Testament v. Cocorosie

The two best hip-hop response tracks of the decade:

Testament calls out Jay-Z and Kanye:

Cocorosie calls out Akon and Snoop:

 

Grand jury fishing expeditions expand

Local accounts indicate that the federal grand jury out of Davenport, Iowa targeting local Minneapolis activist Carrie Feldman has widened its scope and subpoened another member of the local community. I’ll report more, maybe comment on more, when I know more.

In the mean time (and always): Fuck grand juries. Every time. Every question.

Resist. Resist. Resist.

Update: The indymedia story is here.

 

Insta-manifesto!

My goodness, this is wonderful. Insurrectionist blather at your fingertips, modified slightly with every click of “Refresh.”

We live in amazing times.

 

Nostalgia

I remember when this aired, if you can believe it. (Surely no one was alive back then!) I lived in a two-bedroom apartment above, respectively, a shop that sold first communion dresses and pinatas and an untrustworthy Chinese restaurant called “O’Tasty!” 

I remember watching it on this little, stupid television I’d acquired, in my bedroom. I almost certainly was intoxicated. I’d just started listening to Bright Eyes, so it was this huge deal, I guess. It was also my introduction to M. Ward.

All of which is to say, kids are dumb. Good song, though.

 

Poop

It has a blog.

 

Holy shit

 

Black Mesa Indigenous Support

Keep fighting.

 

Oddly, this is exactly how I remember it

Babes in Toyland:

 

What the fuck happened to Saul Williams?

Was my general response after last Sunday’s show at the Varsity. Carl Atiya Swanson’s review of the show on the City Pages blog sums up my reaction nearly perfectly (I was less impressed with Dearling Physique than the author): 

 It may have started early in the night, the first time that MC Tchaka Diallo, who was acting as host for the evening, thanked their sponsor Budweiser. The Converse sponsorship was tolerable — if you can get money to finance a tour, more power to you Afropunk — but Williams has never seemed like the kind of man who would endorse American light lager…

But before Williams and his guitar and keyboard player would come on, Diallo and KiDTRONiK would perform as Krak Attack, and at that point the show definitively went off the tracks.

Wearing a vest decorated with a ribcage and flexing his biceps, Diallo rapped about being the best, as rappers are wont to do, but then paired it with lyrics like “Al salaam-aleikum/I don’t eat bacon/I am not Jamaican.” As if that was not ludicrous enough, the hype act became downright derogatory as Diallo and KiDTRONiK pulled women up onto the stage to perform their single “Big Girl Skinny Girl.” For an audience who came to see Williams — an artist whose book of poetry S/HE was a fragile, fierce and honest exploration of the relationship between him and the mother of his daughter, who refers to the powers he sees in the universe as “goddess” and promotes art as a vessel for independence and liberation — having some stereotypically objectifying bullshit club grind open up for him was downright insulting. 

It was grotesque, for sure. And, as a friend pointed out, the fact that Williams walked on the stage during their final song — participating in it, in terms of spectacle — only reinforces the point that he could’ve made mocked it, or inverted it, or something … or made it never happen. He’s the headliner, for fuck’s sake. Dude is his DJ and co-produced the record. At some point, he could’ve been like, “You know, I’m just not really comfortable with ‘Fat Girl Skinny Girl.’ Or ’Black Girl White Girl,’ come to think of it. They’re both just awful and contradict most of what I believe and have said previously, everywhere. Fuck you, guys.”

But nope, he rolled on stage in Niggy Tardust regalia and slapped his DJ on the back. What the fuck. His set was alright — actually, a little off — but totally soured by the nonsense that came before it. 

In other news, No Bird Sing stole the night.

 

Local resistance news round-up

The Quad-City Times has a pretty decent article on Minneapolis resident Carrie Feldman and her refusal to testify before a Davenport, Iowa grand jury. The focus on the raid itself, rather than the undemocratic nature of grand juries (to put it mildly), is sort of unfortunate, but actually not that unfair, in my opinion.