Attention Democrats: Word to Your Mother

This is the funniest shit I've seen in a long time. The GOP, in a bold move to rebrand itself as the dopest thing this side of LL Cool J, has launched an 'off the hook' (their words) marketing campaign. Perhaps they hope the youth will 'get jiggy with' fiscal conservatism and find the 'flyness' in family values. Either way, I suspect hilarity shall ensue from this campaign.

Also, demonstrating how with the times the party is, Chairman Michael Steele made a 'midget' joke.

What's Beef?

A BlackStar PSA:

Slingshot Hip Hop: Free the P

This is my attempt to bust pauly's musical trust on the Tank. While awaiting the arrival of my copy of the new Son of Nun album, here's an excellent sampling of Pro-Palestinian hip hop.

The Arab Summit:


The Philistines:


And Son of Nun w/ the Welfare Poets:

Amiri Baraka Visits Madison

Prodigious Marxist poet, dramatist, writer and activist Amiri Baraka came to speak at UW-Madison Monday night. Invited by a hip hop/spoken word group, Baraka spoke about that challenges that face young people committed to changing the world with lessons from the past and poems that were very insightful and inspiring, not to mention hilarious - "There are some negroes that are as backwards as Rush Limbaugh. Well, almost." He emphatically challenged 'identity politics' and whiteness theory, a huge hurdle for multiracial organizing today by explaining how Black mayors haven't improved the lives of millions of working and poor Blacks - for instance in his hometown of Newark. Additionally, he pointed out how H. Rap Brown was convicted by a jury of 9 Black people and 3 whites.

Despite his published condemnation of those on the Left that would criticize Obama as a pro-imperialist and business-as-usual Democrat, Baraka emphasized the need for organization and politics for a movement that would bring about the changes we want to see. He argued for study circles within movements and that those who haven't read the Souls of Black Folk aren't intellectuals. Without saying it so directly, Baraka was arguing quite strongly for the need of an organization capable of being the 'memory of the class', with knowledge of previous struggles - victories and defeats - in order to orient the fights of today. Another important point I believe Baraka made quite subtly, given that the event he spoke at was a spoken word/hip hop forum, was that while music - particularly the Black music tradition - is important for understanding the changes in society and culture in the past and can play that role in the present, art alone cannot change society. This is not to say that rap and music are incapable of supplementing struggles and exposing the crimes that capitalism carries out daily, but is an important to know that to really force Obama to bring the troops home now, give us universal health care and create jobs struggle and organization are a must.

Here is a video of Baraka's infamous - read: amazing - poem that he composed and delivered soon after the events of September 11 entitled "Who Blew Up America"

Weekly Dave: Bill O'Reilly

This week's Dave award should be combined with an as of yet unnamed award for silliest grandstanding. Bill O'Reilly has decided to launch a campaign against having Nas play at the welcome back concert for Virginia Tech students, describing it as "an atrocity." Watch the video here. In the video, you get some vintage O'Reilly. He shouts down Bakari Kitwana, a brilliant critic and author, in order to assert some facile point about Nas having a gun conviction. Then, he patronizes the token black conservative (a species well-dissected by Adolph Reed) by asking him if he's ever heard of Stephen King. I'm surprised he didn't cover his bases totally by flat out asking the man if he could read.

O'Reilly then proceeds to recite the cliched conservative litany of ways hip-hop is, in the words of Senator Tankerbell, confusing the youth. They are boring and not worth writing about. I would, however, like to take a moment to point out O'Reilly's staggering hypocrisy.

My j'accuse is thus: O'Reilly is in fact a far greater cause of the ills which he attributes to hip-hop. He is a dedicated opponent of affirmative action, minimum wage increases, or reparations, all of which are necessary if there is ever to be economic parity between Blacks and whites. Since crime is intimately linked with poverty, O'Reilly's defense of a social order built on Black impoverishment implicates him in the very criminality he seeks to condemn. What a fucker.