Killa Kyleon: shining
Killa Kyleon is guilty pleasure summer music, and as the weather turns nice you might want to have some Killa on hand. Yesterday he laced the world with a lush video about the pleasures of sitting in his car. Over the 2010 Sade sound, he just does it with ease. “Kevin Bacon kush I’m coughing so I’m on my footloose.”
No question Killa Kyleon has a fantastic flow. Mostly he basically rhymes as if his words were the snare drum, but he has a crisp double speed flow and varies his tone enough to actually match the melody of tunes, not just hitting the beat. What I love is that he rhymes, but he also plays his words — picking consonants at the right places to make the vocals stand out.
I can recommend both of his recent mixtapes: Candy Paint and Texas Paint and Natural Born Killa. Topically, Killa Kyleon will tend to repeat themes about money, sex, guns, cars, drink, and weed. Despite the predictable rap tropes, Killa picks some innovative similes and can really play with the words. Consider the “Moon and Stars Remix” with Curren$y and Big K.R.I.T. is a great tune, and honestly I think Killa K. offers up the nicest verse.
A former member of Boss Hogg Outlawz, Killa K. was introduced as a lyricist. From a 2008 interview with Slim Thug and the rest of the BHO Slim runs down all of the members, describing Killa Kyleon thusly: ” Killer Kyleon is the most lyrical cat. I think he’s up there with Lil Wayne when it comes to lyrics.”
via Slim Thug and the Boss Hogg Outlawz Interview – UGO.com.
I can’t vote for all the verbiage about his “bitches” and “boppers,” but like Curren$y it seems like his sexism is casual laziness. Without excusing or justifying his bias, it is worth talking about the particular frames of sexism presented in Killa Kyleon’s work. In most of his tunes women aren’t really present, when they do show up they are positioned simply as arm candy like the women in the “Moon and Stars” video. Killa is more likely to brag about being pursued by women, or comment that so little time he has for women because he is working so hard (“married to the game, you know I got a bad wife,” from “I live it”). When he does give a full song’s treatment to “pussy,” he shares the track with New Orlean’s up-and-comer Allie Baby for some mild bragging.
I doubt it matters very much what Killa Kyleon says– in the era when Common is attacked as a gangsta rapper, there is really no reason at all for any emcee to second-guess their own prejudicial lyrics. It is obvious that the medium by which you have chosen for expression will convict you even if you rapped about Strawberry Shortcake. But I’m not interested in prosecuting, I’m curious about how entwined the sexism is for Killa’s persona, and it doesn’t seem like it is central to what is going on in his raps.
What is central to his rhymes is the place he lives (Texas) and his car. He joins Texas legend Z-ro for “Swang real wide” on Candy Paint and Texas Paint and the big state automotive smoothness is at an all-time high. Killa: “Big wheels looking like a wagon, buttons on it looking like a suit/maroon paint looking like an agate, butter seats in my candy coupe/I got no top, decapitated, got the ladies infatuated they fascinated with the way I roll but it keep the haters so aggravated.”
Kyleon’s beats are likely to be both head-nodding and sluggish, open canvases for him to write verses filled with expressive comparisons and crafty double entendres. If you can handle the topics and the lingo, then pursue Killa Kyleon for his lyricism and talented rapping.
Filed under hip hop
Zombie Marie Curie dropping science
Thanks to feministing.com for the comic!
A short write up on the comic at the often-inspiring feministing.com.
Propaganda: facebook vs. google
Propaganda impedes the ability of the viewer/listener to distinguish who is making the message. Facebook hired a P.R. firm (Burson-Marsteller) to plant semi-bogus stories about privacy concerns in the media. Here is the Guardian on this trickery:
Suspicions in Silicon Valley were aroused earlier this week when two high-profile media figures – former CNBC tech reporter Jim Goldman, and John Mercurio, a former political reporter – began pitching anti-Google stories on behalf of their new employer, Burson-Marsteller. The pair consistently refused to disclose the identity of their client.
Goldman and Mercurio approached USA Today and other outlets offering to ghost write op-ed columns and other stories that raised privacy concerns about Google Social Circle, a social network feature based on Gmail.
In their pitch to journalists, the pair claimed Social Circle was “designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users – in a direct and flagrant violation of [Google’s] agreement with the FTC [Federal Trade Commission]”.
Facebook’s cover was blown when Burson-Marsteller offered to help write an op-ed for Chris Soghoian, a prominent internet security blogger. Soghoian challenged the company’s assertion that Social Circle was a privacy threat and accused them of “making a mountain out of a molehill”.
Soghoian was stonewalled by Burson-Marsteller when he asked them who their client was. He later published an email exchange between himself and Mercurio.
Cordasco said on Thursday: “Now that Facebook has come forward, we can confirm that we undertook an assignment for that client.
via Facebook paid PR firm to smear Google | Technology | guardian.co.uk.
Offering to ‘ghost-write’ stories is fairly common in P.R. circles. A casualty of the 24-hour news cycle, many reporters and editors are on constant copy hunts. The lengthy time given to reporters to fact check has mostly disappeared instead replaced with quick internet searches. Corporations (and their public relations mouthpieces) can offer to write the whole article in journalistic prose and then offer the article to a well-known pundit (or a beat reporter).
For those reporters on the grind — it is like a sudden snow-day off from school — you are freed from the responsibilities of actually reporting. But of course for those of us who still wish that mass media was actually reflecting accurately what someone SAW this is a tragic development.
But of course, the tendrils of internet companies (and google in particular, the medium by which many 0f us do our own ‘fact-checking’) quietly re-adjusting written history is a terrifying possibility.
Internet barriers presented by nations (China for instance) quickly become comfortable to the citizens. Evan Osnos wrote a fascinating essay describing his conversations and observations on a Chinese tour of Europe. When he asks one of his fellow tourists if they used Facebook, he comes up with this reflection.
I asked Promise if he used Facebook, which is officially blocked in China but reachable with some tinkering. “It’s too much of a hassle to get to it,” he said. Instead, he uses Renren, a Chinese version, which, like other domestic sites, censors any sensitive political discussion. I asked what he knew about Facebook’s being blocked. “It has something to do with politics,” he said, and paused. “But the truth is I don’t really know.” I recognized that kind of remove among other urbane Chinese students. They have unprecedented access to technology and information, but the barriers erected by the state are just large enough to keep many people from bothering to outwit them. The information that filtered through was erratic: Promise could talk to me at length about the latest Sophie Marceau film or the merits of various Swiss race-car drivers, but the news of Facebook’s role in the Arab uprisings had not reached him.
via Chinese Citizens on Tour in Europe : The New Yorker.
It isn’t so much that any citizen of any nation censors themselves to protect the nation, but we swim in so much state-oriented media that it would be impossible to know what we don’t know. Those elements that are forbidden to us, must be inaccessible for a good reason.
In this context, we should probably argue that corporate media filtration is more dangerous than national media filters. As Osnos points out, people can circumvent national information barriers, but it is trickier to outwit google or facebook.
Filed under human rights, media, propaganda
Profit, fear and forming the pack: Hunter S. Thompson
I finished Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels yesterday. The epic piece of journalism in which he is ’embedded’ in the motorcycle gang for a few months holds up well, although I’m astounded to see how much casual racism is in his writing.
Two nice quotes need to be archived here for discussion. One about profit and fear. The Bass Lake section of the book describes an Angel run to a tiny lake resort. One store proprietor refuses to sell the Hell’s Angels beer, while another makes a big profit not only from beer sales, but also from the spectacle of Angels. Thompson writes:
So it must have been a giddy revelation for the Bass Lake Chamber of Commerce to discover that the Hell’s Angels’ presence — far from being a plague — was in fact a great boon to the tourist trade. It is eerie to consider the meaning of it. If the Hells Angels draw standing room only any half-hip chamber-of-commerce entertainment chairman should see the logical follow-up; next year, bring in two fighting gangs from Watts and pit them against each other on one of the main beaches . . . with fireworks overhead while the local high school band plays Bolero and “They Call the Wind Maria” (147).
I thought I owned a copy of this book, but couldn’t find it, so I stopped by the library to get a copy. The librarian reminded me that Hunter S. Thompson books tend to get boosted from the library. Now that is a legacy.
The other quote that struck me was about the Marlon Brando movie The Wild One which was an fictionalized antecedent to the moral panic of motorcycle gangs running amok. Thompson makes the case that the film itself helped to create rebel identity — solidifying a previously misty image of themselves.
The truth is that The Wild One — despite an admitted fictional treatment–was an inspired piece of film journalism. Instead of institutionalizing common knowledge, in the style of Time, it told a story that was only beginning to happen and which was inevitably influenced by the film. It gave the outlaws a lasting romance-glazed image of themselves, a coherent reflection that only a few had been able to find in a mirror, and it quickly became the bike rider’s answer to the The Sun Also Rises (66).
In the field of communication this process of identity formation might be called ‘constitutive rhetoric.’ To create an audience by virtue of their description in media. From Mountain Dew consumers, to the folks who tattoo themselves with the Nike logo, this is a valued space for inquiry.
It is worth noting that the previous person who took out his book was inspired to capture a small pixie or bat in between two of the pages. The way people will store old leaves in a book, this lunatic stored old dead critters. I discovered this when a few pages before the creature a sinister stain began to emerge in the middle of each page. Engaged I simply turned the pages, avoiding the funky stain. And then in the middle of chapter two, two pages stuck together cradling a dead being.
Selah.
Why so valuable? Ai Weiwei can not be replaced
Ai Weiwei dropping a han dynasty urn
Thirty seven days. Artist Ai Weiwei has been locked up by Chinese authorities for thirty seven days. Rumor is that he is being tortured and beginning to admit to his ‘crimes.’
Weiwei is priceless. Artistic installations and performances that point to a better world than one without him.
Adrien Serle writes about Weiwei’s blog writings in a recent Guardian.
I can think of no equivalent recent writing by an artist in the west, none that confronts political and social realities so eloquently or with such passion and controlled rage. Thoughtful, acerbic, angry, increasingly outspoken, the blogs cover innumerable subjects, from attempts to rescue the cats rounded up and left to starve in warehouses in the clean-up campaign before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to architecture and design. He writes about Andy Warhol, about the destruction of China’s heritage and the unthinking cynicism and idiocies of city planners and cultural officialdom. He documents the Chinese government’s handling of the 2003 Sars epidemic, the contaminated milk scandal, the “tofu-dregs” construction of the schools that collapsed during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. He damns the mendacity of the Chinese media (“To call them whores would be to degrade sex workers. To call them beasts of burden would humiliate the animal kingdom”), and the hypocrisy of some Chinese public intellectuals. But there are also lighter essays on haircuts, humour, creativity and much more besides. After the closure of his blog, Ai turned to Twitter, saying that in Chinese the 140-character brevity of the form almost amounted to a novella.
Filed under art, human rights
‘Graceland is safe:’ Reading disasters through consumption
“I want to say this: Graceland is safe. And we would charge hell with a water pistol to keep it that way, and I’d be willing to lead the charge,” Bob Nations Jr., director of the Shelby County Emergency Management Agency, told the Associated Press.
Residents in more than 1,300 Memphis-area homes have been told to leave, and about 370 people were staying in at least four shelters, city officials said. Overall, more than 3,000 properties, including 949 single-family homes, were likely to be affected by the flooding in Memphis and surrounding Shelby County, county officials said.
via Memphis flooding: Mississippi River expected to crest Tuesday in Memphis – latimes.com.
This is the eon of the natural disaster. Natural disaster. Nature –> creates the disasters, which is strange for a nation whose approach to this “nature stuff” has been to treat the world we inhabit as a backdrop upon which the action takes place.
Which means that we are poorly suited to even understand what is happening when the waters rise or the earth shakes. It’s like starting a fight in a bar with a seemingly quiet drinker only to find that they are a lethal mixed martial arts master. In this hypothetical fight, you’d be unconscious before processing the trauma.
I think most western citizens are in a similar place. We aren’t comfortable with disasters. We are comfortable with shopping, it can’t be surprising that we are invited to understand suffering through consumption.
If we think back to September 11th, we were encouraged to shop by the president as a means to get the American economy going and to deal with our stress. The Japanese earthquake impacted the production of the new Ipad. Katrina discussed in relationship to economic development and the Dow Jones.
Now flood waters rise in the heart of America and we are told not to worry because Graceland is safe. Well Elvis is dead, and I’m honestly more concerned with the hundreds of living Memphis citizens who are displaced and lose their homes mentioned in the next paragraph.
Filed under disaster
Absolute victory: Big K.R.I.T
thanks to the apollokidz.com for the photo
Big K.R.I.T. is an astounding musician. His mixtape Return of 4-eva is emblematic of new melodic southern hip hop and the political economy of a rapper on the come up. Return of 4-eva is an album, with musical cohesion, quick skits, and a distinct tape-long flow. It is also given away free.
K.R.I.T. is one of several artists who develop fans by giving away exceptional musical product. It seems like he just wants to make fans. Well in my case it worked. Whatever you put out, I’m buying.
Return of 4-eva is an engaging listen all the way through. The intro track hints at the Charlie Daniels Band as the fantasy of an emcee taking the stage to a roaring crowd is positively cathartic; engineered through clever audio layering into a horn-heavy crescendo. Fade into an alarm clock to the track “Rise and Shine,” boom-bap and an invitation into the worldview of a sincere young emcee hustling to make something happen.
Big K.R.I.T. can make a name for himself with his poetic articulation of consciousness and struggle. “The vent” and in particular “Free my soul” offer a lens on ethics of consumerism.
“I think it was the shine that got us blinded not sure of what we reading when we signing our life away/they say ignorance is bliss well I’d like to stay in the game and test out records and real shit they don’t like to play/you ghetto famous to us, you just Bojangles to them/ tap your feet, tip your brim and sell it back to your kin/ I don’t rap I spit hymns my god’s bigger than them trying to blacken your heart and say we’re children of men/ I sin ‘cuz I’m ain’t perfect but I’d rather save your life than hurt it.”
And of course, the tune “Dreamin'” for which there is a fairly earnest K.R.I.T. narrating while engaging in some custodial work.
Better than the heart-felt K.R.I.T. is the wood-wheel steering old school driving emcee out for a ride in “Rotation,” “Highs and Lows,” and “My sub.” “My sub” in particular is a thumping tune about the value of bass and it might be the best track on the album. It is a good point to note that most of these beats were made by K.R.I.T. himself. The sound is mature hip hop with Southern flavor and a refreshing absence of the pop loops that saturate most hip hop projects. Each track was obviously lovingly crafted to articulate the distinct sound of the emcees or the tune itself.
“Sookie now” positions the Mississippi up-and-comer with the Mississippi veteran David Banner. I guess sookie now is parlance for ‘we don’t believe you.’ Big K.R.I.T. enjoys the chance to drawl out while Banner gets righteously political. “From the land of the Ku Klux/with no masks/and my folks they ain’t never had/ the rebel flag still flying/ bitch you lying if you say we ain’t hanging/from a tree Fredrick Carter Greenwood Mississipi.”
His flow is nice over slow thumping beats. “American Rap Star” and “King’s Blues” are good examples where he can get expressive about his struggles in smooth cadence. There is some casual sexism in K.R.I.T.’s lyrics especially associated with sexual behavior and pimping. Fortunately his rhymes portray diverse perspectives of women and he isn’t a one-note misogynist. There was more of this pimping paradigm represented in his previous mixtape Big K.R.I.T. wuz here.
The “Country Shit (remix)” offers a latent pack of trouble. The beat is rugged (and a holdover from Big K.R.I.T. wuz here) sharp snaps and a bumping bass hit that moves the listeners through verses by Ludacris, K.R.I.T. and Bun B.
Return of 4-eva is an awesome undertaking, a true creation of great musician. Thank you Big K.R.I.T.
Now make a video for “My sub!”
Filed under hip hop
Money making jam boys
There is no doubt that Prestige means a lot to these Philadelphia ensconced emcees. Black Thought is a boom-bap emcee that can gloat over almost any beat. STS isn’t from Philadelphia, but the city seems to like his staccato enough to hold him down. Truck North? It’s like a pleasure to hear his snarl/punctuation. Dice Raw? P.O.R.N.? Yeah.
This is a project about emcees. Thanks to 10deep, we got a free mixtape. If you don’t have it, go get it.
Money Making Jam Boys freestyle for Statik Selektah
I’m feeling the whole tape, but I realllly enjoyed “Look Funny,” “Contract the world,” and “Coming out hard.”
Filed under hip hop
corn syrup vs sugar
Sunday morning + coffee +New York Times –> straightforward. In the era of the interwebs I tend to read the Sunday Times online.
I’d been wondering about the difference between sugar and high fructose corn syrup ever since seeing the advertisements last summer reassuring me that I had nothing to worry about . They were clearly corn industry folks defending their product by claiming it was identical to regular sugar. Any time an industry advocacy group spends millions to reassure you that their product is identical to something ‘natural’ suggests you should learn more.
At the same time, I think that purity politics of food fanaticism aren’t very healthy. High fructose corn syrup is in almost everything — especially cheap accessible food stuffs. The solid explanation of just how damaging certain things are might simply leave us paralyzed.
Information seems like the appropriate middle ground. Actual information about how things work that can help to inform key decisions I have to make. THAT is useful.
With these in mind, I dove into the ten-page NYT article on sugars. To find the key distinction is in the liver. Gary Taubes writes:
“The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body. Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose). And if you take that sugar in liquid form — soda or fruit juices — the fructose and glucose will hit the liver more quickly than if you consume them, say, in an apple (or several apples, to get what researchers would call the equivalent dose of sugar). The speed with which the liver has to do its work will also affect how it metabolizes the fructose and glucose.”
via Is Sugar Toxic? – NYTimes.com.
As the next few pages point out, when we dump heavy sugar onto our liver it process it into fat and the body increases the development of insulin. The correlative evidence has been observed for a couple of decades.
Knowledge we can use? Well two of the prominent cancer researchers quoted in the article make the case to simply avoid sugar. Here is the fairly compelling conclusion:
“But some researchers will make the case, as Cantley and Thompson do, that if something other than just being fatter is causing insulin resistance to begin with, that’s quite likely the dietary cause of many cancers. If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly. For just this reason, neither of these men will eat sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, if they can avoid it.
“I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can,” Thompson told me, “because I believe ultimately it’s something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer.” Cantley put it this way: “Sugar scares me.”’
via Is Sugar Toxic? – NYTimes.com.
Aw, I ain’t scared! More beer. Whole grains. Chard. That’s what I learned. To be “free” from the illnesses which plague this society is to live in delusion. To live in frozen amber unable to move forward isn’t much better. So live and act with information.
Filed under health
Life of refinement 