Black Star - Respiration

This is what plays in my fancy Audio-Technica M50 headphones (http://www.audio-technica.com/cms/headphones/57a64f4a9fdbefd9/index.html) when I feel something redeeming about living at the moment history ends, capitalism fails, the most important truths become too hard ignore after  being repressed for far too long, and the dichotomy of human nature (barbaric agression vs. genuine altruism) makes itself lucid. During this time, I also forget that I'm not a fan of rapper Common because to me, he's Kayne West Lite.

RIP Adam Yauch

A person like Adam Yauch only comes around maybe once during a lifetime. He leaves the world after giving it so much. The music his band made will always be an inspiration and his band introduced me, and I'm sure plenty of other people who spent their teenage years in the 90s, to countless other bands and musicians. His spirit was infectious; whether Yauch spoke on political issues, whether he embraced Tibetan Buddhism, made records, produced records, directed films, or went down snow-covered mountains on his snowboard, he had figured out life, if you had a clear mind, was a creative journey that had to be grabbed by the balls.


Beastie Boys - Namaste (1992)

http://www.jukebo.com/beastie-boys/music-clip,namaste,rrvqv.html (Better sounding link)

A butterfly floats on the breeze of a sun lit day
As I feel this reality gently fade away
Riding on a thought to see where it's from
Gliding through a memory of a time yet to come
Smoke paints the air Swirling images through my mind
Like a whirlpool spin beginning to unwind
And I stand at the edge cautiously awaiting
As time slips by
Carefully navigating by the stars in the sky
And I sit And I think to myself
And on the horizon the sun light begins to climb
And it seems like it's been so long since he shined
But I'm sure it was only yesterday


Namaste 

A cold chill of fear cut through me
I felt my heart contract
To my mind I brought the image of light
And I expanded out of it
My fear was just a shadow
And then a voice spoke in my head
And she said dark is not the opposite of light
It's the absence of light
And I thought to myself
She knows what she's talking about
And for a moment I know
What it was all about.

Those in the mainstream press who redundantly claim the Beasties and Adam Yauch brought hip hop to suburbia simply don't get what hip hop is about or what the Beastie Boys were actually doing...

To understand what the Beasties and Adam Yauch meant to hip hop, Pete Nice of 3rd Bass, the other white rap group that signed with Def Jam after the Beasties and who  questioned the legitimacy of the three white Beastie goofs even though they shared stages with Run DMC, Public Enemy, and Whoodini, not tomention the four legendary legendary black punk hardcore innovators known as  Bad Brains during the Rat Cage and A7 hardcore days, before they came out on the hip hop tip. 

3rd Bass may have vented their jealousy of the Beastie Boys with a classic hip hop diss, but there was also something else that consumed the psyches of MC Search and Pete Nice, something white rappers don't experience in today's consumer-based  hip hop culture, something that Yauch too was aware of which moved him and his two other Beastie bandmates into a direction that was concerned not with what the music industry had put in place, but making music that hip hop connoisseurs  could say was the good shit. Paul's Boutique stood the test of time. So has Check Your Head and Ill Communication. Unfortunately, Third Bass could never put anything out as good as their first record. Considering Pete Nice's testimony below, it's clear that he regrets ever dissing the Beasties though he the nostalgia of hip hop won't allow him to fully admit his regret. 

Yet, there's a saving grace for Pete Nice and it doesn't involve his shady dealings with baseball memorabilia because he concludes that for him and Yauch (and assumably the rest of the Beasties) it was not about reaching white kids in the suburbs. This wasn't the goal. It's always been about making the good shit, the kind of of shit that bumps from cars driven by native urban kids during the hot summer night. It's about music, nothing more, nothing less. 

peter 'pete nice' nash

Last week, after learning that Adam "MCA" Yauch of the Beastie Boys had died at 47, Gawker asked sometimes Deadspin contributor Peter Nash—also known as Prime Minister Pete Nice of 3rd Bass—to share his thoughts about MCA's legacy and being a white MC during the golden age of New York hip hop. He obliged.

Adam "MCA" Yauch and I had a few things in common. We shared a record label for a minute, along with some managers and a mess of mutual friends. We were also two white MCs in the ‘80s—Yauch with the Beastie Boys, and me with 3rd Bass—and that was enough to give way to beef between our crews.

The golden age of New York rap ended a long time ago, and with MCA's death I'm reminded of what's already been relegated to the milk crates—all those vinyl records in their distinct burgundy-and-black Def Jam 12-inch covers. I had never really known Yauch. When I heard that he passed last Friday, all I could really recall was having taken a picture of him and Flavor Flav (both wearing yarmulkes) at our manager Lyor Cohen's wedding in the Dominican Republic in 1988. Back in the day, I'd bumped into him at the Milky Way or Hotel Amazon on Rivington Street when Public Enemy was performing.

The rest was all on the mic. MC Serch and I had clashed with the Beastie Boys ever since Licensed To Ill was released on Def Jam. One thing about white MCs is that we all have chips on our shoulders bigger than Chubb Rock and Heavy D combined. No other white boy could have been the first to rhyme before you; no other white boy could have been nicer on the mic than you; no other white boy could have rocked fresher Nike kicks from Jew-Man than you. And no other white kid could have been the original b-boy to show his pale face at NorthMore to see the Funky Four or at the Latin Quarters later on to see Scott La Rock and KRS-One. Back then, seeing a white boy at a New York City nightspot was like a Sasquatch sighting. Saying you were in the spot was like a badge of honor. And as far as we were concerned, we were the only white boys in the room.

MC Serch and I had friends who'd grown up with and gone to school with Ad-Rock and Mike D at St. Ann's in the Heights. Mark Pearson, my college roommate at Columbia, and his boys John Merz (later known as the Reanimator) and Dan Kealy (later known as MC Disagree) had always considered themselves hip-hop connoisseurs way before Ad-Rock and Mike-D were down. Blake Lethem was another friend who'd grown up with Pearson and Merz, and was known in Fort Greene as Kid Benneton (and years later served as the inspiration for the protagonist in his brother Jonathan's Fortress of Solitude). Lethem was one of the original white MCs. He later went to Manhattan's High School of Music and Art with Serch, Slick Rick, and Dana Dane. Almost by osmosis, Serch and I absorbed the white b-boy angst of each of those characters, and when we joined forces working with producer Sam Sever and Def Jam and Rush rep Dante Ross — two more early pale-faced hip hop figures with ties to the Beastie Boys — we were primed to erupt. Ever since the Beastie Boys blew up in the summer of 1986, all we'd heard was that we weren't them. Record labels had no idea how to perceive our music on its own.


But it was also around this time that the Beasties and their producer, Rick Rubin, were falling out with Def Jam, and Russell Simmons had just put me and Serch on the Rush artist roster. In just a matter of time, we signed with Def Jam and recorded a Beastie Boys dis record called "Sons of 3rd Bass." "Counterfeit style, born sworn and sold out with high voice distorted," I rapped in the second verse, "If a Beast'll wish play fetus, I'd have him aborted." I saw Ad-Rock at a barbershop near Canal Street not long after and we didn't even exchange words.



Our mugs soon showed up on the cover of the Village Voice. "White Rappers," the headline read, "Beyond the Beastie Boys: 3rd Bass Breaks the Street Barrier." Soon after, the Beastie Boys released Paul's Boutique on their own label and to much lower sales than their Def Jam debut. People said they'd fallen off; others thought we were just a creation of Russell and Lyor to fill the void they'd left at Def Jam.

A few years later, MCA took his own shots at Serch on "Professor Booty." "You should have never started something that you couldn't finish," he wrapped, "'Cause writin' rhymes to me is like Popeye to spinach."

Through it all, though, I never had any beef with MCA as an artist, or as a person. Sam Sever had always told me he was cool people, and that was good enough for me. In fact, I always felt that MCA's grizzled voice and persona gave the Beastie Boys their real hip hop sensibility, which was something white MCs always had to fight for. This past weekend I listened to a 2008 interview MCA did with Serch in which he said a big influence on his rhyming was Spoonie G's 1979 record "Spoonin' Rap," and you can so clearly hear that influence in his early rhymes. In reality, and despite whatever the Voice cover said, the Beasties had already broken the perceived "street barrier" for white artists performing in a black medium: their 12-inch single off of Licensed in 1986, "Hold it Now, Hit It," had done the job. The record got major play on KISS-FM and WBLS with tons of spins by Red Alert, Chuck Chillout, Mr. Magic, and Marley Marl. For any MC at that time, white or black, recognition like that on the Friday or Saturday mix-shows was the epitome of success.

And for white MCs, it wasn't easy. Bill Adler, the publicist/in-house psychologist for Def Jam and Rush, was around to see us — along with other white MCs—struggle for radio play. He talked about Yauch over the weekend and nailed what I think is MCA's musical legacy:

Yauch was the best conventional rapper of the three guys, he's the one who sounded most like a "rapper" as far as I'm concerned but he was also a musician and he was a producer, so he always had a strong hand in the production of the band's recording and I think his personal journey must've had its affect on his two partners as well.

What Adler was really saying is that Yauch sounded black. He had a voice and cadence that made him sound like the other MCs on the scene. He could blend in. The Beasties could never have conquered the pop music scene without the quick wit and Jerry Lewis moves brought to the table by MCA's rhyming counterparts. What Mike D and Ad-Rock brought to the Beastie Boys shaped their identity, for sure but without MCA's authentic voice and sound, could they really have recorded a track like "Hold It Now, Hit It"?

After "Fight For Your Right to Party" blew up, every A&R rep was looking for something similar: White Boy Rap/Rock shit. To put it in perspective, the concept of a white kid rhyming—let alone making records—was nonexistent in the early '80s. And outside of a small group of people scattered throughout New York's five boroughs, the white audience for hip hop was similarly scarce. Serch and I both started out rhyming off a hammered-out beat on lunchroom tables. The kids we hung out with happened to be black. Eventually, we started writing rhymes, and it took some time before we had the swagger to actually perform them or even battle other MCs. If you were whack, you'd know soon enough from the response you got.

When the Beasties and Serch each dropped their first records, nobody was really making videos—so the kids listening would just assume the records were by black artists. My old manager, the late Lumumba Carson (also known as Professor X of X-Clan) and others often said that if you didn't have a visual on me and Serch—if you only heard us on the radio or in the club—you'd think we were black. Still, we had trouble evading the stigma our whiteness carried. It wasn't even until our record, Steppin' To The A.M., played on Video Music Box that people's heads got fucked up by the fact that we were white. No one could just try to sound black—you either had it or you didn't. You were nice or you were the proverbial sucker MC.

MCA was nice. In 1986, as Adler recognized, he and the Beastie Boys joined Run-DMC on the infamous Raising Hell tour. It was a seminal moment in their career:

I remember the Beastie Boys go out at the bottom of the bill on the Raising Hell Tour in 1986—It's Run-DMC, LL Cool J, and Whodini—and the Beastie Boys scampered out for 25 minutes at the beginning of the night every time. They were playing nothing but arenas and the crowd was about 95 percent black, so you'd imagine that that'd be a tough crowd for the Beastie Boys, but they went out and the music was strong and the performance was strong and they made friends every single night all summer long. It was not a problem, they were accepted because they were wonderful.

Years later, Yauch and the Beastie Boys ended up reinventing themselves and became as much a part of the alternative rock landscape as full-fledged musicians who transcended their early roots in hip-hop. Still, they recognized their debt to black music and the audiences that welcomed them on that first Raising Hell tour. On those stages, MCA experienced what only a select few white MCs could ever lay claim to: he moved the crowd alongside the likes of Run, D and Jay, LL, Jalil, Ecstasy, and Grandmaster Dee. 'Nuf said.

MCA did it all in his career. Aside from the NYC radio play or the Run-DMC tour, the only marker that might have had similar career importance was having your own record jump off at the city clubs. One night, I remember, I went to the Latin Quarters with Lumumba to see Just-Ice perform his hits, "Latoya" and "Gangster of Hip-Hop." Before the show, "Hold It Now" blared on the house speakers, and DMX, Just-Ice's human beat-box, approached me. He gave me a pound and a hug and then complimented me on the song. He thought I was MCA, I realized.

At the time, I was still waiting on my own record; being mistaken for MCA was salt on a deep open wound. But now it feels different—like an induction into some obscure fraternal order of cracker MC's. An Elk's Club for white boys who rhymed on records for Def Jam.

Lumumba just laughed his ass off. "All of you white boys look alike."



Peter Nash, formerly Prime Minister Pete Nice of Def Jam's 3rd Bass, is the author of two baseball books and also writes for Haulsofshame.com. He is currently working on his upcoming book, Hauls of Shame: The Cooperstown Conspiracy and the Madoff of Memorabilia.

http://gawker.com/5908629/requiem-for-a-white-mc

NPR needs to replace that Windbag Terry Gross with Richard Belzer immediately

We all know Terry Gross sucks. The problem is we never complain about it and put up with phony crap every afternoon when we're driving home from work.

It would be in the best interest of NPR to fire Terry Gross and replace her with Richard Belzer. Below is the proof.

How Bush turned a projected 6 trillion dollars of surplus into 6 trillion of debt.

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/how_george_bush_turned_a_projected_6_trillion_surplus_into_6_trillion_of_de

Add Idaho to the list of asshole states - Chuck Winder, Idaho Lawmaker, Suggests Women Use Rape As Excuse For Abortions.

   

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/03/20/chuck-winder-rape-abortions_n_1366994.html

Paul Krugman, the only thing worth reading in the New York Times

There's liberal points of view that blend rather nicely into the narrative offered by the political establishment. More often than not, this is what allows the right-wing and powerful democrats to cater to big business at the expense of the working-class.

And hen there's the liberal point of view, held occasionally by people like Paul Krugman that express true dissent


Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity
By PAUL KRUGMAN 5/3/2012

Before the Great Recession, I would sometimes give public lectures in which I would talk about rising inequality, making the point that the concentration of income at the top had reached levels not seen since 1929. Often, someone in the audience would ask whether this meant that another depression was imminent.

Well, whaddya know?

Did the rise of the 1 percent (or, better yet, the 0.01 percent) cause the Lesser Depression we’re now living through? It probably contributed. But the more important point is that inequality is a major reason the economy is still so depressed and unemployment so high. For we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion — both of which have a lot to do with the distorting effects of great wealth on our society.

Put it this way: If something like the financial crisis of 2008 had occurred in, say, 1971 — the year Richard Nixon declared that “I am now a Keynesian in economic policy” — Washington would probably have responded fairly effectively. There would have been a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of strong action, and there would also have been wide agreement about what kind of action was needed.

But that was then. Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income inequality.

On partisanship: The Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have been making waves with a new book acknowledging a truth that, until now, was unmentionable in polite circles. They say our political dysfunction is largely because of the transformation of the Republican Party into an extremist force that is “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” You can’t get cooperation to serve the national interest when one side of the divide sees no distinction between the national interest and its own partisan triumph.

So how did that happen? For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should be doing impossible.

Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.

Now, however, the Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe. Friedman called for monetary flexibility; today, much of the G.O.P. is fanatically devoted to the gold standard. N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University, a Romney economic adviser, once dismissed those claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves as “charlatans and cranks”; today, that notion is very close to being official Republican doctrine.

As it happens, these doctrines have overwhelmingly failed in practice. For example, conservative goldbugs have been predicting vast inflation and soaring interest rates for three years, and have been wrong every step of the way. But this failure has done nothing to dent their influence on a party that, as Mr. Mann and Mr. Ornstein note, is “unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.”

And why is the G.O.P. so devoted to these doctrines regardless of facts and evidence? It surely has a lot to do with the fact that billionaires have always loved the doctrines in question, which offer a rationale for policies that serve their interests. Indeed, support from billionaires has always been the main thing keeping those charlatans and cranks in business. And now the same people effectively own a whole political party.

Which brings us to the question of what it will take to end this depression we’re in.

Many pundits assert that the U.S. economy has big structural problems that will prevent any quick recovery. All the evidence, however, points to a simple lack of demand, which could and should be cured very quickly through a combination of fiscal and monetary stimulus.

No, the real structural problem is in our political system, which has been warped and paralyzed by the power of a small, wealthy minority. And the key to economic recovery lies in finding a way to get past that minority’s malign influence.