The Billiken's Bluff

Sometimes rap and politics intersect on the way to work. Flipping between sports radio, Imus (returned), NPR and Power 105.1.

Kanye's latest:

If somebody would've told me a year ago
it'd go, get this difficult
Feeling like Katrina with no fema
Like Martin with no Gina
Like a flight with no visa

Later at the gym, DJ Clue and Ghostface repping Desert Storm, the record label, not the early 90s military operation, on my ipod.




Later leaving gym, back in the car, on N to the P to the R (you know who you are):

Oprah endorses Obama and I think this makes sense for everyone involved.







All reach the same conclusion - DESERT STORM sounds imposing, street strong, good way to body an opponent and attract a constituency to post yellow ribbons on their doorways.



Oprah sells.
Oprah hates rap music, she does not endorse it.
She does endorse Obama.
Obama played basketball in college.
Basketball is intertwined with hip hop, clearly.
David Stern does not endorse hip hop.
Stern does however endorse Outkast who he enlisted to perform at halftime of the 2004NBA All Star game.
Andre 3000 at times has embraced hip hop.
He is certainly responsible for the only song that I have ever encountered that has caused multiple tables of diners at a restaurant in NYC to burst into spontaneous gyrations during their meals.
2004 Democratic candidate General Wesley Clark referenced Hey Ya during campaign stops in 2004.

There is a thread somewhere here. Pop culture, maybe, or American culture, rather, (dan). All from the same tradition, translated differently, reinterpreted maybe and reused for varying purposes but all born out of comic book nuclear fallout. Satellites and kaleidoscopes. Chaos, watermelons, clocks, everything.









Kevin Garnett's I Got Seven Mack 11’s, About Eight 38’s Nine 9’s, Ten Mack Tens reported here years back.




Rap music and military missions the same target in their infrared - shock and awe.

This line from Jay-Z's American Gangster inspired from a movie screening (not directly from the Blue Magic of Frank Lucas) of Denzel's Frank Lucas, rings true and false just the same.





[not an optical illusion my man, verily, that is a Window's Vista styled pocket square in Jigga's left breast pocket]

So do we care if Oprah tells us to vote for Obama if we might have anyway? Why not get your news from Jon Stewart? [writer's strike and outdated reruns not withstanding.] Do we care if the American government borrows pop culture, employs comic largesse in the naming (and dreaming) of its military operations? Is it insulting to those who are killed in those operations (specifically those not from the American pop culture tradition), or is it to be expected - as American as Apple Pie (fight power with power, cliches with cliches, you shake what yo' mamma gave you so to speak - curse US political leaders while wearing an I Love NY baseball hat and applying for exit visas from Morocco)? Do we care if Jay-Z borrows screenwritten crime from the silver screen, which in turn borrowed from real crime, drugs, misery, poverty and Vietnam?

"Actually believe half of what you see/ None of what you hear, even if it's spit by me/ And with that being said, I will kill niggas dead."

Talk more.