blood unable to be washed out with high-tech detergents
Here’s the latest from “stronghold, tenacity“… Check for her album whenever it drops. It’s titled That Which Death Cannot Destroy. “Shebang,” the last track I posted here by her was just wonderful and this one is no exception. In fact, this track is even more relentless and hard!
from a recent essay by M.A.N (about Coltrane, Lil Wayne, black masculinity, and the post-trauma blues)
Unlike historical figures like Doug E. Fresh and Biz Markie who used their voices to create new sounds, Lil Wayne, like Coltrane is really using his voice to find alternative registers for what has clearly been a life lived in absurdity and pain–even if some of it might have been self inflicted. And perhaps it is as it should be, as Lil Wayne’s urges us to come to terms with the first edge of the Post-Katrina Blues.
A Blender magazine cover story offers a glimpse into the world of Wayne -
Like any rock star, Lil Wayne isn’t immune to self-mythologizing. To hear him tell it, he’s a superman: He describes surviving two bullets—one a self-inflicted accident at age 12 and one fired into his bus by an angry groupie—with chuckling élan; he’s an indefatigable hustler: “I’m always in the lab”; and he’s an artist beholden to no one but his own codeine-addled muse: “The word pressure is not in my vocabulary.”
But the man desperately needs a vacation. The first day we meet, he’s running 10 hours behind—handlers try to rouse him from bed throughout the day, but word keeps coming back that “he’s in a coma.” The next day, at his condo, he snaps at T for failing to pack enough cough syrup for the trip to Atlanta. “I thought you said you were doing it,” T protests.
“Me? Why would I say that?” Wayne snarls. “Since when is that my job?”
I was down in Virginia over the weekend, southwest Virginia, Blacksburg — a seemingly/peculiarly tranquil place, for this weekend at least. A friend put me on to the new Ry Cooder albumI, Flathead:The Songs of Kash Buk and the Klowns. I had heard the song “Can I Smoke In Here?” on the radio several weeks back, so I was curious and wanted to hear the rest of the record. Apparently, this is the final installment in Ry Cooder’s “California trilogy” which began in 2005 with Chávez Ravine, an album about a Mexican-American community in Los Angeles that was demolished in the 1950s to build a stadium for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The second album, 2007’s My Name Is Buddy is also a “social-political concept album” which explores farm failures, the plight of laborers, strikes, hobos–and for all this, the stories are told from the perspective of a cat! I, Flathead is about drag-racing in 1960s southern California. The narratives here are told from the perspective of the unfortunate Kash Buk, a former drag racer turn Country music singer. Buk plays beat-up roadhouses with his band the Klowns.
At this moment, I can only listen to the album in segments, certain songs are just too Country. I like the bluesy fragments like the one below (and also the chicano and cumbia sounding pieces and some of the easy Western Swing joints)
Here’s a track from the excellent album by Mike Ladd, Negrophilia - inspired by a great book with the same title. Ladd sez “If you have not read this book yet read it today! After reading it, bizarre phenomena like Elvis, Eminem, Condoleeza Rice and Modernism make sense..”
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