"I want you to tell people to love one another. I want you to fight to lift the standards back. What happened to us that we are now celebrating from being down? What happened we went from saying I’m black and I’m proud to calling each other blacks and ho’s and witches. I sung people up and now they’re singing people down, and we need to change the music. Lift the music back to where children and their grand mommas can sit and listen to the music together." Al Sharpton in his eulogy as to what James Brown told him just weeks before he died.
For years I have periodically checked the racist hate sites to see what’s up. For most of 20 years there was little to report, the front pages have overflowed with screeching about Affirmative Action. In lock step with the RNC and the GOP who do the same but in a secondary more carefully worded manner.
About two years ago that all changed, the hate sites became so consumed with Hispanic maids, lawnboys and lettuce pickers it has become hard to find most anything about African Americans at all, which is also true of Right-wing talk radio. Both these dynamics certainly have something to say about race and immigration in America. For if David Duke, the Klan, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage are singing the same song, it’s a sure bet the tune is rotten at the core. It is the nature of the Beast.
The mainstream media led by CNN’s Lou Dobbs has also forgotten African Americans over the past year dwelling on the horror of people in our country working hard without the correct paperwork. In fact, the racist code word over the past few years, Jackson/Sharpton, is actually hard to find these days. Well that all changed a few weeks ago thanks to Atlanta Falcon’s quarterback Michael Vick who got caught sponsoring to the death dog fights.
The issue itself is about as low as humans can sink. All arguments defending dog fighting are crap. Deion Sanders who recently defended Vick with his statement that there was nothing wrong with it as it only expresses the reality of Black culture, kicked the ball through the goal posts.
If even I who has defended Hip Hop, Rap, and the reality of the poetry of The Hood for a generation has now had it up to HERE with this crap, I can well imagine the rest of the civilized world is even angrier than I am. This issue is not about third world cock fights where the chickens are going to be eaten anyway. Or even Matadors facing death in a bullring where the bull will be killed and eaten no matter. This is about man’s best friend being killed for the joy of watching something suffer for no reason other than the macho fun of it. There is no redeeming social factor involved, which as Mr. Sanders so blindly remarked, stinks to high Heaven just as much as the culture that promotes it. In fact this issue has so exasperated race relations in Atlanta where Blacks defend it and Whites decry it, that some believe Atlanta may burn again.
Recent polls showed that even Black grade school children think dogs fighting to the death is fun and cool. Their heroes are gang bangers, pimps, foul mouthed rappers and spoiled snot nosed athletes. It has gone over the top and it is time for a correction, which I don’t have answers for.
To their benefit Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Bill Cosby have over the years called this culture out for what it is to no fanfare and little avail. Rap and Hip Hop is not music, it is culture. There is no musical talent involved, in fact what music there is has been stolen and remixed. I give it a 36, it’s easy to dance to, the bland repetitive Disco of yesterday rehashed for today. The fashion is based on excessive clownish jewelry, loose clothing to better hide big handguns and assault weapons, face and neck tattoos to imply one is a criminal, a killer and unemployable. And of course speech and dialect that demeans everything and everyone. It’s the glorification of violence, criminality and revenge, the low roads of humanity.
I know the defense that the music expresses the reality of The Hood, but I don’t recall much poetry that promoted the reality of slavery, Jim Crow, the Gestapo, or the Holocaust. How about burying the disgusting realities of what is the worst in us and start singing about what could be the best in us? No that is wrong, free expression is the basis of a free society, rather it is time stop the promotion of all this nasty, filthy violent crap.
Whooooooooaaaa, I feel good! Like I knew that I would now…