Either Nas is a Genius or he just Bob Beamoned the Shark

Frankly, I am not sure which.

Say Hello to Nas’ Be a Nigger, Too.

“My Flow tight as Tootie’s Braces” <—-that’s slick right there. Can’t front on that.

Listen (with your headphones, of course) and let me know what YOU think.

Third time through and I’m not sure if I can endorse this or not.

As art, it’s good stuff.

As political commentary….uhhhhhhhhh.

This cannot happen

I join with Carmen from All About Race in insisting that George W. Bush not be allowed to screw up anymore than he already has.

From Carol H. Rasco, president and CEO, of Reading Is Fundamental (RIF):

“President Bush’s proposed budget calling for the elimination of Reading Is Fundamental’s (RIF) Inexpensive Book Distribution program would be devastating to the 4.6 million children and their families who receive free books and reading encouragement from RIF programs at nearly 20,000 locations throughout the U.S.”

“Unless Congress reinstates $26 million in funding for this program, RIF will not be able to distribute 16 million books annually to the nation’s youngest and most at-risk children. RIF programs in schools, childcare centers, migrant programs, military bases, and other locations serve children from low-income families, children with disabilities, foster and homeless children, and children without access to libraries.”

We need you to help - NOW. Please Click Here to SEND A LETTER TO CONGRESS.

Find out more, see the timelines and get involved - Today. Time is running out for our kids. We can all stand together on this.

Kindly Post this with a hat-tip to Carmen.

Thank you, Carmen.

Jersey #1 for the Rafters: Steve McNair

On the day of his retirement, I would like to acknowledge Steve McNair for his achievements in Football by hanging his jersey in the rafters.

Let the Steve McNair for the Hall of Fame campaign start here.

A Pox on all their houses.

It is official.  The Dominant Media Culture cares NOTHING for this country.  They exist to profit from conflict.  Where there is no conflict, they create it.  Why even bother watching the news.

I would have just as soon watched THIS.

And I DID. (Well I DVRed it)

All that was missing was a heel turn and a steel chair.

I will NEVER watch an ABC News anything ever again.  I am SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO done.

Has anyone seen the price of FOOD?  ANYONE?

The price of Gas?

We are at war….on TWO fronts.

Flag Pins….SERIOUSLY?

This is a buncha Bullshit.

I am Irritated.

Nothing I have to say is as throught provoking as this.

I am deferring to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has gone from writing pieces in the Washington City Paper to the Atlantic Monthly.

The boy is sweet with the nouns and verbs.

From Birmingham to Cleveland and Baltimore, at churches and colleges, Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot.

It’s heady stuff, especially coming from the man white America remembers as a sitcom star and affable pitchman for E. F. Hutton, Kodak, and Jell-O Pudding Pops. And Cosby’s race-based crusade is particularly jarring now. Across the country, as black politics has become more professionalized, the rhetoric of race is giving way to the rhetoric of standards and results. Newark’s young Ivy League–educated mayor, Cory Booker, ran for office promising competence and crime reduction, as did Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty. Indeed, we are now enjoying a moment of national self-congratulation over racial progress, with a black man running for president as the very realization of King’s dream. Barack Obama defied efforts by the Clinton campaign to pigeonhole him as a “black” candidate, casting himself instead as the symbol of a society that has moved beyond lazy categories of race.

You are telling on yourself.

I would love to weigh in on this whole bitter deal, but I usually get so angry It becomes difficult for me to focus my thoughts.

Suffice it to say that I am in disagreement with the Conventional Wisdom on this one.  All i really have to say is I am a bit skeptical of any person who dares to speak for the working man when they are not working men themselves.

Yes. It is now April, 2008 and Bob Johnson is still ignorant.

Bob Johnson is still ignorant.

Ignorant about how to ingratiate an expansion basketball team to a city that had just lost a team and ignorant about politics.

This subject isn’t worth a lot of my time or yours.  Consider this the equivalent of walking into the house soaking wet and announcing:

“It’s raining outside.”

Alicia Keys is tired of the box the y’all put her in

While a bunch of folk spent this weekend discussing the bitterness of small town folk, the Black Blogosphere got their feeding frenzy on at the expense on the young lady below:

By now you have heard the punchline of the story:

We’ve been talking about Keys’s early jones for the Notorious B.I.G. “My favorite Biggie song is ‘Me & My Bitch,’” she says, licking a stray globule of jam off her finger. “That title doesn’t make you think he’s speaking about the love of his life, but he is. She throws his shit out the window, she flushes his drugs down the toilet—she’s crazy! But if you grew up like that, then you understood, that was love in that world.”

We ask what other gangsta rappers she liked. And that’s when Keys drives a steamroller through the wall.

“‘Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other,” she says, putting down the sandwich. “‘Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.”

Come again? A ploy by whom?

She looks at us like it’s the dumbest question in the world. “The government.”

Sigh. The easy way out is to pounce on Alicia Keys and fit her for a tin-foil hat. More interesting, as usual is the REST of the story.

From reading the WHOLE story you get a glimpse at an artist in evolution.

Alicia Keys has been the 21st century Whitney Houston. A creation of the Clive Davis Arista/J Records hype machine who rode a debut album to that exalted Grammy status first occupied by Lauryn Hill and later by Norah Jones, Beyonce’, and most recently, Amy Winehouse.

She went from random new chick on the block who could sing and play the piano to playing second banana to Scarlett Johannson in the Nanny Diaries and bussin Caps with Common and Ari Gold in Smokin Aces.

Of course, as is the norm with anyone with an abundance of Melanin, talent, and success, there is a certain need for us to pull down that which we were so instrumental in building up (Barack Obama, take note).

I was on the other side, albeit silently when the great Alicia Keys vs. India Arie debate was held back in 2001-2002. I, being the bougie elitist artsy fartsy type that I have been known to be, was bitter towards the astounding success of Ms. Keys and felt that India Arie was being slighted.

In time, I have learned to save my slings and arrows for THEY (yes, the mysterious They; it always seems to be about them)…and not Ms. Keys (or Beyonce…or anyone else getting more shine than I feel they deserve) and she has grown on me. Each album has been an improvement over the last and I find her down to earth nature refreshing.

I don’t think she REALLY believes that the government created gangsta rap as a ploy to get Black folk to kill each other. (The government would  NEVER be complicit in the death of its own citizens…ESPECIALLY the ones of color*blink*)

What I DO think is that Alicia has gotten too close to the blinding light of overexposure and she now sees how the game has been played.

She wants to step out of her comfort zone and enter the next stage of her career.

She wants to do her “What’s Goin On“

While this was an awkward place and way to explain her evolution, It is an evolution that we should all applaud.

What surprised me most was the fact that she asserts that Go Ahead was actually about President Bush and not about some dude.

Seriously.

Sounds different when you look at it that way, huh.

A One-Sided Conversation by Design

I watched the “conversation about race” on MSNBC and waited for that singular moment that inevitably arises where you see it all devolve into a squandered opportunity.  I saw many candidates, but one particular moment took the cake.

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Kevin Powell and Professor Carr of Howard, BOTH of whom I would consider young men who harbor an intense desire for the uplifting of Black people.  A conversation ensued where each individual took their issues to a personal place and inevitably fell into a bunch of wolf tickets snuffed out by the unyielding march of the profit driven media.

Ultimately, if anything has been learned as we settle into the 21st Century, the media is what it is and it does what it does.

What it is, is a tool of the market.  An enterprise.  Despite the railings of ANYONE who says differently, it has only one master and one goal.

Profit.

Anyone who is skilled in making money will tell you that you profit by creating an environment that maximizes growth by efficiency.

Meeting David Wilson, the documentary that spawned and preceded said Conversation is a perfect example of capturing a moment for the sake of profit.

Part of what prompted Brian Williams to cut to the break was his desire to bracket the evening with a moment of poignancy….*ahem* when the grandsons of former slaves and the grandsons former slave-owners sit down at the table of brotherhood.

That is what THEY want to see.  a pretty picture.

That ugly messy conversation that US wants to see?  You do that on your own time.  Ford has Cars to sell and Proctor and Gamble wants to sell its soap and whatnot.