The Black Album
My first impressions: Pretty good last album, Hov. Though I am skeptical that you won't make any more music, which isn't bad since you're music still speaks to a lot of us out here.

The lyrics are hot, as usual. I still don't like how you compare yourself to Big so much, but I think that's my own bias. Obviously you've owned the scene since the mid-1990s, so you've got some clout and people like me hold it against you that Big and Pac aren't around. But no doubt, your rhymes are mostly tight. Nice holdin down the mic without any guests.

As has been heavily discussed on Okayplayer, production is interesting and good. Ninth Wonder's jawn is fire, as is Kanye's Lucifer. Sorry, though, the Neptunes didn't come through the way they have in the past. And DJ Quik? A little old for my taste. His shit was good some years ago. Would have liked to see some Dilla, maybe Madlib, definitely Pete Rock and Premier, but hey, it's a business. Rick Rubin brings us back a few years, but unlike Quik, with taste. Just Blaze is not bad; same with Eminem.

Preliminary marks: 4 out of 5.

Freestylin'
Here I go again
Freestylin
And you can bet
I got the girls smilin
But I ain't the type
To call one a bitch
Make her get on her knees
And bust on her lips
That don't mean
That I don't come with the real
Fuck Will Smith and LL love raps
They ain't know the deal
I just treat a woman right
With respect through the night
Don't matter if she's black
Latina indian asian or white
Cuz I'm done with that trife life
That's played up by type hype
Including marriage so fuck Bush
Ain't no husband and wife type
Yeah I got a gripe
Bigger than Richard Bey
Morton Downey
Al Franken
Bill O'Reilly
White man shut the fuck up
Cuz I've had enough
And I'm the only one comin through
With the truth straight and abrupt
So like McGruff the crime dog
Put ya tail between your legs
And chew on a bone
I'm tired of your shit
And it's time to head home

Common (Sense)
FYI: To liven things up (because it's so quiet out there!), I've decided to provide my overwhelming and omnipotent knowledge to some of today's MCs. They don't get enough attention: too often, people are blaming them for getting kids hooked on drugs, joining gangs, and investing in other vices. But fuck that and fuck them. As Wordsworth says, "Rap is the world's only consciousness/ We rap about everything that Congress miss"

Let's start with the cat who is by far my favorite MC, Common.

Common is as skilled a lyricist out there. He has charisma and energy -- and it hasn't fallen off (i.e. Nas). Electric Circus came with the same power that Can I Borrow a Dollar had. He sure sounds older, wiser -- less homophobic remarks and more expansive considerations of identity and culture -- but he still has a battle mentality, the aggressiveness, the swagger to pull it off.

He's also thematically deeper than Henry David Thoreau, who managed to spend several volumes talking about nature. Among the topics Common has covered in his five albums include: Assata Shakur's heroic narrative, the death and revival of hip hop, having to proceed with abortion, the search for religion, dealing with alcoholism, the meaning of music, race relations, the cityscape, getting robbed, etc.

More so, he's the most clever. He is undoubtedly a thinking human's MC, though that doesn't mean someone who hasn't been to college won't feel him. It's just richer if you've been. He has all these cultural references embedded in his lyrics, they are full of puns and metaphors.

He has worked with Jay Dilla, ?uestlove, James Poyser, Hi-Tek, DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Psycho Les, No ID, etc. His live show and band, A Black Girl Named Becky, have only gotten better.

I would rank his five albums as follows:

1) Resurrection
2) Like Water for Chocolate
3) Electric Circus
4) Can I Borrow a Dollar
5) One Day It'll All Make Sense

One.

Shifting into a new gear
The density of the readings I've been assigned this semester is beginning to show. I was handed a news article to read in class today -- not even from the esteemed New York Times, just a wire story -- and it must have taken me three reads to comprehend it. My mind could not process the information clearly the first two times.

However, while this signals an information saturation as far as receiving goes, I've also noticed a growing desire to write more. Not creative writing, which operates at a level different from my academic work. But writing as a means to synthesize all of the readings I've had so far.

Which is a good place to be, as December approaches. December, with all of its finals assignments and essays, with literature reviews and research proposals and research projects. No exams, thankfully. And so as my mind shifts into writing gear, I hope this will result in well-thought analyses that reflect all of the important work I've been up to this semester.

P.S. The Black Album comes out Friday.

Matrix: Revolution
This movie disappointed me.

It ended rather abruptly. It spent too much time outside of the matrix in that ugly hyperindustrial netherworld. There were only really two extended action scenes featuring the high-tech stunts of computer programs and crazy cameras.

The first film was great because of those scenes. The second one was interesting because of the dialogues that fleshed out the characters of the Oracle and the French guy. They were both good because Larry Fishburne played a significant role.

Revolution whittled Fishburne into a few lines. Though I must say Cornel West was once again a startling presence on-screen. Too bad he spent most of his adult life in the ivory tower. He might have displaced Denzel as a leading black actor.

My recommendation: wait for the rental.

Mixtape Friday
Okay, so it was a short tape.

Kweli Mixtape:
1) The Blast
2) Raw Shit
3) Guerrilla Monsoon Rap
4) K.O.S. (Determination)
5) Manifesto
6) Get By
7) Eternalists
8) Know That
9) Gun Music
10) Rolling with Heat

Common Mixtape:
1) Time Travelin'
2) The Sun God
3) I am Music
4) Full Moon
5) Charms Alarm
6) Resurrection
7) Respiration
8) Soul Power
9) Introspection

One.

freestyle of the day
if i have to tell you more than once
then you're probably a dunce
and i'm sick of your shit
cuz you give mcs the runs
and you got the nerve
to come out of the burbs
try to make it on the street
and get left on the curb
well i stick to the verb
and i'm ready for the action
by the time you gettin started
i'm done and just relaxin
waxin poetic
cuz i got enough to dead it
in the first round
i'm a dog
and my verse hounds
i'm a god
and you cursed now
the worst now
i'll leave you in a hearse now
eh you it's true what they say
my rhyme hurts pow!

Silence.
Silence.

It was what resulted last night at the dinner table, where Kelly, her friends, and I sat. It was what resulted after one, a vocal performance Master's student, asked me what my work involved.

I tried to be general, but perhaps I was too general. I told them it focused on literature and postcolonial theory. I tried to summarize postcolonial theory without relying on its keywords: ambivalence, negotiation, agency.

And I failed. There was silence.

A professor of mine at Brooklyn College had warned me about this, about how I would never be able to have conversation with people outside of the graduate humanities world. About how all of my friends would be academics, too.

In short, about becoming a lifelong nerd.

I tried to avoid it, once I got out of high school.

In Columbia, Missouri, I dressed fancy to class. I styled my hair every morning and sported a well-kept goatee. I exuded confidence, mystique, charm. I was nineteen.

At Brooklyn College, I gave that up for a disheveled coolness. I grew my hair out, my goatee long. I wore baggy clothes and bore an ice grill on my face wherever I walked. In the summers I shaved my head and the ice grill looked meaner. Deadly.

Here in Minneapolis, I've submitted to nerddom. I wear whatever isn't dirty, randomly assembling daily wardrobes. I leave the library with twenty books at a time. I spend my time out of class reading at home, sprawled on our sofa.

The next logical step would be to buy pocket protectors, specs, and plaid shirts.

I'm sorry to the non-nerds in the future who must survive a conversation with me.

Jessica Hagedorn
Last night, a snowy one here in Minneapolis, the writer/performance artist Jessica Hagedorn gave a reading of her new novel, _Dream Jungle_, at the Loft.

The plot sounds exciting, and given Hagedorn's biting humor, we're in for a treat. The setting is the Philippines, in the 1970s. Two historical events circumscribe the text: the "discovery" (in the Columbian sense, only) of a tribe that, for possibly many good reasons, has not participated in globalization and modernity; and the filming of the epic film, _Apocalypse Now_.

Sightings: David Mura was in the audience and asked some interesting questions about Hagedorn being a Filipina American writer writing stories set almost entirely in the Philippines, which she does with this text and _Dogeaters_, her most famous work to date -- especially given Hagedorn's sarcasm, which is potentially read as ignorant of the gravity of the postcolonial Philippines.

In a way, though, her focus on the Philippines even as an immigrated and assimilated writer demonstrates how our attention as an American reading audience should focus on places like the Philippines where American colonialism really f*cked up.

Her effort intervenes into the current Bush II dialogue about how Iraq has the promise of becoming what the Philippines became after decades of American presence. This discourse succeeds in ignoring what really happened (and still happens), relying on how little Americans know.

Hagedorn teaches us a little about it.

One.

25th Hour
We watched Spike Lee's 25th Hour Saturday night. Interesting plot, but it failed to build any suspense. I was left watching how Ed Norton lived the last day of his free life, without questioning whether he would go in or not. Only in the final scene, when his father tempts him into fleeing, is that question raised. Before that, all we want to know but don't is who turned him in?

Anna Paquin's role was strange. Besides showing what a goof Phil S. Hoffman was, what? Wasn't one sexy woman enough? C'mon Spike, I expect better from you.

More disruptive to the movie were two things: the homage to 9/11, which seemed corny and forced, and the two or three periods of racial angst, which were even more forced, not to mention taken straight from his older work.

The film, while certainly wrought with race, ethnicity, class, gender issues, did not seem to be calling them into question specifically. The plot involved a hip white man -- with Irish roots, to be sure -- and his dilemma of going to the slammer. Sure, his girlfriend was Puerto Rican and said identity was questioned and excused for turning him in, but that was the extent of such dialogue; it hardly engaged in the larger narratives of exclusion and racism.

So to me, his five-minute rant picking on every sub-category in New York was totally out of place.