What we create – feeds others. What we create – reverse acculturates others. (!) Until we are not there anymore. We as a people should be tired of this cycle by now. I won’t speak on what to do because ya’ll already know what to do. Right? So let’s go ahead and do our “Gates Up”.
This Time – let’s keep what is ours Family. “Taking Time” must be over.
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FREEDMEN ABSOLUTE 