You have the emergence in human society
Of this thing thats called the State
What is the State? The State is this organized bureaucracy
It is the po-lice department. It is the Army, the Navy
It is the prison system, the courts, and what have you
This is the state — it is a repressive organization
But the state –[people will say] “gee, well, you know,
Youve got to have the police, cause..
If there were no police, look at what youd be doing to yourselves!
Youd be killing each other if there were no police!”
But the reality is..
The police become necessary in human society
Only at that junction in human society
Where it is split between those who have and those who ain’t got

Chairman Omali Yeshitela

Jay-Z’s evolution into the bridge between hip-hop and mainstream popular culture has been a long one, but his nostalgic turn worked to make him a figure whose mythos will likely endure into the old age of a generation.

Too Young to Let Go: Jay-Z, Medicare, and You
By Josh Timmermann

Jay-Z’s 10th studio album, American Gangster, is intended as a cohesive, conceptual companion piece to the Ridley Scott-helmed Denzel Washington/Russell Crowe vehicle of the same name, a biopic of Harlem crime lord Frank Lucas, but that doesn’t really matter, at least for our purposes. I like the record a lot—more than the three that preceded it, less than The Blueprint, Reasonable Doubt, and Vol. 3…The Life and Times of S. Carter—and yet I probably won’t bother with the ostensible source film, since I haven’t enjoyed a Scott movie since Thelma and Louise and I‘ve never been nearly as taken with De Palma‘s Scarface as most rappers and rap fans seem to be. But that doesn’t matter either.

Why? Because if you have no prior knowledge of the album’s big-screen inspiration going in, you’ll still get roughly as much out of it as you would if you’d dropped ten bucks to see the flick. American Gangster might be Jay’s best excuse for cold-shouldering iTunes, chatting it up with Charlie Rose, and gradually transitioning from post-retirement productivity into rap’s Randy Newman, but to these ears, this just sounds like a particularly good Jay-Z record. It’s certainly no coincidence that Jay selected this movie to base his new record on. Specifically, high-drama gangster mythology (namely, his own, natch) is his raison d’etre. More generally, though, nostalgia is Jay-Z’s great subject.

On last year’s hit-or-miss Kingdom Come, Jay declared “30 the new 20”—even though he’s actually pushing 40—and meditated on the virtues of Grand Theft Auto PSP and beach chairs, while enlisting his then-25 year-old girlfriend for what sounded like a Dreamgirls outtake better left on the cutting room floor. On the would-be comeback record’s finest moments (the Dr. Dre-produced “Trouble”, most stunningly) Jay sounded urgent, in and of the moment, but for the most part he coasted on a larger-than-life swagger that felt more removed than ever from the street-level narratives with which he made his name. In other words, “when your friends is Chris and Gwyneth”, you aren’t Tony Montana anymore. You’re just Al Pacino.

The Blueprint marked a major turning point, in more ways than one. It’s widely considered his masterwork, give or take his debut, which some hardcore hip-hop heads persist in citing. At any rate, for those of us who have, at some point, subscribed to Spin or Rolling Stone, but never to The Source or XXL, Jay’s 2001 effort was his case for a prime spot in a musical canon not headlined by Big, Pac, Rakim, and Nas. Subsequently, he’s been mashed up with the Beatles, Pavement, and Weezer, kicked it official-like with Linkin Park and Bono, taken a CEO position with hip-hop’s most famous label, and sold millions of records to consumers who might not own a dozen rap CD’s by rappers not named Jay-Z. For both mixtape-obsessed genre diehards and folks who bought the Fort Minor album, he’s come to represent rap with a captial ‘R’ like no single artist before him in the history of the form. What The Blueprint also represented, albeit rather more subtly, was the genius logical next step in the evolution of Jay’s charming hustler persona, a finely tuned character that, up to that point, had grown only in baby steps—“22 Two’s” to “Can I Get a…” to “Big Pimpin’”. Over expertly designed soul samples that would soon make a household name of one Kanye West, Jay made the shrewd move that would define the second half of his career and secure his early canonization: he looked back.  He looked back at the first-names that shaped young Shawn Carter (“Mickey cleaned my ears, Annie shampooed my hair / Eric was fly—shit, I used to steal his gear”); at Richard Pryor and Ike and Tina Turner; at the diverse ethnicities of all the lovely ladies he wants you to think he boned on his way to the top.

Of course, this wasn’t the first case of Jay spinning Dickensian yarns about his hard-knock past, but there was something discernibly different this time around. For one, Jay was nearly on his own on the mic; the album’s lone prominently featured guest rapper was Eminem on “Renegade”, a classic back-and-forth rap duet that he should’ve just saved for the spottier double-disc sequel. More importantly, however, he sounded less like a dude adding touches of flash and color to his memoirs, and more like the narrator of a personal history that has come to feel like it occurred all of a lifetime ago. Or, to invoke Jay’s mentor, maybe it was just a dream, runnin‘ the streets “like drunks run street lights“ and tears he can‘t see coming down his eyes? It’s the closest thing in hip-hop to a grand Proustian statement, and its best line goes like this: “Police pursued me, chased, cuffed, and subdued me, talked to me rudely / ‘Cause I’m young, rich, and I’m black, live in a movie”.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

As a paid celebrity spokesman for Hanes underwear, it’s time he used his connections to put an end to the company’s sweatshops in the Dominican Republic.

Six Degrees of Exploitation: Anti-Sweatshop Activists Target Kevin Bacon
By Zack Knorr
If you’ve ever taken a long-distance car drive, there is a good chance you’ve played the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” On the off-chance you haven’t, this is the game — riffing on the idea that all of the earth’s people are connected by no more than six intermediate degrees — where you try to connect movie stars to Kevin Bacon through the movies they have appeared in. Now, with the help of student anti-sweatshop activists, Kevin Bacon is getting a taste of real life “Six Degrees,” and the connections are unsettling.

Meet Marlenny Franco. A textile worker in the Dominican Republic and the mother of a new born child, Marlenny stood up to her bosses at the Hanes factory where she works to stop discrimination against women and unsafe conditions. The company retaliated by firing her, along with many others who protested. And now students are holding Kevin Bacon accountable.

The connection? Kevin Bacon is a paid celebrity spokesperson for Hanes, helping to sell the company’s T-shirts and underwear through a high-profile ad campaign. The students are asking Bacon, who has a reputation for liberal politics, to use his status to help stop labor abuses at Hanes overseas textile plants.

The students, who are part of a national organization called United Students Against Sweatshops, confronted Bacon in New York at the premiere of his film Death Sentence. According to Connor X, a Columbia University student who held a banner at the protest reading “Kevin Bacon: Tell Hanes to Stop the Exploitation of Workers,” Mr. Bacon came up to the protestors and promised he would look into the situation.

But since then, say the activists, there has been no follow-up from Mr. Bacon’s camp and the situation at the factory has only gotten worse. In response, the activists have launched a national campaign, with student protestors showing up to challenge Mr. Bacon at events across the country — from the Emmy awards, where they say their protest won a brief glimpse on national TV, to small-town concerts by the Bacon Brothers, the rock band led by Kevin Bacon and his lesser-known brother, Michael.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

Today’s photo of the day comes from the New York Post, which apparently has no regard for Barry Bonds’ presumption of innocence. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t always wait for a jury verdict to declare certain people guilty. Still, I’m curious to see what new evidence they have on Barry that hasn’t been revealed before.