New Music: Hollyweerd

I don’t listen to a ton of mixtapes, but I make an effort. Edible Phat 2.0 is one of the best I’ve heard so far in 2010. I might be overreaching a little, having listened to it directly after Rich Boy’s Alabama Season, which basically sucked. Anyways, I knew nothing about Hollyweerd, its existence or its music, until a few days ago. If you’re in the same boat, their other three mixtapes are here. ‘Love Me’, below, features Big Pooh of Little Brother fame.

My Dirty South Phase

Playlist this ish.

1. Creep At Night – Tommy Wright III
2. Country Shit – Big K.R.I.T.
3. Stay Fly – Three 6 Mafia ft. 8Ball & MJG and Young Buck
4. Fantasy – Ludacris ft. Shawnna
5. A Milli – Lil Wayne
6. Hickory Dickory Dock – 8Ball & MJG
7. Testin My Gangsta – Three 6 Mafia
8. Throw Some Ds – Rich Boy
9. Where The Cash At – Curren$y ft. Lil Wayne
10. Big Pimpin’ – Jay-Z ft. UGK
11. Lemonade – Gucci Mane
12. The Work’s Hard – Pill ft. Killer Mike
13. Don’t Flex – 8Ball & MJG
14. Rubber Band Man – T.I.
15. Sittin’ Sidewayz – Paul Wall ft. Big Pokey
16. Poppin Them Bottles – Lil Wayne ft Curren$y
17. Go Crazy – Young Jeezy
18. Sholl Iz – Dirty
19. Creepin’ While Ya Sleepin’ – Tommy Wright III
20. You Love It  – Curren$y
21. Wood Wheel – UGK
22. Born With A Plug – Pill
23. Still Tippin – Mike Jones ft. Slim Thug and Paul Wall
24. Feel Mi Ni – Dirty
25. Return of 4eva – Big K.R.I.T. ft. Big Sant

My obsession with southern rap is going on two years now, but in reality the seeds were sown much earlier. During high school I bought Master P’s ‘Ghetto D’ solely because it had ‘Make ‘Em Say Uhh!‘. And a few years years later, towards the end of college, I admitted to liking ‘Tight Whips‘, which to this day remains a guilty pleasure. I’m no longer into No Limit Records, if I ever truly was, but in retrospect these were important signposts.

How did I manage to get a Jay-Z track on this list? Aside from featuring UGK, the beat to ‘Big Pimpin’, produced by Timbaland, is pure dirty south. I think I also could have reasonably included ‘Real As It Gets‘. Anyways, other recognizable names include Lil Wayne, Ludacris, T.I. and Three 6 Mafia.

Less well-known, at least to people who aren’t rap nerds, are Big K.R.I.T., Dirty and Tommy Wright III. Krizzle, from Mississippi, is on his way to blowing up. Dirty, a duo out of Alabama, has had some success on the charts. Then there’s Tommy Wright, erstwhile underground Memphis icon about whom there is virtually no info on the Internet. (While there was a Wikipedia page for a year or so, it was deleted because TW didn’t meet Wikipedia’s ‘notability’ requirements.) Anyways, he looks and sounds really fucking cool.

New Slang: Barn

-noun

1. house or home: Can I crash at your barn?

2. social milieu, including friends, siblings, and work people: Jerry’s cool I guess, but his barn is wack.

3. title of endearment and chastisement alternatively. Synonyms include fam, family, dun, man, dude: Yo what the fuck, barn!

4. someone or something characterized by agressively keeping it real and extra personal: This bbq is fully of barneys.

Trill 25: Best Rap of 2009

No particular order. Just get put on. In fact, playlist this immediately.

1. Freaky Freaky – Dizzee Rascal
2. On To The Next One (ft. Swizz Beatz) – Jay-Z
3. Manic! At The Disco – Danny!
4. Born With A Plug – Pill
5. Auditorium (ft. Slick Rick) – Mos Def
6. Fuck You – The Knux
7. Dont Need No – Pink Dollaz
8. 10 Bricks (ft. Cappadonna & Ghostface Killah) – Raekwon
9. Lemonade – Gucci Mane
10. Cartel Gathering (ft. Raekwon & Ghostface Killah) – Jadakiss
11. 3am – Eminem
12. Real As It Gets (ft. Young Jeezy) – Jay-Z
13. Stay Off The Fuckin’ Flowers (ft. Raekwon) – Blakroc
14. Rapture – Cormega
15. Supermagic – Mos Def
16. Already Home (ft. Kid Cudi) – Jay-Z
17. Shine Blockas (ft. Gucci Mane) – Big Boi
18. I Hate My Job – Cam’ron
19. Never Hungry – Pink Dollaz
20. Gazzillion Ear – MF Doom
21. Bagpipes From Baghdad – Eminem
22. All About The Money (ft. Rick Ross) – Gucci Mane
23. My Old School – Big K.R.I.T.
24. Empire State Of Mind (ft. Alicia Keys) – Jay-Z
25. Absolutely – MF Doom

Whoop That Trick

This scene, the song, everything about this movie is perfect. I just saw it for the first time about a week ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Obviously when DJay is rapping about ‘tricks’ he’s not talking about women, at least not necessarily. The song is about him and Nola as ‘hustlers’ kicking ass and taking names of the mark-ass bitches, busters and scallywags, independent of gender, who consistently blow up spots. In DJay’s moral worldview, I hold, women are esteemed as equals because, like men, they too are hustlers or tricks by virtue of action, not birth.

Cute Cuddly Kittens

This was one of the funnier parts of ‘Funny People’, which mostly sucked. I don’t think any comedy, or whatever, should be 146 minutes long.

Krugman, Krauthammer, And Obama’s Anti-Politics

As seminal figures of the American left and right, the intellectual affinities between Paul Krugman and Charles Krauthammer would seem to be few, if any. In June, for example, Krugman wrote about the role played by Fox News in the mainstreaming of conservative extremism, while Krauthammer, who makes frequent appearances on the station, hailed it for shattering the ideological stranglehold of the liberal media. Also recently (as if some further indication of their differences were needed), Krugman called for the investigation and possible prosecution of Bush administration officials over the ‘interrogation tactics’ used in the war on terror. Krauthammer, for his part, took the opportunity to restate his qualified justification of torture.

Substantial opposition in posture and policy notwithstanding, I think there’s something shared by Krugman and Krauthammer in their commentary of late, with both attacking what could be called Barack Obama’s anti-politics, by which I mean the president’s post-partisan, pragmatic-and-therefore-nonideological style. Of course, in that their shared aversion to anti-politics probably stems from different sources and is definitely put to different effect, the chances of overstating their common ground are great. Nonetheless, I think both writers have something important to say about the limits of consensus politics and the folly of collective certitude.

Krugman has been one of the most persistent left-leaning critics of Obama from the consensus angle. In May, for example, he voiced skepticism over Obama’s seeming belief that partisanship has been the primary cause of stalled health care reform. “Back during the Democratic primary campaign,” he wrote, “Mr. Obama argued that the Clintons had failed in their 1993 attempt to reform health care because they had been insufficiently inclusive. He promised instead to gather all the stakeholders, including the insurance companies, around a ‘big table’.” But, Krugman asked then, “what if interest groups showed up at the big table, then blocked reform?” In this situation (i.e., the one we presently face), inclusion might not be conducive to solving the health care crisis, but rather the very ingredient for prolonging it. Given the existence of a powerful opposition determined to derail meaningful reform, Krugman’s hope (and mine) is that Obama will not be so, well, anti-political when the chips are down. “Will Mr. Obama gloss over the reality of what’s happening, and try to preserve the appearance of cooperation?” Krugman wondered aloud. “Or will he honor his own pledge, made back during the campaign, to go on the offensive against special interests if they stand in the way of reform?”

At first glance, it seems that Krugman’s aversion to anti-politics is simply a matter of efficacy: either Obama maintains his post-partisan stance, or he prevails in the health care battle. I suspect, however, that Krugman rejects Obama’s consensus rhetoric not only on instrumental grounds, but more intrinsic ones as well. This is where Krauthammer comes in. While he is convinced, despite all indicators to the contrary, that the president is a radical social engineer, Krauthammer does highlight a repugnant scientism that Obama mostly, but does not always, avoid. “This is not just intellectual laziness,” he wrote of Obama in March. “It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.” By speaking from a position that has purportedly transcended conflict, Obama conceals the ineliminably aesthetic, discretionary or irrational dimension of all political decision-making. Of course, there’s a popular consensus about health care and other issues; it’s this consensus that put Obama and the Democrats in office. But this consensus in no way implies unanimity; there is no single right solution to the political crises we face. Acknowledging as much does not mean conceding that Obama’s answers are fully ‘arbitrary’, as it were. Rather, it expresses that we, and not some transcendent, extrasocial source of authority – Reason, History, Nature – are responsible for our political decisions, institutions and limitations.

It’s Official: Danny’s New Phone Is Wack

I just parted with a cell phone I bought about three years back. I’m embarrassed to say that this thing had buttons missing, but it was seriously hard to let go. Aside from generally working, my text message dictionary was expansive. Imagine never having to type out the many crucial words not recognized by the pre-programmed English text assist. After hundreds upon thousands of text messages, with painstaking spelling and saving, that was my life.

Anyways, my new phone sucks. In the spirit of recession I opted for the free upgrade, a Nokia 2600, which I was told could be exchanged within 30 days for a $20 ‘reshelving’ fee. Dude, really? I’m not upset about the looks or the size or anything, though a few haters have mocked. But the sound quality is real, real bad. And it’s all slow and shit, despite being basically the same phone with the same functions three years later.

The Quality Of This Protest

This video comes by way of Andrew Sullivan, who somehow posts more updates on Iran than all other journalists combined. As he says, watch until the end. Very stirring.

Also, it’s a sign of interesting intellectual times when David Brooks, Peggy Noonan and George Will thoroughly rebuke their own, so to speak. Paul Wolfowitz and Charles Krauthammer took to the Washington Post last Friday to air out their criticism of Obama’s ‘timid’ stance on Iran, while Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley did the same on the Sunday talkshows.

More On Netanyahu’s Speech

From Ari Shavit, Israel Harel, and the always poetic Yossi Sarid.