and yes, over the course of a few decades i developed an accent.

swiped from kanye

this is one of those nights where i’m tired as fuck but can’t get myself to sleep.
I’M SOOOO EXCITED!!!!!!
last night was ill-literacy & the hi-lifes’ first jam session since february.
prepping for our santa clara show next friday.
those of you who are coming out to that are in for some surprises…i can’t really reveal what, because quite honestly it’s still unclear to me…all i can say is…all those frustrations of not being able to write a 3-minute formulaic slam-style spoken word piece flies out the window when them hi-lifes boys start playing, and nico’s sitting on the couch nodding his head and ruby’s dancing and dahlak’s smashing the keys and that microphone’s hot in my hands.
there’s a change in the weather here at ill-literacy.
part of me wonders what it all means,
the rest of me is a multitude of questions, doubts, excitements.
the santa clara show won’t be straying too far from the few sessions we’ve had with the band, but it’s opening up the floodgates for the fall tour…that shit’s gonna be WILD. whether or not you’ve seen an ill-lit show in any form, we’re completely flipping it. or as i like to think, keeping a lot of the characteristics that people like, but adding some stuff that you’ll love.

the other day i was writing a new intro to potentially open up the new ill-literacy set. somewhere in between the part about space robots and the point where the guitar solo kicks in, i suddenly became extremely self-conscious. this is a loooooooooong way from the ill-literacy that was doing 15-minute features in cafes at poetry slams just a year and a half ago. part of me is worried about it. artistically, it’s what i want to do. i’m craving music, and lately every time i try to sit down to write a poem, it feels contrived, cliche, corny.

at the same time, i remember the feeling of disappointment and alienation as a young spoken word fan finding out that saul williams was switching over to music. it was 2001 and i had just gotten into it because of him and it was like watching the captain jump ship. i couldn’t understand why. there were enough musicians out there…spoken word was so fertile yet untapped to me, there was so many places it could go and saul, the guy at the frontline, was putting out rock albums. it took me years and even a face-to-face conversation with him, but now i understand exactly why he made the change. he never left spoken word, he just had to take it where it hasn’t been yet. and since i’d never heard it like that before, i didn’t recognize it as such.

still, there’s something about being in the audience and watching someone on stage with just a microphone…no band, or support vocalists, or backup track–just the intensity of voice and the warped facial expressions and mist darting from clenched teeth. i really do believe in spoken word as an artform and as a movement, and so i feel that as ill-lit we’ll always try to keep some aspect of that a’cappella element in there. but it’ll just be surrounded by hella funky ass music that makes you want to fly to outer space.

speaking of which, i just finished reading this biography of george clinton that the homie jamilah gave me for my birthday. i pretty much finished the whole thing in two sittings. in reading all these biographies, i’ve learned that everyone has to go through a wannabe period. it’s just the way things are. so frankly, hendrix was a wannabe dylan, and sly was a wannabe hendrix, and clinton was a wannabe sly, and outkast was a wannabe clinton, and lately ill-lit has been wannabe all that. HOW STARRY-EYED DO I GET IMAGINING MYSELF IN THAT CHAIN REACTION?? not to say that we’re about to come out on stage all p-funk, but it’s safe to assume that we’ve been drawing more inspiration from that than, say, the minneapolis slam team.

(disclaimer: that was not a diss to the minneapolis slam team)

anyway, with that said, i know a lot of you folks who read my blog learned about me through “slip of the tongue.” at the risk of you gasping at your computer screen, i must reveal to you that it is my deep deep hope that i can retire that poem by the fall tour. well, maybe not retire, but do WAY LESS or strictly on a “only perform when panties are thrown on stage for it” basis (though i guess given the content of the poem that would be kind of counterproductive). well, here’s the deal: i’ll only replace it if i come up with something that i think is better. and 300 years down the road when we do our dreamgirls-style goodbye performance, i’m sure it’ll be in the set list.

well, much of my style-transition anxiety was eased upon leaving the erykah badu show on sunday and seeing how far away from the neo-soul image she has gone…and how much better she is for that, in my opinion. i mean, i love love love love love love love baduizm and mama’s gun, but i don’t need her to release another one of those. her new music is the shit because it’s very apparent that it’s the type of work that she’s having fun doing. and even though she didn’t do “next lifetime,” we still survived (plus, that electronic version of “apple tree” was the hottttttttnesssssssssss!)

dude, front on barack all you want, but he brought cody chesnuTT back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

for real though, politics and music seldom mix to form happy songs. i’m all for it. yeee!

cody chesnuTT - afrObama

also:
nas - black president
movado - we need barack
ti$a - vote obama

dj chief boima - barack star mixtape
(features the roots, kanye, jin, james brown, marvin gaye, etc.)

ps: the weezy and nerd albums are both the truth.

Dude, I had to post this…the homie Talia sent this to me the other day and it’s one of the most original and yet simplest ideas I’ve seen in awhile…Yeondoo Jun fro Seoul took kids’ drawings and turned them into real photoshoots (!!!!!) Check out the whole gallery here.

Really sorry that this site has been “I Spy Racism” lately…I feel like I’m back in sociology class.

Anyway, when I heard about Sharon Stone’s earth-shaking hatred for Chinese people it wasn’t really a thang to me because I wasn’t ever that fond of Casino or Basic Instinct or Hannah Montana or whatever other movie she’s in. So when I saw this Amy Winehouse clip, I came to a crux…you know, that moment like when you find out that something you really really like is something that you really really shouldn’t like anymore…but you still want to like it. I’ve been a huge fan of Amy for years. When her first album Frank came out I passed it around like it was the Gospel. There was even a moment when I envied her–that she was touring, and had such incredible albums. And when all the tabloids started piling up, I felt angry at the carnivorous media for her. Even with all the substantial evidence that she was doing the Hollywood wilt in the worst possible way, I sympathized with her. I blamed the paparazzi and big record companies and her chauvinist boyfriend…anything to excuse the person who made music that helped me enjoy life.

And so even in light of a video of her staring dead into the camera and singing “blacks and pakis, nips, and gooks,” with her fingers stretching out her eyelids, there’s a deep part of me that allows for a double-standard…to not switch it when “Take This Box” came on random on my iTunes earlier…to fish for a reason why it’s still okay to listen to her music and love it.

I suppose we toss these artists into the “guilty pleasures” bin–that collective of songs and movies and television shows that you know are problematic, bad for you, shameful to claim, but you allow them to exist in the limbo of your interests. The term “guilty pleasure” is the righteous person’s free pass to lay down their politics and not think about how utterly poorly this might reflect on their character if people found out just how much they love the things that contradict who they are.

Some people use the convenient reasoning that an artist’s art shouldn’t be judged based on an artist’s life. These are the people who can listen to an R.Kelly song without thinking about him peeing on someone (or at least don’t mind it). Unfortunately, I’m not one of those blessed people, and I regret that I can’t listen to the Trapped in the Closet series.

But then again, I wasn’t even really into R.Kelly even before the whole peeing thing. How much does an artist’s greatness have to outweigh their faults to make them okay to listen to? Is it really all that different that Amy sang that song strung out and on YouTube instead of on an album track? Does the rubric from which we analyze her alter when she steps into the recording booth?

Do you see the conflict? Folks who probably aren’t really feeling Amy Winehouse to begin with probably think I’m trippin. I mean, if I’m going to all these places throughout the country trying to uplift Asian folks and make them feel good about themselves, and then in between shows I’m bumping musicians who still have “gook” and “nip” in their vocabularies, isn’t that kinda funnystyle? It must be incredibly hypocritical for me.

At the same time, there gets to a point where to just stop listening to songs based on my politics, even though I love hearing them, gets tiring. And boycotting becomes draining. It’s like, *shit I can’t buy Nikes because they use sweatshops* and then *well then I have to stop wearing Chucks because Converse is owned by Nike* and *damn, my favorite restaurant underpays its immigrant workers* and *aw, I shouldn’t listen to Lil Wayne because his songs are misogynistic* and then *well if that’s the case then I can’t even listen to Kweli because he has some homophobic lyrics from time to time* and then *well I definitely can’t listen to Miles Davis because he actually hit his women* and on and on and on until finally all you’ve got left are Michael Franti records and a pair of vegan leather sandals.

It’s 4:30am and I’m not really sure what I’m talking about anymore. No excuses for Amy, the shit she said on that video was horrible. For some reason there’s a binary in my head that I can either:
a) forgive her and keep bumping her music, or
b) not forgive her delete all her mp3s

I haven’t quite settled for either, though I’m definitely not very fond of her right now. What do you guys think? Do people get extra leeway if they’re hella fresh??

Look what Jon from Verbal Acupuncture sent me:

This is from an art gallery by Yazmany Arboleda that opened in NYC entitled The Assassination of Barack Obama. In actuality, it’s about the character assassination brought about through media coverage of Obama during this primary season. The gallery opened alongside The Assassination of Hillary Clinton.

From its press release:

The installation explores the figurative, but highly effective attempts by the American populace to assassinate Barack Obama’s reputation during his historic candidacy for president. Reflecting the sentiment that no one is without blame or responsibility, Arboleda shows the extreme effects of a society intent on castrating anyone in power.

Yesterday morning Aboleda tried to set up the exhibit in Midtown across the street from the NY Times building, but by 9:30am the cops had taken him into custody to be questioned (disallowing media coverage) and covered up the word “assassination” with censo[red] tape.

It’s interesting to see all of this unfold…at what point did we start being so polite? Maybe around the time they started blanking out Biggie’s line “blow up like the World Trade” on “Juicy.” Now an art gallery with the word “assassin” on it gets shut down with the swiftness. In the same country that screened The Assassination of a President on screens everywhere. On the news everyone’s evaluating if America has “healed” from racism since we might have a black president. Like it was a parasite, or a disease, that America acquired. Like it wasn’t always like that.

Nobody wants to talk about it. But everybody’s thinking about it. Even the people my age, who only know of assassination like some phantom concept that we toss around during Big and Pac conversations, paranoia quivering from our tongues. People my age, we don’t know assassination like our parents do. Like they know Lennon. And Kennedy. And Malcolm. We weren’t even alive to see Reagan get shot.

So what is it that makes it so that even the high schoolers I talk to respond to the word “Obama” with the word “assassination” like some sick game of Taboo? These people know of assassination through 50 Cent. Theirs still live, even after 5 shots. And really, no one knows exactly how we would react if something were to happen. It’s that instinctual sour taste in our mouths, that taste that made me feel like I could rejoice for Barack taking the nomination, but rejoice with caution. Surely, we live in a sensitive era. But what’s the expense for not talking about things that we don’t want to happen? What’s up with this jinx society? People with their noses deep in The Secret don’t want to speak assassination into existence and so the conversation falls limp. So isn’t it the role of the artist to uncover the topics no one wants to talk about? Or would this be considered irresponsible and in bad taste?

I’m interested to know what folks think of this whole…thing…being cooped in my apartment writing has gotten me all weird and artsy.

Check out the galleries here:
www.theassassinationofbarackobama.com
www.theassassinationofhillaryclinton.com

And then watch this: