Haile Sellasie Karate and thoughts about music today...

If your following me on Facebook or Twitter maybe you saw this link I posted earlier last week: A brilliant article by Homeboy Sandman about Hip Hop, Media Consolidation and the Prison Industrial Complex. In the article, he breaks down how a mere 232 media executives control the information diet of 277 million people... and how a few of those media executives have made offers to keep privatized prisons in the United States at a 90% occupancy rate. How could media giants make such bold statements? Because rap music is a tool in today's form of slavery that exists in the United States. We already know the voices in the mainstream don't reflect who we are. It reminds me of what Frantz Fanon called double consciousness: a colonized people who at the same time has to view themselves as the colonizer sees them, and as how we truly see ourselves. It also reminds me of Chimamanda Adichie's brilliant TED Talk "The danger of a single story."  See I don't want to censor these artists who get mainstream radio play... but the fact that the only Black men who get a mainstream push in rap music are all telling the same exact story isn't just insulting, it's an attack. My issue is the lack of diversity and complexity, that in reality we do hold, that deserves to be reflected in all the stories people know of us. No one group of people anywhere can be defined by a single story, in fact I don't even think a single family is that simple. Which is why this blog exists: aside from I just needed a website... It's to spread music, videos, news and whatever inspires me to keep going. And this new Pharoahe Monch video (filmed in Mitchell's Plain, South Africa) couldn't of hit me on a day when I needed it more... We Are Renegades. Be more.