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Have you seen the film? Deep Cover I mean. This song belongs to the closing credits.
Haunting, this song is. That LA feeling of quiet suburbia laced with absolute menace. The single piano chord with semitones, the augmented fourth bass line.
I studiously avoid anything that sounds like acting Black. Frat boys with sideways baseball caps at CU Boulder helped. My stepdad Maurice being from Jamaica helped. But, I have strong feelings about Deep Cover, because it reminds me of parts of my childhood. The drugs and the criminal gangs part of my childhood. Nothing scares you once you've met a Kray Twins assassin. In your dad's living room. At age 12. I'm coming for you De Sadist. And this is the song for the closing credits.
Strongly identify with some of it, overlap in the region of 12-year-old Tim walking through his dad’s neighborhood, “Fairyland” aka Maryland, "an island of lost children," as he said with characteristic sinister poetry. Roy the junkie lives over here, who one Christmas Day showed up on Dad's doorstep and died on the spot in his doorway, Dennis over there, similarly addicted, keep walking Tim, through a bombed out post-WW2 misery space on the edge of Hell. Then, far worse—arriving at Dad's house where on any given day the police might show up and arrest his partner for possession of 1000 tabs of acid and a lot of speed, everyone from off the street and worse piled in his living room. A place where the worst thing you could be was not a murderer or a thief or ... but a snitch.
That LA noir feeling of quiet suburbia right up next to not-suburbia (but what is it...what), laced with absolute menace. The sound of a car rounding the corner two blocks away. The single piano chord. Snoop Dog like a cartoon mouse on a 1920s Disney loop, “Creep with me as I crawl through the hood…” His utterly strange and uncanny intonation of “187…” like a teenage ghost descending from a broken traffic light. That incredible line that slips over the bar like a kid slipping down an alleyway to avoid the cop cars and the not-cop cars: “But I got the hook up with somebody who knows how to get in contact with him.”
This song and the film are the most wonderful noir loop, anti-racism’s proof of Monty Python’s proof of Turing’s proof of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Mathematical objects (numbers) in deep cover as logical propositions sticking it to the bad guys then sticking it to the really bad guys, the cops, and then the really really bad guys, the government (logic). How you have to be ridiculously smart just to cope…how much RAM that takes up. How badly I feel for anyone who has to calculate just to get across the street without being shot.
The Monty Python version, called "Argument Clinic," is handy and also comes laced with its own kind of genius menacing grin:
For every sketch, there can never be a police officer with enough authority to arrest everyone in it for violating the Strange Sketches Act, since every time an officer enters the sketch they are in the sketch.
Change "sketch" to Dad's house.
As Beyonce gears up for the monumental world tour for the new album titled Renaissance, where she is expected to make "north of $500 million" from tickets sales alone, and Ticketmaster greedily anticipates the revenue from their "dynamic pricing" scheme, I want to share this post about a little known Hip Hop documentary about women, gender, and power in Hip Hop from Rachel Raimist released in 1999, Nobody Know's My Name. — Read the rest
Rap is something you do, HipHop is something you live. — KRS-ONE.
"Temple Tactics" is a Hip Hop video talk show hosted by Los Angeles- based Hip Hop historian Conkrete Mike P.
"Off Tha Map" is a bike and/or car tour where participants learn new geography by exploring "West coast Hip Hop Historical Sites," also organized by Conkrete Mike P. — Read the rest
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