October 21, 2004
A Different Drummer
Voice: So, you're a philosopher?
KRS: Yes, I think very deeply.
[repeated and scratched]
[Verse One]
Let's begin, what, where, why, or when
will all be explained like instructions to a game
See I'm not insane, in fact, I'm kind of rational
when I be asking you, Who is more dramatical?
This one or that one, the white one or the black one
pick the punk, and I'll jump up to attack one
KRS-One is just the guy to lead a crew
right up to your face and dis you
Everyone saw me on the last album cover
Holding a pistol something far from a lover
Beside my brother, S-C-O-T-T
I just laughed, cause no one can defeat me
This is lecture number two, My Philosophy…
I'll play the nine [9 mm. pistol] and you play the target
you all know my name so I guess I'll just start it
or should I say, Start this, I am an artist
of new concepts at their hardest ….
From “My Philosophy,” by KRS-One.
The Truth is a Lie!
When a professional athlete suffers an attack of honesty with a reporter, he typically suffers speaker’s remorse. As soon as the newspaper hits the stand, or the report airs on the TV news, the jock will lie about having told the truth. “I was quoted out of context,” goes the boilerplate. Well, “KRS-One” (Kris Parker; hereafter, “KOP”), one of the original gangsta rappers, who led the 1980s/early 1990s group, Boogie Down Productions, went the jocks one better: Instead of merely saying that he was quoted out of context, in a defense at hip hop site All HipHop, KOP said that the New York Daily News committed character assassination against him, when its gossip column “Rush and Molloy,” (the husband and wife team of George Rush and Joanna Molloy, “with” Ben Widdicombe, Jo Piazza, Chris Rovzar and the News' top rewrite man, Corky Siemaszko) quoted him as supporting Al Qaeda’s 911 attack on America, threatened to sue the newspaper … and then said in his defense, exactly what Rush and Molloy had attributed to him, and then some. Apparently, the musically and mentally challenged performer is unaware that the truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel and defamation.
Hip-Hop: Entertainment Without Entertainers
A “rapper” is typically a talentless black who wants people to subsidize him, so that he doesn’t have to get a j-o-b. Rap aka Hip-Hop (r/h) has refuted the racist stereotype, according to which blacks have “natural rhythm,” and revealed that the average black cannot sing, dance, compose music or write lyrics any better than the average white. Many of rappers’ rants consist of nothing but narcissistic self-promotion, where the performer brags about himself in the third person. When r/h recordings do include something recognizable as music, it is invariably through plagiarizing someone else’s earlier recording, which is known in r/h by the euphemism “sampling.”
Why would anyone pay for r/h? When Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald were the world’s greatest singers, there was no question why fans would buy their records, rather than those cut by any random drunk warbling from a barstool. But with r/h, the hierarchy of talent, from tone-deaf amateur to virtuoso, collapsed. But worse even than in an aesthetic democracy, in r/h, the tone-deaf pretend-artist is king, the virtuoso an outcast.
The great singers of the Big Band Era and the Great American Songbook loved America, and in spite (or because) of having had to work like dogs before becoming rich, tended to have an attitude of gratitude for the blessings that had been bestowed upon them. Rappers, by contrast, are strangers to hard work and talent, and tend to revel in racism, violence, misogyny and anti-Americanism.
So much of r/h sounds like a parody of illiterate street blacks. But this, er, stuff is scribbled by people who haven’t an ironic bone in their bodies.
(Yo man these people around here in '87 just slippin dough you know
what
I'm sayin? Boogie Down Productions not slippin dough so hold ya
hands you
know what I'm sayin? (word) Yo! What's goin' on? Mr. Magic you know
what
happened? He slipped on us he die. Pumpin KISS FM we rock. To my man
DJ
Red Alert we chillin' (word). Yo man! Yo do heard about man this
s--t
about this kid Wearin' the, ah, Jerry Curls, man. Word up! He was
slippin'.
Yo dough, word up, word up. He had a yellow coat on, but no
description was
given)
Now what you just heard, people, was a little kickin
But let me tell you this while the clock is still tickin
This is the warning, known as the caution:
Do not attempt to dis cuz you'll soften
Just like a pillow, or better yet a mattress
You can't match this style or attack this
While I'm telling you, write on schedule
F--k with K-R-S and I'll bury you
Deep in the dirt, or sand with a shovel
No fight, no scurry, or scuffle, just muffle
Total domination on stage
Kris is the name, 22 is the age
Those who wanna battle, I know who you are
You got a little girl, you drive a little car
You come into the place with that look on your face
Before you ran the mile, you lost the race
So assume you're doomed when you step in the room
I'll be the witch and you'll be the broom
I'll ride you, guide you into the concrete
I'll slide you to a funky beat
So what do we have here?
A sucka in fear
I snatched your heart
Put it way up on the chart
At ten you're f----d
At nine you suck
At eight you're a sucker
At seven-a m--------a
At six you're slapped
At five you're just wacked
At four you're lost
At three, you're just soft
At two you're an a--
At one, you're a d--k
From “9mm Goes Bang,” by KRS-One
R/H and Black Supremacy
R/h’s cultural function is as the voice of domestic urban nihilism and black racism. Many rappers have been supportive variously of the black supremacist groups the Nation of Islam, New Black Panther party, and the Five Percenters. While the aforementioned groups’ philosophies are mutually incompatible, they share a common, genocidal hatred of whites, and the desire to see America’s enemies triumph over her.
Black supremacist writer Cedric Muhammed maintains,
“Now keep in mind it is hard to argue against the reality that along with Minister Farrakhan [leader of the Nation of Islam], there was no greater "outside" influence, during Hip-Hop's most "conscious" era, on the lyrics of leading Hip-Hop arists, than the teachings of the 5% Nation. This is the case most obviously in 1987-1988 with popular artists like Rakim and Big Daddy Kane. To varying degrees Lauryn Hill, Nas, Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, MC Ren, X-Clan, Queen Latifah, and countless others have been positively influenced by the teachings of both the 5% Nation of Islam [Five Percenters] and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the West.”
As I have previously written, the Five Percenters are an ultraviolent, black cult.
(In a recent e-mail, a black writer mentioned rappers’ embrace of the Five Percenters. The writer also remarked that whites didn’t seem to like the identification, “European Americans.” When I responded that the phrase had, to my knowledge, been coined by the black supremacist Nation of Islam, and is today also embraced by white nationalists, he was still baffled as to why whites would reject the term.)
In the case of KOP, as with many other rappers, one hears of their positive social engagement. For instance, in the late 1980s, KOP founded the Stop the Violence movement. As Steve Huey has written for VH-1 on KOP, ca. 1989, “Taking on issues like black-on-black crime, police brutality, education, and spirituality, KRS-One found his audience growing and the mainstream paying attention to his message.”
Based on the English language, you’d think that someone who founded a movement called “Stop the Violence” and who was concerned about crime, would be … opposed to violence. But you’d be wrong.
Keep in mind, that as Carl Chery has written, KOP’s album Criminal Minded “featured the battle records ‘The Bridge is Over’ and ‘South Bronx’ with Kris and Scott on the cover brandishing grenades and bullets.”
And this is the ultraviolent world of r/h, where blood feuds are maintained for the sake of making a good impression, blood feuds that have resulted in the murders of, most notoriously, Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.
In 1989, after a syndicated Jesse Jackson column on the topic, “black-on-black violence” was a macro on every white pundit’s word processor as an urgent social problem. None of those white pundits, to my knowledge, had the cojones to ask why black-on-white violence was not an urgent social problem. (Similarly, today we have heroic, white intellectuals and moralists like National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who jump on Bill Cosby’s bandwagon, but who have never condemned black racism or black social pathologies, or black anti-Americanism… and never will.)
Jackson, KOP, et al., were not at all concerned about white’s lives. Indeed, had those white pundits hit the streets and listened to what urban blacks were saying, and read what they were reading, they would have seen that the movement to stop black-on-black violence supported an explosion in the already out-of-control black-on-white and black-on-Asian violence. The two leading theorists of “Afrocentricity,” Frances Cress Welsing (The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors, 1991) and Amos N. Wilson (Black-on-Black Violence: The Psychodynamics of Black Self-Annihilation in Service of White Domination, 1990), have called for genocide against whites, and in Wilson’s case, Asians, as well.
In a position that remains popular among urban blacks, Wilson argued that all of the violence that blacks visit upon other blacks, should be stopped, and the rage saved up and used against whites and Asians. Within black supremacy, of which r/h is part, violence practically takes on a religious dimension.
KOP has never been a pacifist, not even concerning blacks. In 1989, shortly after founding Stop the Violence, he and some of his Boogie Down Productions associates jumped on the stage during a performance by rival rap group P.M. Dawn, assaulted performers, threw one off the stage, and commenced to give their own performance. P.M. Dawn’s crime was in seeking to give rap musicality; KOP was an anti-aesthetic purist who would not tolerate anything but the ugliest rap.
Roots
The longtime leader of the Nation of Islam, “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad” (Elijah Pool; 1897-1975), spent most of World War II in prison for draft evasion and sedition. Poole/Muhammad had not only dodged the draft, but spoke publicly in support of our enemies, the Japanese. In those days, people actually went to jail for sedition and treason!
The Brits did us one better, in hanging William Joyce for his radio performances as “Lord Haw-Haw” for the Nazis.
During the War in Vietnam, Muhammad/Poole ordered heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay), to refuse to serve in the military, when the latter was drafted. Ali/Clay also made seditious statements: “I ain’t got nothin’ against no Viet Cong!” In a travesty of justice, on appeal, the courts exonerated Ali/Clay, who has since been “rehabilitated” through a fictional cover story, according to which the willing accomplice of a convicted draft dodger and seditionist was really a prisoner of conscience whose freedom of religion had been violated.
Despite the Nation of Islam having been responsible for the racial murders of at least 15 (the official number), and according to the author of Zebra, Clark Howard, as many as 270 California whites during the early-to-mid 1970s’ Zebra crimes, periodically members of the NOI who found it insufficiently genocidal, have broken off from it, and founded their own racial sects, most notably the Five Percenters and New Black Panther party.
Honest Gossips
Let’s look at the October 13 Rush & Molloy item.
KRS-One, decency zero
If Osama Bin Laden ever buys a rap album, he'll probably start with a CD by KRS-One.
The hip-hop anarchist has declared his solidarity with Al Qaeda by asserting that he and other African-Americans “cheered when 9/11 happened.”
The rapper, whose real name is Kris Parker, defiled the memory of those who died in the terrorist attacks as he spouted off at a recent New Yorker Festival panel discussion.
“I say that proudly,” the Boogie Down Productions founder went on, insisting that, before the attack, security guards kept black people out of the Trade Center “because of the way we talk and dress.
"So when the planes hit the building, we were like, ‘Mmmm - justice.
The atrocity of 9/11 “doesn't affect us [the hip-hop community],” he said. “9/11 happened to them, not us,” he added, explaining that by “them” he meant “the rich ... those who are oppressing us. RCA or BMG, Universal, the radio stations.
Parker's screed drew a loud boo from novelist Tom Kelly, who was in the audience. “I lost six friends there on 9/11,” Kelly told us afterward.
Parker also sneered at efforts by other rappers to get young people to vote.
“Voting in a corrupt society adds more corruption,” he added. “America has to commit suicide if the world is to be a better place.
Ex-Nirvana rocker Krist Novoselic, who was on the panel, yelled back: “That is wrong, man. Suicide is not the answer.
But, judging by Parker's downward-spiraling career, he's already bent on self-destruction.”
KOP Fires Back
If anything, Rush and Molloy were too easy on KOP. Let’s look at the rapper’s “Rebuttal To NY Daily News Article” in All Hiphop.
Like everyone I was shocked to read that I and other African-Americans actually “cheered when 911 happened” and that I have “declared my solidarity with Al Qaeda”. When I read my words taken out of context I was shocked and disappointed that the Daily News would go this far to assassinate my character and distort my views.
Such statements with no follow up explanation or interview from KRS-ONE as to what he may have meant or even a complete quote of my point is simply irresponsible journalism on the Daily News’ part. I would never just say something as crazy as “we cheered when 911 happened!” I was making an objective point about how many Hiphoppas as well as the oppressed peoples of the world felt that day.
I am a philosopher and a critical thinker, I speak truth and I urge people to think critically about themselves and their environment. Yes, my words are strong. Yes, my views are controversial. But to call me a terrorist is simply wrong!
A young lady asked about what we can do beyond voting to change the political state of things in our country? I responded not by irresponsibly stating that “America has to commit suicide if the world is to be a better place” and that’s all. I am a poet and I speak poetically. My full statement was "America has to commit suicide if the world is to be a better place.
If you want to go beyond voting American interests must put a gun to its head and commit suicide because as long as we are only interested in American interests we go out and invade the rest of the world. The real question is are you a citizen of the United States or are you a citizen of the world? And so for me, I would say voting in a corrupt society adds more corruption.
I was asked by the New Yorker magazine to discuss “different and personal beliefs musicians hold and the contribution artists like myself can make to the nation’s political dialog”. My views were indeed different and most were personal. However, when I was asked about why Hiphop has not engaged the current situation more (meaning 911) my responds was “because it does not affect us, or at least we don’t perceive that it effects us, 911 happened to them”. I went on to say that “I am speaking for the culture now; I am not speaking my personal opinion”. I continued to say; “911 effected them down the block; the rich, the powerful those that are oppressing us as a culture. Sony, RCA or BMG, Universal, the radio stations, Clear Channel, Viacom with BET and MTV, those are our oppressors those are the people that we’re trying to overcome in Hiphop everyday, this is a daily thing. We cheered when 911 happened in New York and say that proudly here. Because when we were down at the trade center we were getting hit over the head by cops, told that we can’t come in this building, hustled down to the train station because of the way we dressed and talked, and so on, we were racially profiled. So, when the planes hit the building we were like; mmmm justice.” And just as I began to say “now of course a lot of our friends and family were lost there as well” but I was interrupted.
My intent is never to demean or disrespect anyone’s loss or gain; and of course I did not literally ‘cheer when 911 happened’. I made an objective statement about the feelings of those who were oppressed by world trade policies. I was just as saddened as everyone else on 911. However, for many of us that were racially profiled and harassed by the World’s Trade Center’s security and the police patrolling that area as well as the thousands of American protesters that spoke out against the World Trade Organization months before in Seattle, Washington there was a sense of justice, a sense of change, a wake up call watching the twin towers fall.
These are not my views only; these views represent a popular truth that few people are really ready to hear. No one wished death on anyone or just sat and “cheered when 911 happened”. But some of us can see through the bullshit! America must change its approach to the world and its citizens. This, I believe is what all Americans should be thinking about. How do we make our country better?
KOP also told his readers not to believe anything the Daily News says. But they don’t have to take the word of the News. In the same screed, he admitted that he cheered the 911 attack. “We cheered when 911 happened in New York and say that proudly here.”
(And to think, back in 1996, white Daily News “reporter” Gene Mustain blackwashed the 1995 Harlem Massacre carried out by black supremacist Roland Smith Jr. aka Abubunde Mulocko -- in which Smith murdered seven people, before committing suicide -- and libeled the target of the massacre, Jewish shopkeeper Fred Harari. What’s with these terrorists? Where’s the gratitude?)
KOP denied having said that “America has to commit suicide if the world is to be a better place,” only to “correct” the record by saying … “America has to commit suicide if the world is to be a better place.” (“America” means “white people”; KOP surely does not wish “authentically” black Americans to commit mass suicide. Black supremacists and leftists define blacks who support or engage in mayhem as “authentic,” while showering racist epithets on blacks who oppose mayhem.)
But when them come to arrest a
black man, they need 30 cops or more.. well now
When they arrest a
black man, they need 30 cops or more.. well now hey
Years ago a black man couldn't be a cop
They could only be great dancers
When the whole police department was white
Justice, was the Black Panthers
We've been robbed of our religion
our government and social position
And you won't see no quick solution
Until you see the black revolution
From 30 Cops or More, by KRS-One
We can safely disregard KOP’s statements alleging police and corporate oppression.
If Port Authority police officers at the World Trade Center had assaulted young black men, based merely on the color of their skin, it would have been news around the world. Race hustlers would have sued the Port Authority for $1 billion. Just last year, race hustlers succeeded at shaking down the City of New York for $167,500, via a frivolous “racial profiling” lawsuit.
On the other hand, if KOP’s complaint about the WTC police “because of the way we dressed and talked, and so on,” was a code phrase for engaging in the sort of disorderly conduct and racial harassment of whites that so many New York blacks consider their birthright, and that is tolerated and even encouraged by local authority figures, it is possible that Port Authority (PA) police did run black toughs out of the complex. (The PA Police is a regional force composed of New Yorkers and New Jerseyans, and which serves in both states.) For unlike most of New York City, which is daily terrorized by “and so on,” is policed by the racially whipped NYPD, and is a wreck, the World Trade Center actually functioned.
If girly-man KOP were half as tough as he depicts himself, he wouldn’t complain about getting smacked around by the PA police. Since the charge of “racial profiling” is a race hoax that in its present form was concocted in 1999, it is reasonable to assume, until proven otherwise, that KOP is just another black race hustler.
When KOP speaks of “thousands of American protesters that spoke out against the World Trade Organization months before [911] in Seattle, Washington,” he is referring not to “protesters” who “spoke out,” but to anarchist terrorists who rioted.
It’s a White Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand
As for the notion that white corporations “oppress” black hiphoppers and blacks in general, white-owned corporations made r/h a cultural and commercial force. KOP owes his celebrity to the white-owned corporation, RCA, which not only signed him to a recording contract in 1987 through its subsidiary, Jive, but stuck with him, after his recording partner, Scott La Rock (Scott Sterling), was shot to death in 1988. And as Rolling Stone reported on October 14, “in recent years he actually served as an executive with Dreamworks Records.” KOP is a creature of white, corporate America.
While blacks have gladly forked over their money to those same white-owned corporations, it is the white public that made r/h the multi-billion-dollar business that it is. There are three simple reasons for this: There are six times as many whites as blacks in America; unlike blacks, who will rarely spend money on white singers, whites have always bought recordings by blacks; and blacks are unwilling to invest billions of dollars in the production, distribution, and marketing of cds videos, r/h or otherwise.
Every time a black entertainment form has become popular, whether it was the art of jazz or Motown, or the garbage that is r/h, it was whites that made it popular and lent it legitimacy. Were whites to boycott r/h, it would disappear tomorrow. Even black supremacy exists as a cultural and political power, only to the degree that white elites and white parents indulge it.
If KOP were merely an isolated imbecile, he would not be worth any bandwidth. But as r/h writer Steve Huey reports, “to this day, he remains one of hip-hop's most outspoken and respected intellectuals.” Intellectuals. Huey continues, “Taking on issues like black-on-black crime, police brutality, education, and spirituality, KRS-One found his audience growing and the mainstream paying attention to his message. The New York Times invited him to write editorials, and he found intense demand for his views on the college lecture circuit.” Presumably, the Times had an editor re-write KOP’s illiterate utterances into a semblance of English.
Beyond the r/h subculture, racist and anti-American statements by black New Yorkers are as much a part of daily life in the big city, however, as are black-on-white racial assaults. And yet, there is a virtual “blackout” on reporting such incidents and statements in the New York media. The blackout is the work of racist, black newsroom enforcers and their white allies. (In January 1991, after I was attacked in the subway by a spontaneously-forming black and Hispanic gang, a white NYPD detective acknowledged that such racial assaults on whites are a daily occurrence, but that for political reasons, “there are some things you can’t say.” And things only got worse under Mayor Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001). The much-vaunted crime-fighting revolution under Giuliani involved the systemic fudging of crime statistics.)
It is because the Daily News violated the “blackout,” that KOP is so angry. (On a personal note, I used to freelance for New York Newsday, New York’s most leftwing daily. In 1991, I violated the blackout, and was punished by being “whitelisted.”)
Recall that KOP complained that he was misquoted, only to show that he had been quoted exactly. Logically, he was engaging in self-contradiction. Psychologically, what was going on was more like this: The Daily News writers criticized KOP. The media are not supposed to criticize “authentically” black men. The truth of what KOP said, is for him beside the point. As far he is concerned, the News was obliged to put a positive spin on what he said, and air-brush his most treasonous statements. That’s called, “respect” (read: deference).
Ultimately, the mystery isn’t why reporters typically don’t report on black racism and anti-Americanism, but why in a case like that of KOP, they occasionally do.
No comments:
Post a Comment