Today’s video of the day is “Gone Till November” by Wyclef, as I will be on blog vacation from noon today until 9:00AM on November 1, 2007.

Once again, I’ll be appearing on the Star Jones Show today to discuss the Genarlow Wilson release. More importantly, Genarlow will be on too!!! Make sure you check it out!!!!!!!! The show airs at 3:00PM.

Deconstructing the False Good Rapper/Bad Rapper Dichotomy
By Mark Reynolds
You’ve really got to feel for the Dilated Peoples.  Assuming, of course, you’ve heard of them.

If you’re a serious, studious hip-hop fan, you probably have.  The Los Angeles-based trio of rapper/ beatmaker Evidence, rapper Rakaa, and DJ Babu achieved a level of notoriety on the progressive rap circuit in the late ‘90s and ‘00s, and managed the delicate balance of maintaining their indie cred while releasing four excellent albums on a major label (Capitol).  But new label management came in with a different vision for the band, and things fell apart in due course.

But Dilated’s happy in the long run, because they’re back on their own with no corporate ‘massas’ to have to answer to.  Their CD/DVD The Release Party (Decon) smartly chronicles their ups-and-downs, and throws in their videos, two new songs and some remixed tracks for good measure.  The title track is a pun that won’t be lost on those in the music industry.  “Release party” normally refers to some catered, guest-listed affair trumpeting the official launch of a new CD.  The trio flips it into an “I Have a Dream”-sampling anthem of freeing themselves from the expectations of mega-conglomerate bean counters.

Evidence spells it out about as clearly as possible in this concert clip:

A record deal is just a key to a door that opens up a lot of bullshit, OK? Right now, live and direct, from Dilated to the people directly, no middleman, right here.  So we are independent, we are off our label, and we are celebrating. . .

Yes, you’ve got to feel a bit sorry for the Dilated Peoples.  Not because they’ve seized the freedom to make the music they want to make – that’s cause for a standing ovation these days.  No, the bummer here is that you’d think that at this moment in time, a rap band committed to artistry, community, and social integrity as core values would get a little bit more love from people wondering why such bands don’t seem to exist in large numbers.

The Release Party dropped earlier this summer, smack dab in the middle of the year-long discourse on hip-hop culture and its effect on society.  It started with the YouTubing of Michael Richards’ public use of “nigger”, and continued through the Don Imus/ “nappy-headed hos” flap.  Hip-hop culture got blamed for making such sentiments possible, maybe even permissible, to exist within the pop media spectrum.

Self-appointed culture warriors who hadn’t paid much attention to hip-hop in the past, from Oprah Winfrey’s televised summit to Myron Magnet’s neo-con, post-Cosby screed in the summer issue of City Journal, came out of the woodworks, imploring rappers to wash their mouths out with soap and address the seemingly rampant sexism and violence in their lyrics (although the debate seemed to be more energetically focused on the former, as if that would solve the latter problem all by itself).

Of course, rap is used to being a target, for some of these transgressions and others as well.  During prior dustups, the record industry was fat and happy, rap records were making money, and the furor usually wound its way to a back burner in the fullness of time.  But things in the game done changed.  The major record labels are no longer raking it in by the bushel – CD sales have been falling for years, and digital revenue hasn’t completely covered the shortfall.

Rap CDs have taken the sharpest plunge of all.  Any further devaluation of rap music in the marketplace would have been horribly bad for business, so no one was in much of a mood to pick a fight with the prevailing mood on the street.  Rap elders Russell Simmons and Master P proclaimed themselves down with the new-time religion, and even stars from the current generation like Chamillionaire renounced using “nigger”.  (See also The NAACP’s Mock Burial of Its Relevance)

Coincidentally, it just so happened to be time for Common’s new CD to drop.  The earnest, jazz-inflected Chicago rhymer has become a crossover alt-rap brand, known almost as well for his ever-present hats and burgeoning film career as for his thoughtful lyrics.  His ability to reach audiences beyond rap’s young black demographic (National Public Radio chatted up his father, who has appeared on several Common CDs, just before Father’s Day 2005) makes him an easy figure to cite, along with Mos Def and the Roots, as one of the rap acts most likely to be heralded by people who don’t like the rest of rap.

For the rest of the story, click here.

As the occupation of Iraq continues, the number and magnitude of demonstrations appear to be shrinking. What is happening to the protest culture of wars past?

Where Have All the Protests Gone?
By Tom Engelhardt

As I was heading out into a dark, drippingly wet, appropriately dispiriting New York City day, on my way to the “Fall Out Against the War” march — one of 11 regional antiwar demonstrations held this Saturday — I was thinking: then and now, Vietnam and Iraq. Since the Bush administration had Vietnam on the brain while planning to take down Saddam Hussein’s regime for the home team, it’s hardly surprising that, from the moment its invasion was launched in March 2003, the Vietnam analogy has been on the American brain — and, even domestically, there’s something to be said for it.

As John Mueller, an expert on public opinion and American wars, pointed out back in November 2005, Americans turned against the Iraq War in a pattern recognizable from the Vietnam era (as well as the Korean one) — initial, broad post-invasion support that eroded irreversibly as American casualties rose. “The only thing remarkable about the current war in Iraq,” Mueller wrote, “is how precipitously American public support has dropped off. Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War.” He added, quite correctly, as it turned out: “And if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline.”

Where the Vietnam analogy distinctly breaks down, however, is in the streets. In the Vietnam era, the demonstrations started small and built slowly over the years toward the massive — in Washington, in cities around the country, and then on campuses nationwide. In those years, as anger, anxiety, and outrage mounted, militancy rose, and yet the range of antiwar demonstrators grew to include groups as diverse as “businessmen against the war” and large numbers of ever more vociferous Vietnam vets, often just back from the war itself. Almost exactly the opposite pattern — the vets aside — has occurred with Iraq. The prewar demonstrations were monstrous, instantaneously gigantic, at home and abroad. Millions of people grasped just where we were going in late 2002 and early 2003, and grasped as well that the Bush dream of an American-occupied Iraq would lead to disaster and death galore. The New York Times, usually notoriously unimpressed with demonstrations, referred to the massed demonstrators then as the second “superpower” on a previously one superpower planet. And it did look, as the Times headline went, as if there were “a new power in the streets.”

But here was the strange thing, as the “lone superpower” faltered, as the Bush administration and the Pentagon came to look ever less super, ever less victorious, ever less powerful, so did that other superpower. Discouragement of a special sort seemed to set in — initially perhaps that the invasion had not been stopped and that, in Washington, no one in a tone-deaf administration even seemed to be listening. Still, through the first years of the war, on occasion, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators could be gathered in one spot to march massively, even cheerfully; these were crowds filled with “first timers” (who were proud to tell you so); and, increasingly, with the families of soldiers stationed in Iraq (or Afghanistan), or of soldiers who had died there, and even, sometimes, with some of the soldiers themselves, as well as contingents of vets from the Vietnam era, now older, greyer, but still vociferously antiwar.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

The Child Labor Gap

Clothing retailer The Gap Inc. was forced to disavow a factory in India that was revealed to have been employing young children to make Gap clothing under horrible conditions. What do you think?

Thomas Gevedon,
Caretaker
“By horrible conditions you just mean ‘in India,’ correct?”

Lucy Guilfoyle,
Plumber’s Assistant
“I’m sure they didn’t take into account the generous product discount these children are getting.”

Lucas Mullan,
Secretary
“I’m shocked. I was under the impression that all Gap clothes were made by child labor.”

From TheOnion.com