HipHop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes

I had the good fortune to come across a video addressing violent masculinity, misogyny, and homophobia in hip hop music. It's an excellent documentary. If you've got an hour to burn and you are interested in hip-hop in any form, this is a must see. Watch the preview first if you have any doubts. Enjoy.

Preview


The Documentary

White Lust: A Serious Epidemic

Update (02/07/11 - yes, more than three years later): Mr. Steven J. Newton, PC, a lawyer for Amar Bakshi, the author of the article ("An American Girl's Love Life in Mumbai") that is the subject of the commentary on this blog has written informing me that the original blog entry infringed on Bakshi's copyright. In order to rectify the situation I have rewritten and reworded large portions of the blog. Since the blog presents commentary, I believe my use of selective quotations from the article (and making sure to attribute authorship whenever possible) should bring this entire blog in line with fair use law. More on this later.

(picture from washingtonpost.com)

Part I

I remember how some among you used to laugh when I introduced the concept of "white lust", an amazing addition to the sociological conceptual framework and lexicon. White lust (or "whitelust") is what occurs when a person of a non-European cultural background lusts after white Americans and Europeans. In my case I have pointed out the syndrome when I have seen it manifest in my Indian and Middle Eastern friends. It may seem simple enough, but this phenomenon cuts deep into the brown man's psyche and displays an underlying need for acceptance from the cultural majority.

I present the story of a special Cracker Ass Cracker (CAC). And boy are you going to enjoy this story. Courtesy of washingtonpost.com's America: Post Global (penned by Amar C. Bakshi), an article titled:

AN AMERICAN GIRL'S LOVE LIFE IN MUMBAI

Some choice tidbits:

Sabrina B. calls herself "a middle class, average American girl." But in India, she's been treated like a "god." Within months of getting here, she starred in a TV sitcom, "jumped five years ahead" in her career and hooked up with a suave Indian actor.

...

Things started out great. She rose up the ladder at The Times of India to quickly become a full-time features writer -- her dream job -- in under a year. "It was something I could never get so fast in the U.S." she says. Being American didn't hurt. And on top of this she was solicited by Bollywood to act in ads and on TV for thousands of rupees a day, since white women are in high demand as actresses. Socially, she found herself frequently the main attraction at parties, although sometimes crowds would make her recite Hindi curse words.

....

A whole new world of relationships opened up before her. From dating "average American guys" she found herself now romancing with the stars of Mumbai. First a 19-year-old son of a prominent politician; then a handsome TV actor....

But just as being American brought her into high society fast, it kept her out. Neither of her first two boyfriends took her seriously, she says. They considered her "the goodtime girl," just someone "fun to fool around with…because they knew their families wouldn't accept me."

....

"Indian men are very, very emotional and tend to get more jealous than the typical America guy," she's discovered. And being American doesn't calm the flames of jealousy. The current boyfriend particularly resents Sabrina's sexual past, which she says would be average in the U.S. but seems exceptional here.

To read the full article please click the link to the article above.

....

I'm saddened. Not only because my people remain in a colonial mindset that has created a inferiority complex and social discrimination, but also because--in all honesty--this woman isn't even attractive. Seriously.

I mean, come on. Guys, if you're going to elevate some cracker-ass cracker (CAC), at least prop up like a model or something. That old lady on the left (in the first pic in the WaPo blog) was probably better looking 20 years ago. This is fucking sad.

Part II

Who do we blame? Who do I blame?

The colonial oppressors? Hollywood and the western media? Yes. But ultimately, we have to look to our own community.

Case A: Singhi Singh

The person pictured above shall not be named and shall instead be referred to as "Singhi Singh" for his own protection. This lad has been on the prowl for white flesh from the day he and his family set foot on Plymouth Rock looking for poor man's jobs in engineering.

I remember the first day I spoke to Angad. I was introduced to him by my boy Pasha. Our conversation in the school cafeteria went something like this:

Me: Hey, I heard you had Malloy for--
SS (thick accent): Dude, I had an erection in Chemistry today. Holy cowabunga, man...

CAC looks over and starts to stare our way.

Me: Ummm, okay--
SS: I love America. Everywhere, there is hot bitches. Hot bitches everywhere! I am walking around with an erection, everywhere...

More CACs look over.

Me: Yeah, there are some nice looking--

Singhi grabs my shirt and pulls down on it.

SS: I got to have me some of that sweet white meat, man. I am so horrrrrrrrny--

At which point I realized he wasn't talking about the fried chicken breast being served when I looked down at his pants.

SS: Holy crap-ola, it happened again...

And so on and so on. If you look at the picture above you shall see said brown man in bed with a Caucasian man. Lovin' the white bum is the closest he's come so far. But he remains on the prowl.

Is there a solution to this new challenge facing the brown community? What can be done? What should be done? I for one am not sure of a solution...

Other than castration.

It's been a while...

Since I last blogged. My apologies. I have been hard at work trying to hammer out some ideas for future scripts, etc. in addition to to also doing a lot of work. Is that an excuse? Nope. But I shall tend to this blog with more care for the rest of the summer.

Some recent thoughts:

What's a better course of action: Writing Hollywood crap fluff to get over and then pursuing what you truly want to do or sticking to your guns and writing shit you want to write. Me and Jerbear were recently debating this over the phone, and you can guess who took what position.

But nevertheless, I think they are valid points on both sides of the argument. Getting your foot in the door allows you to make the contacts necessary to produce your work on your own time without having to worry constantly about money and shit. The problem arises, I feel, because one might get lazy and fall into a cycle of writing material that "sells" and become afraid of taking risks.

The other option is to write what you want to and hope to God you don't end up poor or worse yet giving up and taking some douchey job. The only advantage is the hunger and drive that comes with knowing that whatever you produce is yours and you and only you are solely responsible for how it turned out. There can be no cop out such as, "Man, I just write this crap to please people. Wait until I write my masterpiece. Blah, blah, blah..." You live and die by your work. There is some honor is here....I think. Anywho...Any thoughts would be appreciated.


Enjoy this web series I found. Pretty fucking funny for amateur work:


WNG - Episode 9



"Smash?"
"It's like pork, but less vulgar."

Anywho, watch the rest of them if you like it.


P.S. I'm deluded enough to think anything I write, commercial or otherwise, is capable of selling.

Get the fuck up!

Pharoahe Monch

It's that time of the week again. During the interval between the opening act and Deftones the remix to Pharoahe Monche's Simon Says was played and I was happy and 'Juna and Bretton thought the beat was killer and asked me to get them the song. So I have. Four weeks later. In blog form.

In short: He will be at Rock the Bells and I consider him one of the best rappers who's never put together a complete album. Monch started out in the group Organized Konfusion and then signed to Rawkus during its heyday and put out Internal Affairs. One of the best around right now with incredible lyrical dexterity.

Simon Says


Oh No feat. Mos Def and Nate Dogg


Let's Go (Live)

Ignorance, Social Science, and Sex in the Prett-ay Paincave

Ignorance

Part 1: Ignorant Sociology
So I got through the first of my summer reading books last week, Ignorance by Milan Kundera. I won't run down the whole plot here, since anything I write won't do the book justice. Anywho, the story surrounds two emigres from the former Soviet Czechoslovakia who return after the fall of communism and the role of nostalgia, memory, and return. As is common in Kundera's work (well I gathered from reading this and The Unbearable Lightness of Being) there are many departures throughout the novel into philosophy, history, and other stories. One of these focuses on the story of some random young girl who has broken up with her first boyfriend and has just started seeing a new one. The passage that struck me was this:

One day she sees he new boyfriend hurrying toward her in a blue jacket and she remembers that her first boyfriend also looked good in a blue jacket. Another day, gazing into her eyes, he praises their beauty by way of a highly unusual metaphor; she was fascinated by that because her first boyfriend, commenting on her eyes, had used word for the word the same unusual phrase. These coincidence amaze her. Never does she feel so thoroughly suffused with beauty as when the nostalgia for her past love blends with the surprises of her new love. The intrusion of the previous boyfriend into the story she is currently living is to her mind not some secret infidelity; it adds further to her fondness for the man walking beside her now.

When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop to at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences are miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings. The fact that today’s boyfriend bears a strange resemblance to yesterday’s makes him even more exceptional, even more original, and she believes that he is mysteriously predestined for her.

What struck me most about this passage (and this chapter, really) is the similarity I see when I conduct empirical studies of social life. I am at first amazed by the patterns and resemblances that are apparent in day-to-day interaction and the role social location plays in social action. An awe, an excitement, fills me when I pick these things up and then apart. But the endless repetition, the common place nature of it soon dulls me to the phenomenon. Worse yet, if the phenomena in question is antithetical to my values, I find it hard to stomach, and become more jaded still.

The question here is the distinction between observation and experience. Is it possible to separate these into two separate roles? Or is an amalgamation an inevitable result? Each role brings with it highs and lows, and it seems the further I delve into the former (the role of the observer) the further distanced I become from the latter and vice versa.

Someone could argue that there is a beauty in the pattern, and realizing that you are not above it (or below it for that matter) and experiencing it as some sort of fateful happening is remarkable in and of itself. But as you can clearly see, I see one view as more accurate than the other (at least in personal experience.)

Part 2: Sexorcism
Nevertheless, pick up the book if you're looking for something to read during break. It is a worthwhile read although some of it can come of as uncharacteristically sentimental. One thing that annoyed me while I was reading the book was the motif of "female liberation through sex." It isn't as overt in Ignorance as it is in some other works, but it still caught my attention. I have come to believe that this is the most overused motif in modern literature. It's one thing to use fucking as a symbolism for change and maturation or loss of innocence or whatever, but in recent memory I have read or heard of this theme being used over and over and over again...Bored housewife has an affair...BAM! Spiritual reawakening...Sheltered girl gets fucked hard...BAM! She's an entirely new person. You'd think that these women's vaginas gained some sort of magical powers after fucking (like the ability to talk espanol or some shit). It seems that this is more a reflection of Western society's love/hate relationship with eroticism than anything else.

It's not really surprising then that you meet so many young educated women (read: educated, not enlightened) who spout this sort of inane crap about "expressing themselves sexually" and "oneness with their bodies" and other idiotic mixtures of the sexual and "spiritual" spheres. It's really a result of an inherent disconnect between what's being said and what's being experienced. The projection of sex into the metaphysical realm is really just an attempt to bridge the gap between what is expected and what is felt (in the crudest of terms). It possibly also partially explains the neuroticism and attraction to drama that typifies your normal 15-35 year-old woman.

To clarify, I have no problem with fucking or women fucking (in fact I encourage it!), but I am just kind of bored with this notion that any real transformation of the self begins with a commonplace, everyday act instead of a shift in the way one thinks and orders reality. For realsies, I'm annoyed that authors use the same idea over and over again, and worse yet readers eat it up. To be fair, Kundera relates everything to sex, this just got me thinking about shit. And I'm not a misogynist....I swear...So yeah...

-MX

P.S. After writing this and seeing how much I had diverged from my original topic, I divided it into two parts.
P.P.S. A talking Vagina would be awesome.

Hell Yeah

Ain't the new sound just like the old sound?

In the interest of keeping things fresh, I have decided to put up some shit on an artist I've been listening to or was listening to. Some of you might have heard of it, but most likely not. So here goes.
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead

To be honest, i only really care about only one of their albums, Source Tags and Codes, and have only a mild interest in their other work, but this one album is mind-blowingly good. I can't think of one rock album that touches Source Tags in this decade. The nearest comparison I can think of is to Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, but that doesn't do this album justice. It is end to end balls-to-the-wall rock--one of the few indie rock albums I thoroughly enjoy, because its uncompromising in its vision and scope. Of course all the good will went to their heads after this album and they recorded one shitty album followed by a decent one, but whatever.

Another Morning Stoner


It Was There That I Saw You


Relative Ways



Word.