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Showing posts with the label history

23

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  July 14, 1997… I walked into an NC DMV and got my no-longer-a-kid license.   The one with facial hair, a stamp that didn’t peg me for being under 18 and reflecting a height that reflected my last adolescent growth spurt. I also registered to vote.      In the interceding 23 years, I have not missed one single opportunity to inform myself and vote in every single election.   I have avoided being arrested for or convicted of anything that would jeopardize my right to vote.   I avoided being less than informed on issues that would drive who I should vote for, even in a land before ubiquitous internetting and unsolicited (or solicited!) text messaging.   Every first Tuesday after the first Monday of every November, I got my ass up and went and participated.   When Early Voting became a thing in my mid-to-late 20s, I chose a favorite polling location – one alternative one now – and have not missed an opportunity to vote early since.      I have seen election seasons come and go.  

For the Love... Writing About Writing

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     When I was 12 and in seventh grade, my aunt came to visit my English class.   She was, unbeknownst to me until that class on that day, a published author and a good friend of my teacher whose name alcohol has erased from my 41 year old memory.   She spoke of a book she had recently written and was on the way to publishing that happened to be stories of my family and her and her siblings (including my own father) during their own upbringing. These were stories I knew first hand, but the way she presented them made it so…   ENTERTAINING.   It was something completely new to me to see something so mundane as a story that every kid knows of what begat them presented in a manner that could hold the attention of 20 twelve year-olds.      I was hooked… As a middle child, also-ran, “who is that guy” kid, I have always been used to things just being whatever they are and cruising through life without any specific dream other than “making it,” whatever that means.      I deci

Still Not Listening to "They"

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     “They” said this shit would be dead in no time flat.  NO one wanted to hear that shit. That was in the mid to late 1970s.  I would be born only a couple of short years later in 1979.  That said, the argument can be made that we literally grew up with you.      “That ain’t real music, anybody can write some damn nursery rhymes,” they said while continuing to NOT write anything – ANYTHING – themselves.  The irony of the repetition of their own parents’ detraction from what they did in their own youth, and their parents before them.  Bearing that similarity, it stands to reason that they would know how this story would continue, if not how it would (or not) end . Hip Hop…      At 40 years old, I have become accustomed to being told for 30something years that I was wasting my time liking – nay, loving – it.  In the 80s, to me it was people who looked like me, spoke like me and dressed like I wished I could afford to.  It spoke to interests that I had and evolved with me as

Today in Phlip History

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September 3, 1998… I was 19, it was a Monday.      I had to work that morning and needed to be there to open the store, so I was in the mall at 9:30am.  When one of my guys got in with me, I snuck away to whatever FYE was 20 years ago to make a quick video game purchase. If I had known that the game I was about to buy would change the direction of the next year(S) of my life, I would have--…  fuck that, I’d have bought THREE!      I worked 9:30-6 that day and IMMEDIATELY rushed home to my Playstation (the boring-looking-ass Playstation 1!), locked away in my bedroom and proceeded to not be heard from other than to work, eat, bathe or shit for weeks.  If at any point I can remember a favorite game becoming my favorite that quickly, this was the time. The story was fun going through.  It was engrossing to have a story with layers and twists and shit, mixed in with the “sneaking around and cutting dumbass guards’ throats” aspect of it.  The Easter eggs found in subsequent

Short Shelf Lives for Short Attention Spans

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The year is 1989, I am ten… It’s September, and school has been back in for roughly 4-5 weeks.  It is still technically summer, so my brother and I are making good on having learned to cut grass and my granny soliciting our services.  In late-80s money, this is still only $10 a yard to split between us and cover supplies, but it is money.  To 5 th graders, a few yards on a Saturday is AMAZING money, plenty enough for candy and soda until the following weekend.      Established here is that we were kind of getting our own money and as word spread about the neighborhood, we had plenty of clientele.  More than candy and sodas from the store without being beholden to my mom’s “we’ll see” (<-- 2="" a="" about="" and="" be="" before="" could="" i="" it="" later="" learn="" left="" ll="" maybe="" more="" nbsp="" nice=&

True Story©... Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer

True Story©…                 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. This is one that has been up for debate for many years.  We’re to understand that Santa already had his reindeer fleet set to go, and all of a sudden another one shows up out of nowhere with a bright red nose?  Nah dawg, that ain’t how the story went.  It CAN'T be.  Today, I am here to lay it out for real.                 We readily believe that Santa handles his Christmas duties every year with the same 8 reindeer; Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and Vixen…  Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen (admit it, you sang that shit, didn't you?) .  All of a sudden, after 100 years there is a new reindeer at the North Pole?  HOW LONG WAS THIS DUDE THERE?!!?  And to make the story just a little more juicy, how about the fact that one that no one was allowed to see or hear of him from the beginning of the Santa Claus story in 1839 to the discovery of Cocaine in the late 1850s and then still remaining COMPLETELY hidden until th

Hip Hop x Basketball -- The Future

     Okay, so we have talked about the past, we have brought things up into the present.  The very natural next question is “well what does the future hold?” As much as I would love to say that I have the answer to that question, the fact remains simply that I cannot have such information.      This coming year, the NBA Commissioner of the hip hop era is retiring and one of his understudies will take his position.  It will remain to be seen whether that means that he will continue the non hip hop friendly approach that Stern attempted within the past ten or so years or if he will simply let things fall to the way of profitability of the time just before those years.  What we DO know is that kids are still playing ball, even if not outdoors as much as they did when those around my own age did.  What is known is that rappers are still dropping basketball metaphors and are still seen courtside at games.  I cannot imagine that last fact changing as long as the prohibitive-to-reg

Hip Hop x Basketball -- 9: Renaissance(s)

9:Renaissance(s)      The concept that a sport or a genre of music, especially one often marginalized as “not music” like hip hop has often been through its years seems foreign to some.  The fact, however, is still that each has had an almost consistently generational window of change that can be expected to take place.  In basketball, the change can be usually marked to include a “generation” lasting about the length of the careers of the most prominent players of that time.  Often times, you hear them discussed/named in terms of the most prominent players/combinations of those particular times.  Examples include the “Celtics dynasty,” the “NBA vs ABA,” of course the vaunted “Magic vs Bird” era, the “Jordan era,” and then the shared “Shaq/Kobe era” and “Spurs dynasty” years.  Based upon the best players playing 11-15 years, those five great periods have bridged the time from professional basketball’s days of infancy in the late-40s and 50s until the present.      Similarly, an

Hip Hop x Basketball -- 8: Detractors Abound

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8:Detractors Abound Despite the very much displayed facts supporting that hip hop and basketball are blood brothers, there still happens to be groups who’d sooner have it otherwise.  Following the infamous “brawl at the palace,” NBA Commissioner David Stern reverted back to his pre-Air-Jordan-days and implemented changes that specifically blackballed things that had always been openly embraced by hip hop at large; specifically the players were forbidden from “street” clothes – no jeans/athletic wear, specifically only “dressy” clothes – and big visible necklace/medallion combinations as they entered and exited the arenas in which they played.  It seemed to matter not that they were to be infrequently seen by anyone other than cameras already tasked and properly compensated with being there to cover them, instead of fans or civilian paparazzi – both of whom would lack credentials to gain that kind of access.  This approach played best into the most lucrative of buyers an

Hip Hop x Basketball -- 7: The Spirit of Competition

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7: The Spirit of Competition      It is no secret that basketball, like any sport, is competitive in nature.  The fact that score is kept and a winner is declared at the end of the competition defines that.  What may or may not be up for debate is just how similarly appointed as a competitive medium that hip hop is. On the surface, Billboard releases their Top 200 and Rap/R&B-specific charts once weekly to outline who sold the most copies of their songs/albums each week.  In a 2012 economic climate, every album or song sale is a hard-fought-for sale, and it stands to reason that artists and executives are cognizant of this and work hard at either bending tastes of their audience to the enjoyment of their work or bending their work to the will and tastes of their desired listening public.      With these things in mind, the heat of the battle has the tendencies to cause the participants to become a bit testy while competing in their craft.  Night in and night out, obsce

Hip Hop x Basketball -- 6: "Who Can I Trust"

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6: “Who Can I Trust?”      It has been said that when you reach a certain income/exposure level, you can never date a “regular” person – at least not one who didn’t know you before you had anything. The same is to be said for the people you will have in your circle.      What remains in application is the exhibited fact that the only person/people you can trust to understand your situation and problems are the ones who have been through similar circumstances themselves.  When, as we have discussed, NBA players and rappers more often than not come up through the same ills we understand the connection that they come to have.  As nothing is ever perfect, we’ve seen even these situations go sour and end ugly – usually just with the loss of a friendship and hopefully not the loss of a friend.  To that ends, the “bosses” of both camps spend major time and resources on educating and guiding them to the building of healthy interpersonal relationships, and even THEN it falls on deaf

Hip Hop x Basketball -- 5: "Let's Do This Together"

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5: “Me Too!” and “Let’s Get Money Together”      No, this is not related to any basketball players’ attempts to rap or any rappers’ attempts to show how much “like Mike” he was in the gym.  It is more related to each side recognizing the other’s validity in the arena of entertainment.  There is a possibility that this could have been taken along with the “Acknowledgment” we previously discussed, but the level that this is taken to has a life of its own, beyond simple acknowledgment.  It almost becomes necessary to point to the fact that each experienced a bit of a burst in popularity right around the mid-80s, directly in line with the spikes in the popularities of – all at once – national media outlets (broadcast and cable TV, radio, etc.), the renewal of the Lakers/Celtics rivalry and perhaps most importantly, the previously mentioned marketing juggernaut named Michael Jeffrey Jordan.      A term born of this mutual respect and endearment from the hip hop community to that

The Concept of the Hip Hop Concept Album

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            On my next birthday, I will be 34, so it stands to reason that my life has left me with plenty of access to hip hop music in my time.  One thing that artists USED to try and actually pull off well was concept albums.  No, I do not mean an album upon which the artist finds a reasonably central theme well and sticks close to that across the entirety of the album.  With that in mind,  Ready to Die, Only Built For Cuban Lynx  and the like are off of the table.  They were classically presented albums that stuck to their formulas well, but “Concept Albums” they were not.             On the other hand, Prince Paul’s TWO concept albums  A Prince Among Thieves  and  Politics of the Business , Kool Keith’s entire career and minor outlying and TERRIBLY slept-on Sporty Thievz  Street Cinema  should all personify what it is I am getting after.  It’s not to say that artists from the little-known on up to megastars haven’t TRIED, just that many fail to pull it off.  Let me lay it