Yesterday, waiting for my ride, I stood on the corner of La Salle and 9th Street in downtown Minneapolis and played with my new camera cell phone doodad. I’ve never had one before last week and I’m enthralled with the instant gratification of snapping and there’s your picture (better than polaroid!) — I can spend hours taking pixelated pictures of my foot, the wall, the carpet, etc.

I was looking skyward, framing a particularly boring shot of the top of a building, when 2 women and a man walked by. One of the women stopped beside me and looked up where I was looking. Then she said, “You can take a picture much better from this angle,” squatted low to the ground, and thrust her widish bottom waaay out towards my crotch.

She was about an inch and a half away from molesting me.

She stood up and laughed and walked off, and her friends laughed, and I laughed. I wish now that I had taken a picture of her ass. But that might have been me harrassing her (no pun intended). More importantly, though, taking her picture might have led to more interaction or conversation with a woman who was obviously insane. And then, too, I would have had a picture of her butt on my cell phone. Nobody wants that.

I felt kinda dirty afterward. But I was asking for it. You should have seen the tight jeans I was wearing.

There are two periods in the history of hip-hop that fascinate me.  The first is the period in the late ’70s where various musical and cultural influences came together in the Bronx to create the stuff.  I read today (on Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt) that the New York blackout of ‘77 hastened the spread of hip-hop from the Bronx because of all the looting:  kids who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford the equipment were able to boost turntables, microphones, and other gear that let them start running their own street parties.  It’s a fascinating theory, even if there isn’t any proof.

The second is the shift that happened right around the time I started forming my adult musical taste, when the mainstream of hip-hop went from pop-rap (MC Hammer, LL Cool J, Young MC) to hardcore.  Suddenly the hit rap songs I was hearing about were songs my radio station wouldn’t play.  I don’t think “Nuthin’ but a G Thang” ever made it onto WCFX-FM in Mt. Pleasant.  (Maybe it hit the local college station.)  This was only a couple of years after Nirvana slaughtered Poison.  Suddenly, all music was hardcore.

I said I was preparing a post about why I thought Bo$$’s Born Gangstaz was such a good album.  In my brain, that post assumed dissertation status.  It involved a short history of Lichelle “Boss” Laws’s career, including her #1 rap single, “Deeper”; a breakdown of her potent rhythmic and rhyming skills; an exploration of her inversions of hip-hop’s gender tropes; a section on her use of violence as myth and reality; and a chapter on the function of her sidekick, Irene “Dee” Moore, who compared to Boss is more acutely psychotic and also more immature–Vader to Boss’s Sidious.  This is weighty stuff for a one-hit-wonder’s not-quite-gold album that in 47 minutes features 280 F-bombs, many of them on the final proper track:  “I Don’t Give a Fuck.”

I’m too lazy to write it, so I’ll get to the point:  Born Gangstaz is such a great album because it both embodies that seismic shift in hip-hop and comments on it.  Because despite Boss and Dee’s repeatedly insisting that “that’s the way the shit really is, G,” that this is “how I live,” Laws puts the lie to it herself with the intro and outro:  answering-machine messages from her parents, who object to the snippet of “I Don’t Give a Fuck” that serves as her greeting and explain exactly why.  Turns out Laws, who poses on the album art with guns a-plenty and guns down friend and foe alike over the course of 12 of the hardest raps ever, spent 12 years in Catholic school, took tap-dance lessons, and even went to college for three years.  In short:  she’s faking it.

Laws was eventually outed as a fake by that renowned bastion of street cred, the Wall Street Journal.  How exactly you out someone who’s already outed herself, I don’t know, but suddenly Boss dropped off the radar.  Born Gangstaz sold almost 400,000 copies, but her follow-up was rejected by her record label.  Read the story here for more details.

Boss is the hardest rapper I’ve ever heard.  “Catch a Bad One” ranks up there with Black Fork’s “Silicone Wetnurse” and Babes in Toyland’s “Handsome and Gretel” (obviously I’m taking a broad definition of “punk” here).  But she’s not keeping it real at all.  It’s all fake.  And when she tells you it’s all fake, she also turns her street narrative into American myth.  There are as many references on Born Gangstaz to paranoia and mental disturbance as there are to killing people or smoking chronic.  It seems entirely possible that all the murder happens only in Boss’s head–especially because, in real life, it really was all in Boss’s head.

That’s not to say there’s no reality here.  “A Blind Date with Boss” is a revenge fantasy about men who don’t give Boss and Dee their due respect, but it follows “Recipe of a Hoe,” which is a riot-grrrl-esque criticism of the sexual politics of the rap industry.  “1-800-Body-Bags” is a skit that implicates not only black gangbangers and gangsta rappers for street violence, but also the white-run entertainment industry for encouraging the thug image and profiting off it.  And as to why Boss might want to display that image, listen to her father’s comment on the outro:  “By the way, baby, thanks for the Rolex.”

There’s also the myth, which comes from the origin stories Dee drops on “Catch a Bad One,” “Born Gangsta,” and “Diary of a Mad Bitch” and Boss’s own tales of hustling, violence, and paranoia.  This is the story of American outlaws.  One of the album’s skits is even called “Thelma & Louise.”  Boss is the gunwoman, Dee the getaway driver, and not even a squad of cops can stop them.  And finally, the relentless hardness of the raps puts the album over the top into satire.  No one could be as ruthless, as violent, as unremorseful as Boss is.  She’s parodying the image of a hardcore rapper by turning it up to eleven.  She has to, since she’s faking it–she can’t allow her credentials to be questioned for a second.  But she also makes it clear that hardcore can easily cross the line into cartoonish, and that you need some depth to make it work.

It’s like she predicted the last ten years of mainstream rap.  Once the hardcore persona becomes a component of the genre, there’s no more space for imagination or criticism.  A lot of the raps and party anthems of the past few years are recycling the tired cliches that Boss was already debunking in 1993.  Maybe I’m giving her too much credit, but even if I am, Born Gangstaz is a spooky, bloody, Kill Bill Vol. 1 of an album that still deserves to be heard.

A flight to Mumbai from Amsterdam on Wednesday had its own personal terror alert and was turned around, by the pilot, for an emergency landing — afterward, 12 passengers were held overnight by Dutch police. Why? The NYT has the scoop:

The pilot of Northwest Flight 42 . . . turned back about 20 minutes into the flight . . . after several passengers were observed passing cell phones back and forth and unfastening their seat belts.

Well, was the fasten seat belt light still on?!? If a man unfastens his seat belt, or passes a cell phone to another passenger, that’s one thing — but if a man with an unfastened belt whips out a phone . . . run.

OK, so lets cut to the important part: what did they look like? I turned to the Star Tribune:

Passengers described the men as between 25 and 35 years old and speaking Urdu, the language commonly spoken in Pakistan and by many of India’s Muslims.

Uh-huh, uh-huh. My suspicions are aroused . . .

Some had beards, and some wore a shalwar kameez, a long shirt and baggy pants commonly worn by South Asian Muslims.

Ah-ha! Beards, huh? You’d think those terrorists would learn to shave every once and a while, to sort of lower their profile, but you can’t teach a terrorist new tricks, apparently.

Anything else? You had me at beards, but wait:

Nitin Patel of Boston, who sat behind the men, told the paper: “I don’t know how close we were, but my gut tells me these people wanted to hijack the airplane.”

Thank God Nitin Patel failed the Air Marshall written exam, or bearded, seat-belt-less passengers on flights around the world would be paying the price.

But even with all that evidence, it turned out to be a false alarm:

Prosecutors said Thursday they found no evidence of a terrorist threat . . . and they are releasing all 12 passengers arrested after the emergency landing.

There is nothing funny about terrorism and there is nothing funny about racism or religious prejudice (yet, somehow, this “incident” is funny . . .)

Dick Cheney recently said that “the terrorists” (or, “Al-Qaeda-types,” as he called them) saw a victory in the Connecticut Democratic primary defeat of Joe Lieberman; Bush, on Tuesday, said that withdrawing troops form Iraq “will send the wrong message to the enemy.”

How about panic (terror, even!) aboard airplanes? Fear and suspicion and anger? Travel disruptions? Could these things possibly be seen as “a victory” by terrorist organizations who have specifically targeted air travel?

Finally:

On Tuesday, a flight to New York from Atlanta was diverted to Charlotte, N.C., after a flight attendant found a bottle of water and then smelled something suspicious on the plane. Officials found nothing hazardous.

Now that sends a message.

Left Pedal, the blog, has risen Phoenix-like out of the ashes.

Warning: semi work-safe bird-flipping images may occur.

The other day I was talking about the University of Florida (where I spent part of my schooling) with some friends.

“There was a good community in the English department,” I said. “There wasn’t much to do in Gainesville, so there was a lot of drinking.”

My friend — let’s call call him “Mr. M,” to protect the innocent — created a word on the spot: “A comdrinkity!”

At the time, I found that to be wildly hilarious.

48 hours later? . . . Still funny!

(anybody have any made-up words to share?)

Yes, it’s true. Pluto has been stripped of planetary status.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.ap/index.html

Time to ramp up the Charon isn’t a moon campaign — or maybe dust off the the moon isn’t a moon, instead an Earth Orbiting Object…

 Who’s with me?

What with the move and all—thanks to Salma, Dan, Kris, and Sarah—I haven’t had a lot of time to write. (Summary of my new apartment: I really like living off the ground again.) So here’s a short post, a roundup of what I’ve been watching, reading, and listening to this week:

Merry Krismix: For which I have Kris to thank. This is Kris’s half of our mix CD exchange, and compared to mine, it has a lot more, you know, mix. The 16 Horsepower, Go Team!, Asha Bhosle, and Gorillaz songs are my favorites. Plus, “Rudie Can’t Fail” reminded me that I need to pick up London Calling. (But the artist on the last song got cut off—who played “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left”?) And Hank is on the cover. Thanks, Kris!

On the Waterfront: Kinda boring. Marlon Brando spends the whole movie looking like he just got struck in the face, so when he actually does get struck in the face, it’s really bizarre. The whole thing suffers from 1950s-brand soundtrack overload, where every emotion is cued by a string crescendo that comes through the speaker distorted.

Abbey Lincoln, Abbey Is Blue: I heard “Afro-Blue” on the Current a few months ago and had to check it out. The song, which has a great horn riff, outshines the rest of the CD, which is mainly supper-club jazz with sad melodies that would sound better if the accompaniment were louder in the mix. She has a great voice, though.

Victory at Sea, All Your Things Are Gone: Aimee Mann without the Aimee Mann. A couple of really good piano-pop songs, a couple of other songs that aren’t quite as good. iTunes, my good people!

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being: So. Very. Boring.

Bo$$, Born Gangstaz: I’m writing (mentally) a post on why this is such a good album, but for now: It’s such a good album. I had it on tape (!) in high school, lost it for a long time, and just this week got the CD again. It holds up. It’s pretty violent, though—kind of hard to take in one sitting.

A couple of days ago, I posted a comment on Gandhi’s attitude towards doctors and nutrition, which surprised me. The quote had come from a book called “Hind Swaraj” (“Indian Home Rule”) which was first compiled in 1909. It contains many rather upsetting and mind-boggling assertions of Gandhi’s, including a tirade against railways for working against natural segregation of people and thus spreading the Bubonic plague. I figured this was a decade or so before Gandhism truly took off, and the, how can I put this delicately, craziness of his words could therefore be attributed to the early unformulated thought of a subsequent wiseman.

Today, in a completely different text, I came across a quote of his from 1929 that has me truly rattled.

Just as it is the duty of the ruler to be the trustee and friend of the people, so that of the latter is not be jealous of the former. The poor man must know that to a great extent poverty is due to his own faults and shortcomings. So, while the poor man must strive to improve his condition, let him not hate the ruler and wish his destruction…He must not want rulership for himself, but remain content by earning his own wants. (Qtd. in Dominance without Hegemony, pg. 37)

Did anybody else know that Gandhi was a neocon?

My sister sent me this link — MississippiBelieveIt.com — which has a series of posters like this one (see left) talking up the Magnolia state. The gist of the ads are, basically, that Mississippi has famous people (famous writers, famous actors and singers, famous football players), culture (the USA International Ballet Competition), and industry (space center that builds the shuttle, big Nissan automotive plant).

These posters, this Web site; it’s a gift from a Mississippi-based PR firm. They were sick of people assuming the worst about their home state.

It’s my home state, too (and one of my sister’s). And living in Minnesota now, I understand where that PR firm is coming from. I’ve found myself becoming something that I never was when I actually lived in Mississippi: an apologist.

I don’t have much of a Southern accent, or at least, I don’t sound like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel from The Simpsons, and that tends to throw people off. “You’re from Mississippi?” One MN-acquaintance asked. “But you don’t have an accent. I don’t understand, were your parents . . . educated?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t understand it either — they were both hicks!”

People associate the South with a lack of education. Is that something to apologize for? Something to work to change, maybe. Mississippi recently was ranked in the bottom ten states (that’s out of 50, Mississippians) for public school-children’s writing scores.

But Mississippi is, by and large, a poor state (the median household income in 2003 was $10,000 short of the national average) — and access to quality education in the United States is, unfortunately, largely dependent on economic class. Is being poor something to apologize for? From what I’ve seen of both classes, not nearly as much as being rich.

I admit, as an English-major type, I’m particularly impressed by the writer poster (see above): Mississippi’s got mad authors. We’ve got the big guns, like Faulkner, and the money-makers, like Grisham, and the cult classics, like Eudora Welty. But does, let’s say, Pennsylvania have posters and a Web site? (Edgar Allen Poe, James Michener, and John Updike are all Pennsylvanians). Nope. Methinks the state of Mississippi protests too much. (But I haven’t heard a lot of pop culture anti-Pennsylvania sentiment in, either.)

So what’s there to apologize for, if not trends toward being less educated (or less wealthy)? The most weighty criticism of Mississippi I’ve encountered is a critique of culture, both said aloud (and joked) and implied — the criticism that Mississippi is the birthplace and radiating center of religious intolerance, the NRA, and racism.

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In Michigan, three Palestinian-American men were arrested last week after being found to be in possession of nearly 1000 disposable cell phones. They are under suspiscion of participating in a scheme to sell the phones to help fund a terrorist cell. In a similar case in Ohio, charges were recently dropped, but Caro, Mich. police are holding firm. From the Star Tribune:

The FBI said Monday that it had no indication that the men had any ties to known terrorist groups. Local prosecutors, however, were standing by the charges.

My advice to the Tuscola County Michigan local authorities: let it go. If the FBI says they aren’t terrorists, then they aren’t terrorists. They know. And they have the illegally wiretapped phone records to prove it.