Thug Life Army

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 published at hip hop site All HipHop, KOP wrote that the New York Daily News had committed character assassination against him, when its gossip column “Rush and Molloy” 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. (The column is written by 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.)

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. Rappers’ rants often 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 anyone would 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 has institutionalized the uglification of art, acting on the world of music not unlike the way, in Tim Burton’s 1989 movie, Batman, that Jack Nicholson’s murderous, avant-garde “Joker” would turn beautiful women into “works of art,” by spraying their faces with acid. But r/h is more than just an uglification movement. It is a moral counter-revolution, in which everything good and true and beautiful is turned on its head: Tone-deafness is musical, lies are true, and the savage is a saint. (Has anyone done a parallel study on r/h and the uglification theme in lesbian theory and practice?)

R/H and Black Supremacy

R/h’s cultural function is as the voice of 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 that has taken over many of America’s prisons.

(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 it.)

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, 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, 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” became an urgent social problem that was a macro on the word processor of every white pundit. 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, black social pathologies, or black anti-Americanism… and never will.)

Jackson, KOP, et al., were not at all concerned about whites’ lives. Indeed, had concerned 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 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.

To be continued.


Nicholas Stix   Source