Posts (page 2)
Last night, doing what I do, I found this post on okayplayer.com a site I used to frequent a lot as The Roots are one of my all time favorite groups in music history.
"The Roots Say Goodbye To Hub after 17 years
Let me end all speculation ladies and gentlemen and officially announce that yes indeed Hub played his last show as a member of The Roots on August 31st of this year.
One has to understand off the bat to be a member of this group is to sacrifice your life. If you look at it (and this is applies to most of the artists that you talk about on this site) there is nothing "normal" about our lives. Well at least my life. (Hold the violins please.... there is cool shit like 1am jams with Prince in his living room watching Joni Mitchel dance like a teenager.....but there is also a downside like being in your mid 30s and your dating life is still on some high school shit.)
Even as i write this i got 34 minutes to haul my ass to rehearsals for the VH-1 tour. (this is after sleeping for 5 hours fresh from working with the Score winner of the VH-1 Hip Hop Awards, which came after a 4:30am lobby call to the Las Vegas airport, which came after all the crazy MTV activity and gigs i had to do, which came after the morning flight and the 6am lobby call from Montreal which came after the 10 hour mission to get a lawyers affidavit to get me into Canada (a mere half hour before stagetime)---of course not before trashing my entire house looking for my lost passport.---that was just 48 hours.
try to make that 17 years. This isn't a pity party. Nor an explanation. Just a confirmation.... I say we use this moment and opportunity to raise our cyber glass and toast Hub in his new endeavors.
(raises glass) -?uesto "
Aw shit! The Roots have for some time been a group that for me, mixed the funky jazzy music my parents raised me on, with the the music my cousins had taught me to love, hip-hop. As the source for this quote was ?uestlove himself, I get it. I understand. Its a tough game, he also points out that its happened with 3 (Rahzel/Scratch/Ben... tear) other members, but Hub, Hub has always been there. As tough as it was to hear, the cost of fame can clearly be weighted. The cost of anything done for that long of an amount of time where one sacrifices a lot for their group, can surely run one down. Hm, something I might have said to myself a few months ago?
Either way, as sad as it is, I'm a grown ass woman so I'll let one tear shed. That's all the tears I have for something silly like a band I like breaking up. I don't have time or energy to do any more mourning, don't get me wrong, I don't wanna cry for days, it was the shock that got me. And let's be truthful, I haven't been too down with some of the stuff they've put out lately anyway. I'll still have Organix, Illadelph Half Life, Do You Want More, and Things Fall Apart as my favs. So as ?uest said at the end of his post, the show will go on like it did before. Hub will be missed.
"I'm just jealous that I wasn't born Latina."
She says in this article.
And now, off to cool my jets.
This is a paper I wrote my senior year of college, found it and it really hit home. I modified some, but its generally a feeling I hold true to this day.
I Used to Love H.E.R, but… what if the Microphone is a Metaphorical Penis?
“Little [GIRL], you’re not allowed to stay/ You have to evolve inevitably/ And I’ve sure come a long way…” — “Getting Grown,” Cee-Lo Green
Scholars of 19th century female authors often ask “Is the pen a metaphorical penis?”. Over the course of my career as a hip-hop fan I have asked, a similar question, “Is the microphone a metaphorical penis?” One scholar notes, that “artist’s most essential quality, is masterly execution, which is a kind of male gift, and especially marks off men from women... The male quality is the creative gift.” I ask this question of the microphone, as the microphone is often equivalent to the pen in hip-hop, as they both become the way an artist communicates to an audience. At this juncture in our nation’s history, hip-hop has become synonymous with black male voices, and expressions of black masculinity, and in creating a space for women in hip-hop, one aspect of hip-hop that has seemingly left out women, is the way that hip-hop has been gendered as a woman when an artist expresses their love of the art form, truly supporting the notion that the pen/microphone is a metaphorical penis.
For some time now I have truly felt that hip-hop had been “the only man I could depend on.” I say this taking the risk of personifying hip-hop as a man, when so many of the male voices I was hearing were telling me it was a woman. In any case hip-hop has served different purposes for me over the course of my life, but over all has acted almost like another older brother among my many pretend ones, another prevalent and important male voice(s) in my life.
In my early childhood, groups like Outkast, Goodie Mob, Run D.M.C. and N.W.A. would speak to me through not only male voices but through my older male cousins taste’s in music. As I got older, artists would speak to me on my own. Warren G & Nate Dog, Snoop and Dr. Dre would talk to the girl who had run with pre-adolescent gang bangers, Richie Rich would remind me that there was “something about the west coast, that [made] me wanna ride (shake it west side, throw your hands up lets ride)”, and Tupac would become the first rapper I could ever remember having a crush on. Mos Def and Talib Kweli, The Roots — oh Tariq/Black Thought how you spoke to the backpacker inside— would set me upon my underground venture when I’d swear that I listened to the Mountain Brothers because they were good, and not just because they were Asian. Regardless, hip-hop has been through everything I have been through, has been along side me, a shoulder to cry on, a voice to reassure me, or feed fuel to my fire when need be. All of this through mostly male voices, sounding like older brothers, uncles, friends and in extreme cases boyfriends as they reminded me I was beautiful.
There was a time however when no voice spoke to me more clearly than Cee-lo did in his track, “Getting Grown,” off of Cee-lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections. The track really hit me at a moment where I was dealing with my own growth spurt. Senior year had come and senior year was about to go. I felt like he was talking specifically to me in his first verse of this song, simply change “boy” to girl, and there was my Uncle Cee-lo telling me that yes, my new life was coming, and not to fear it (quoted above).
“Magtonic,” he’d say between sections, “[You] never won’t be perfect I know/ but workin on it is worse than [you] know / Life is just learning as you go.” Most of all he’d tell me “Oooo, time changed but it feels the same/ There's no tellin what tommorow will bring/ Even if I could I wouldn't change a thang,” letting me know I wasn’t alone. He would reassure me as he concluded, “Say, young [woman], there's no need to cry/ Because I know you will get by/ Look your destiny in the eye.”
DAMN. That was it. The song had done something to me, had changed my outlook in such a way that I was ready for the end, ready for the beginning. And I started thinking, this kind of voice, is the voice hip-hop had been when “it found me.”
It’s arguable that voices like Cee-lo’s, do not reflect standardized visions of black masculinity that we see elsewhere in hip-hop, the second I heard this song I was reminded that in my eyes, hip-hop is not the “chick” Common met when he was ten years old, but that hip-hop is truly a matter of black male voice, and black masculinity. It is my firm belief that anyone who loves hip-hop loves H.I.M. as opposed to H.E.R. So I ask, if hip-hop were a person why would it be a woman, when the voices that we hear the most, are male? Someone pointed out to me that it’s an art flooded with men, so of course hip-hop will be personified as a woman, hyper-hetero-masculinity being a key component in the structuring of hip-hop personas and hip-hop content. And yet another person pointed out that in industries that are dominated by men you will often find that they gender objects as women, as if it were some symbol of control and as if it somehow upheld notions of patriarchy, and the mastering of domains (ships and cars being named after women were the first things that came to mind).
And that’s when a friend who was writing her thesis on female authors of the 19th Century pointed me in the direction of a few texts that look at the paternalistic nature of language and male domination of the literary world. Margaret Homans writes, “Women’s place in language, from the perspective of an androcentric literary tradition, is with the literal, the silent object of representation, the dead mother, the absent referent, so that within a literary text the shift from figurative to literal connotes a shift from the place of the signifier, the place of the speaking subject to the place of the absent object.” If we apply this to hip-hop we can see a similar pattern as men personify hip-hop in terms of being a woman, and only become the subject in their own work through either a boast or a confessional, which are also attributes of male identity, as they are “master’s of a the creative gift” and as the only way they can critique themselves, their ability to master something without compromising their role as masters is to turn such critique into a confessional. Where as women, in both the 19th century and today, “Women who do conceive of themselves as subjects — that is, as present, thinking women rather than as “woman”— must continually guard against fulfilling those imposed definitions by being returned to the position of the object.” Women in the rap world, as they are forced to defend themselves, in such a way that even if they boast as men would, they remain the object their work speaks of In some cases however there can be an exception to the rule.
“Maybe it shouldn’t be us two/ and maybe I’m just not the one whose right/
and maybe we can’t be together tonight/ and maybe you need another girl/
and maybe I just can’t be in your world/ and maybe we just can’t be together/ for you, whatever.”
The second time around she tells us that no, maybe she was wrong the first time.
“Maybe it should be us two together/ and maybe I’m the one for you forever/ and maybe we’re supposed to be together tonight/ and maybe everything is just right/ and maybe I’m your love till the end of time/ and maybe I’m supposed to be your and you mine/ and maybe yes its all right/ and for you still forever.”
What Grae is saying in her lines, the contradictory sentiments she is going through, is not only what other hip-hop artists have expressed when they themselves are personifying hip-hop as a person, but she is also portraying it in a way that some how seems more real, more serious and more true to the actual industry and what goes on it. In contemplating her dilemma, to sign, not to sign, to love him, not to love him she says, “catching feelings truly upset when he had to go school me on the ways of catching a mate,” and is in other words expressing her frustration with having to be taught how to act within this industry, and how to find a record label (or “mate”) she is told by men what she must do as a woman once again asserting traditional gender roles. Yet as this is a common experience I once
again must question if men could see exactly why, as a result of this very dilemma, hip-hop should be seen as a man.
Common, in “I Used to Love H.E.R. expresses his own frustration in his relationship with hip-hop saying “I did her, not
There is a commonly held belief that hip-hop and love songs do not mix, that hip-hop love songs inevitably fail. However, the few exceptions to this rule have always been when the love of the very art from is discussed. In “Love Jones” an article by Miles Marshall Lewis (The Village Voice, 3/9/99) he reviews Things Fall Apart, by The Roots, but begins arguing that at the time he reviewed the album, the new version of a hip-hop love song was not going to sound like L.L. Cool J’s “I Need Love,” but would instead exhibit a “love jones” for hip-hop itself. Only one artist that I am aware of has been able to express this love through the personification of hip-hop, but has done so with out gendering it and I would go as far to argue that while Grae’s attempt to personify hip-hop as a man is fitting of her work, and Common was the first to ever do this so explicitly, this artist does so flawlessly, without subjecting the listener to view hip-hop as a male or female creature.
In “Act Too (The Love of My Life)” off of The Roots album, Things Fall Apart, Black Thought opens the song with a verse describing a seemingly spiritual experience. But quickly follows with:
"When it came to gettin mine I ain't tryin, to argue/ Sometimes I wouldn'ta made it if it wasn't for you/ Hip-Hop, you the love of my life and that's true/ When I was handlin the shit I had to do/ It was all for you, from the door for you/ Speak through you, gettin paper on tour for you/ From the start, Thought was down by law for you/ Used to hit up every corner store wall for you /We ripped shit, and kept it hardcore for you/ I remember late nights, steady rockin the mic/ Hip-Hop, you the love of my life.”
However, in an attempt to make this truly “I Used to Love H.E.R.” Part II, Common steps back into the scene and continues his masculine bantering saying things like:
“Usin, no protection, told H.E.R. on _Resurrection_/ Caught in the Hype Williams, and lost H.E.R. direction/ Gettin eight/ate in sections where I wouldn't eat H.E.R./ An under the counter love, so _Silent_-ly I _Treat_ H.E.R./ Her Daddy'll beat H.E.R., eyes all Puff-ed/ In the mix on tape, niggaz had her in the buff/ When we touch, it was more than just a fuck/ The Police, in her I found peace (like who?)/ Like Malcolm in the East/ Seen H.E.R. on the streets of New York, trickin off/ Tried to make a hit with H.E.R. but my dick went soft…”
The era of hip-hop has been synonymous with the black male voice, as it is the one of the only mediums that has allowed the expressions of black masculinity to exist, and be presented to a mass audience. However, because it has stood alone amongst other aspects of mainstream media as the only outlet for these men, the generalizations regarding black masculinity that have been perpetuated by rap personas — the balla, the thug, the multimillion dollar hip-hop mogul, the pimp, the black nationalist— force me to admit that there is a possibility that the answer to my question is simply the fact that these representations of hip-hop as a woman are a “give in” as this medium is wrought with masculine bravado and performances of machismo. To complicate my question, I must say that when discussing this paper with others, one person noted that if the mic really is a metaphorical penis, it might be weird to sing into a mic if it looked like a vagina, or was a metaphorical vagina. And yet another person presented me with the notion that if the mic is a metaphorical penis then perhaps a lot of these artists should consider the fact that they must look like they are performing oral sex (symbolically and quite literally in appearance) upon a man. These simple questions make me wonder if it perhaps isn’t that I am arguing that hip-hop should only be seen as a man, and not a woman, but rather that as hip-hop is something so personal, spaces should be created where upon women and or men, can discuss their jonesing for the art, with out feeling the need to say, “I love it like I would love a man/woman,” but instead simply say “I LOVE HIP-HOP/ I HAVE A RELATIONSHIP WITH HIP-HOP!”
Marshall argues that those who attempt to address this jonesing, are exhibiting a sort of self-reflection, or expression that when broken down, is simply an expression of a pure interest in the art, a pure involvement and pure love. If that is the case, loving hip-hop to whatever degree, purist or not, is loving not only the music, but also the voices behind it, be they male or female, and it is just that in my eyes those voices are my brother’s, my lover’s and my best friends.
I know. Another reflective blog. I have some actual critiques in the works, things I've been meaning to publish but the fact of the matter is that the aftermath of my hell year has been hitting its peak and I'm starting to come down again.
I completely unloaded on my best friend last night. He left me with a lot of questions but also I got to say a lot about what is going on.
The biggest dilemma I'm feeling is trying to decide what behaviors and moods to be accountable for, and when I can make legitimate excuses for them.
He understood, and didn't at the same time. I didn't expect him to understand entirely. He called me hun, it bugged me. I had to step away to cry, let it out not hold it in. Me crying bugged him.
So I let it out. Let a lot out. Stopped for a minute and released some of this shit this year has brought me. And in the end, although I was feeling a mixed bag of emotions because of the things that came up in our conversation, for the first time in months I didnt feel anxious. I didnt have that burning feeling that rises up to my throat. I felt empty. For a moment, I was able to recognize that the last two weeks, have actually been better. That today, whatever came with it, would be, at least on an internal level, better.
I'm sure I got a handful more of these moments to go, but in some weird way, whatever comes with the fall I feel ready.
Contrary to the portrait my last post may have painted, I have a handful or two of amazing female friends, whose importance matches that of my boys. However, they fulfill different needs, serve different purposes and thus they obviously occupy a different space in my heart.
As noted, it takes a lot for me to trust another girl. In part it is due to the fact that my oh so small schools, and 7x7 mile city left me to attend kindergarten through 12th grade with the same group of 10 or so people most of which were girls. When we’d go from one school to the next, whatever pre-concieved notions about each other and pre-established dynamics between us would follow along. For me, it meant a continual mistrust in women I’d known for what would be the majority of my conscious life. Proving to be a little bit difficult for me as adolescense brought with it the usual girl-girl drama, I found that these relationships depended more upon the past, a loyalty to one another built upon mere time spent together, than upon the future.
This is to say most of the ladies I had grown up with often found any changes among the group, on both an individual and on a community level, difficult to accept. Countless moments in high school, in college I found myself defending the ways in which I’d changed to these girls inevitably altering the friendships we had once had and if it wasn’t the transformation, it was resentment for the past. The closeness we had felt was lessened by distance, by time, by the failure to accept what the world seems most afraid of – change.
Inescapably, I became incredibly untrusting of other women. Guard high, in a completely, unnecessary way, it took a lot for me to accept friendship from another girl and similarly put any stock in the women I was around. Sadly this was compacted by the historically female college, being put in the all girls dorm and I would have to let that guard lessen otherwise I’d be quite screwed. To complicate it even further, as this trust was being dolled out oh so slowly, I often got shit from certain girls about how I placed more value upon my relationships with men. Don’t get me wrong, this was coming from an educated place as our school was known for it’s women’s studies department and this comment usually came from a women’s studies major, but really? It wasn’t that deep I just needed more time.
And so slowly I did, perhaps too cautiously and I became friends with a few women I’d never expect to share so much with.
The fashionista from Texas, on the 4th floor with a passion for 19th century literature, law, making her own jewelry and could rival me in an eating contest with just a minutes notice.
The punk rocker down the hall from upstate New York who I knew would be a girl I had to know the day she walked up and down the halls singing Etta James’ “At Last,” to which I added background vocals from my desk. She’d be my housemate a few years later and write her thesis on Lord of The Rings, even hanging a map of middle earth on our living room walls much to the rest of our chagrin.
The artistic lesbian actress from urban New Jersey, who’d fight the good fight for learning disabled people, share the experience of starting an all female comedy group with me and live in that same house later on, adorning our living room with a gigantic belly button statue, perhaps a rebellion against the LOTR map.
My fellow Californian, only from Los Angeles, who would dance in the colleges repatory theater, turn me on to movies she’d seen in class as she was a film major and visit me for thanksgivings after we graduated from college.
There were a handful of others, the ragtag bunch of ladies I’d do comedy with my junior and senior year. The girls who’d lived with my Cali girl and I’d been partenered with in my class examining the African diaspora thorugh hip-hop. What a crew we’d be, the girl from SF, the girl from Lousianna and the two Jamaican girls people often treated as one entity.
These women were a pleasure to befriend, they’d been able to reciprocate that same unconditional love that my boys always gave me, the accepted change, they encouraged it.
In every way my boys were a link to the past, they grounded me, the girls pushed me to look at the future.
Move to Louisianna. Write a book with me. Lets start our own foundation. Lets have a comedy reunion. When I have my own home in Jamaica you can stay there anytime. You can do anything.
By no means were our relationships perfect, we had a tendency to fight like sisters sometimes, but the drama that comes along with being a girl, was always avoided, ignored or non-existent. We’d drink together and play dominoes, a night with the girls was not all that different than a night with the boys. We’d partake of other substances and watch movies. Shit the comedy group even watched adult films together, mind you it was for a sketch we were doing on an intellectuals sex hotline, but still, it went above the shopping/partying/baking together bullshit that most people expect.
As a result, I’ve sought out those sorts of women in my post-college career. Girls who’ve seen me through some of the roughest shit a person can encounter. Girls who call just to ask if I’ve seen Battle Royale. Girls who understand what its like to only have a handful of female friends. Girls who send me links of concerts I should check out even though they don’t live in the bay anymore.
So for what it’s worth, these are the women I choose to surround myself with. These are the kind of women that help me push through. These are the kind of women I’ve always driven to be.
Update: I neglected to mention 2 ladies who share my weird obsession with baked goods. One, after all the trauma I've endured this year shared her love the only way she knew how, by sending me an semi-secret recipe for a cheesecake that resembles a notorious NY cheesecake makers famous goods. Love her for it more. The other, on a visit to SF at her best, showed up at my work with a cupcake for me. An expensive but tasty mood changing cupcake during an otherwise crappy shift. Don't get me wrong, I mentioned oh so girly baking when I otherwise said my girls and I aren't like that but these two can roll with the best of them, we just also happen to like cake.
I’m feeling refreshed.
It’s taken me the majority of my life, to trust women. As an adolescent I was dogged over so many times by female friends who I had known forever, that I got used to being overly cautious when it came to other chicas.
This followed me for years and the poor women I encountered endured a lot from me.
Some were easy to read and immediately filled under “acquaintance”.
Some, with time, minimal effort and due to the fact that I had to work with them in one place or another, were filled under “associate.”
And then there were the few that were patient with me. With my sneers. My inability to hide my feelings on my face. The cautious speed at which I revealed things about myself. (This was compacted by the fact that I unfortunately was housed in the girls dorm in college, and stuck with the same circle of friends for 13 years prior to that, even though we weren’t in private school). The fact that my guard was so up, my trust was only given after some serious time passed. Those girls who cliqued, became some of my best friends. Like sisters. They had to learn how to operate around me, many in a sense had similar M.O.’s. They were filled in a special place reserved for those few woman I adored.
The straight girl who was so cool, they could talk to me like a dude about that girls butt, or about music or sports. By the same token, I was still a girl, who they checked out when no one was looking, who they could get girl advice from who they said they wished their girlfriends were more like (some territory I don’t think was cool to step foot on). One explained it saying I was the down ass chick. Sure, I’ll take it. That’s all I’ve ever been.
So past and present meet here, at the “dude with boobs/down ass chick” role. It’s one I’ve always occupied. And in the sea of oddities my life seems to have been this year, I’ve tried to heal, cope, move on, remind myself the world is bigger than me. And that keeps me from feeling crappy, but it doesn’t make me feel anything beyond complacent.
What I realized, after a long weekend with some of the boys, is that nothing seems to bring me to the ground like a night with them. A bit of the old, a bit of the new, there’s something about both the familiar and the unknown that makes me feel at peace.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my girls and they have their own fabulous attributes and affects on me, but seriously, there’s nothing like being one of the guys.
What makes your best friend so special?
Submitted by Jessmiloo.
I've been thinking about this a lot actually...
He's the longest relationship I've ever had with a man, (20 years).
He's the only person I'd want to be the godfather of my children.
He can't wait till we're old and gray and he can just sit his grandkids with mine in front of me to hear my crazy stories.
He shares his ice cream with me and makes me work friendly mixes.
He's my dad's substitute son and gives him that testosterone he needs after living with three women.
He listens and pushes.
I beat him at dominoes and he brings over beer and a burrito when we're bored.
If I had a dollar for every time we've been somewhere and I've been mean mugged because the entire world thinks he's hot, I might be the richest woman in the world.
I TOLD YOU.
So I'm perusing my usual race & pop culture blogs like I do most mornings before I go to work, (not even trying to come up with a post right now because I really haven't had the time to put one together and have a few in the works) and I come across this article mentioned in one of my favs (hat tip to stereohyped) reaffirming my feelings towards the Latino community's weird connection (obsession?) with Beyonce.
Ms. Knowles, Fergie & will.i.am are getting Latin Grammy recognition for their work with Latino artists. I can see how some would say my assertion that this has to do with her booty, is totally unfounded in this particular instance. To win a grammy, a Latin grammy in this case, it's about one's musical production, yes I totally get it. But more over, should these artists get said grammy's at all, IF we're talking about a segment of musical awards given to a particular ethnic group, due to the fact that the mainstream grammy's lack of recognizing these artists is the reason these awards even exist?! This is probably a question that is all a matter of perspective, and would have answers on both sides of the fence, but damn. I still can't shake the funny feeling I get when Latinos and Beyonce mix. (Don't even get me started about those former Black Eyed Peas members. Separate argument for another day.)
As I stated in my last Beyonce & Latinos related post, if Gwen gets an award from the Asian American community I'ma loose it folks.
Aight, off to work.
Barry hit his 756 home run... I'm teary eyed... and annoyed the dude who caught the ball was wearing a Mets jersey... oh well.
I just have to put this up... I've become a bit obsessed.
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