Frequency, you were there. Do you agree?
Ego-Fueled Hip-Hop Sci-Fi Space Odyssey
By JON PARELES
Source
There is a new yardstick for the size of the universe. It is approximately equal to the size of Kanye West’s ego.
That’s not necessarily bad. Hip-hop runs on self-glorification, the transformation of underdogs into self-invented legends. Sooner or later someone was bound to claim what Mr. West’s show did on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden: that he’s “the biggest star in the universe.” That was not only part of the script but also a crucial plot twist for Mr. West’s headlining set on his Glow in the Dark Tour, a quadruple bill with Rihanna, N.E.R.D. and Lupe Fiasco.
Mr. West’s set was the most daring arena spectacle hip-hop has yet produced, and in some ways the best, even as it jettisoned standard hip-hop expectations. The rhymes, the beats and the narcissism were there; the block-party spirit and sense of community were not. Until the encore Mr. West had no human company on the arena stage.
The spectacle is framed as a sci-fi space odyssey, with Mr. West as a lone explorer whose starship crashes on an unknown planet. He’s stranded in a landscape of colored lights, billowing smoke — probably enough dry ice to cool Death Valley — and gorgeous, panoramic video images of clouds, galaxies, fireworks and cosmic eruptions. He converses with his computerized ship, named Jane, and with shooting stars. He raps with barely a respite, and bounds around the stage: striding, hunching, pumping his fist, falling to his knees, grinding against the stage, flailing, shouting his rhymes. It is a show of stamina and lonely self-determination that takes on its own obsessive momentum, like a Samuel Beckett scene staged by Robert Wilson and George Lucas.
Mr. West’s songs — chronicles of his striving, success, fashion sense and media missteps — don’t have much to do with a planet devoid of paparazzi or designer labels. At Tuesday’s show, praying to get back home, he promised God that if he made it, he’d “stop spazzing out at awards shows.” But he wrenched the songs into the concept, turning “Gold Digger,” for instance, into a tryst with a hologram generated by his spaceship.
The music was rearranged (for a band sequestered in an orchestra pit) to sound less triumphal and more melancholy. Mr. West reaches pop audiences with pop hooks, but the concert often held them back, starting instead with drumbeats and reverberating minor chords before allowing sweetness in. The audience joined him every chance it got, and he did eventually get back home, to share an encore with Lupe Fiasco. But in Mr. West’s tour de force, it was lonely at the top. Cosmically lonely.
The other acts were also pushing genre boundaries. N.E.R.D. is led by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, who as producers are a hip-hop hit factory called the Neptunes. N.E.R.D., however, is a rock band that ricochets among rap-rock, sardonic new wave and glimpses of Beatles chords. Mr. Williams, who does most of the singing and rapping, plays the perpetual Lothario in songs that dip into wordplay — like the group’s new “Everybody Nose,” about clubbing and cocaine — and make come-ons like, “I just love your brain.”
Rihanna, whose career arrived with dance tunes, keeps broadening her perspective. Her video-ready set flaunted three costumes and revealed her as a full-fledged singer, with a voice biting enough to leap out of speakers but also supple enough to be inviting. Amid Caribbean-tinged dance grooves and ballads, she sang about flirtation and self-assertion, and also tossed in part of M.I.A.’s gun-toting “Paper Planes.” For her biggest hit, the R&B loyalty hymn “Umbrella,” the singer Chris Brown joined her in an unannounced duet.
In the opening set the rapper Lupe Fiasco showed his own ambitions, verbal and musical. He rapped not only about stardom but also about skateboarding, child soldiers and a worldwide plague. And the music in his short set, using three backup singers, encompassed chattering electronic beats, smooth R&B and mournful rock. It was a good start for a concert that insisted hip-hop hasn’t run out of possibilities, even on this planet.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Bringing the NY Times to the Hip Hop Community
Just being lazy. However, I'm truly amazed about how often the New York Times runs Hip Hop stories...I'ma see how long I can keep this up.
Source
CHAOS IN COURT HALLWAY AFTER REMY MA SENTENCE
By Alan Feuer
Remy Smith, the hip-hop artist convicted in March of shooting a friend in an angry tug of war over a purse, was sentenced on Tuesday to eight years in prison at an emotional court hearing that touched off violence moments later outside the court.
Minutes after the sentence was imposed, in a hallway outside the courtroom doors, Ms. Smith’s fiancé, Shamele Mackie, flew into a rage, lunging and cursing at court officers, then overturning a garbage can near the elevator banks. Mr. Mackie shouted at the guards, “Go ahead, lock me up!” as a group of his friends surrounded him and forced him, flailing and howling, from the courthouse.
Tension had been building in Room 1123 of Supreme Court in Manhattan from the moment Justice Rena K. Uviller imposed the sentence and delivered a withering appraisal of Ms. Smith, calling her “an extremely angry young woman” who assumed herself to be beyond the rules of civil society.
Ms. Smith’s friends and family seemed aghast at that and began to weep and mutter as a large contingent of officers in the room stiffened visibly at their posts.
An angry crowd soon formed in the hallway around Mr. Mackie, a fellow rapper who was to have wed Ms. Smith on Monday at Rikers Island. The wedding was canceled when jail officials found a key on Mr. Mackie’s key chain that could be used to open handcuffs.
The officers tried to disperse the crowd, when Mr. Mackie, the rapper known as Papoose, tossed his baseball cap to a friend and lunged forward, reaching for the officers and shouting insults.
A court officer, who declined to give his name because he is not authorized to speak about security matters, said later that the detail had been ordered to proceed with caution because of Ms. Smith’s fame and her volatility.
Ms. Smith, who performs under the name Remy Ma, is known for her eye-catching outfits — on the day she was convicted she was wearing a version of a Little Miss Muffet outfit, gray bloomers and vest — but also for her easily available emotions, evidenced on Tuesday by the tearful statement she read to Justice Uviller.
In it, she excoriated some of the reporters who covered her trial for calling her a “hip-hop hellion,” saying her aggressive stage persona was precisely that: a “music industry creation” and “a facade.”
“Remy Ma is not even close to who I am,” she said through tears. “I’m not a thug. I’m not a hardcore anything. I have feelings and emotions, and I’m a human being like anybody else. I’m Remy Smith.”
Ms. Smith, 26, was found guilty on March 27 of first-degree assault for shooting Makeda Barnes Joseph, a member of her entourage, after a celebration of Ms. Smith’s birthday at a nightclub in the meatpacking district last July 14. At the party, Ms. Smith asked Ms. Joseph to hold her purse and said that when she got it back, $3,000 in cash was missing.
As they left the club, Ms. Smith pulled her Cadillac Escalade up to Ms. Joseph’s Nissan Maxima, then climbed into the Maxima with a cocked gun and tried to search Ms. Joseph’s purse for the money. During the struggle, Ms. Joseph was shot in the belly, and Ms. Smith fled in a taxi, abandoning her $69,000 Cadillac on the street and her victim in pool of blood.
In her own statement, read to the judge by Michael McIntosh, a prosecutor, Ms. Joseph, who was in the courtroom, said she was baffled how a night “so fun and enjoyable” could suddenly turn so violent. One minute she was hugging Ms. Smith, she said in her statement, and the next she was bleeding in a car.
“After July 14, I stopped existing as a person,” Ms. Joseph wrote. “I am now known as a victim, a gold-digger, a groupie, a liar and thief.” Her statement continued: “I will always be the girl they will whisper about. I will always be the girl who was shot by Remy.”
Before Ms. Smith sat down, she addressed herself to Ms. Joseph and spoke in her direction but did not look at her directly.
“I apologize,” she said, “and I’m sorry for not saving you. I feel so bad for all the physical and mental pain you went through, and go through. Myself, I have a lifetime scar on my face. So I know the pain you feel when I look in the mirror.”
Source
CHAOS IN COURT HALLWAY AFTER REMY MA SENTENCE
By Alan Feuer
Remy Smith, the hip-hop artist convicted in March of shooting a friend in an angry tug of war over a purse, was sentenced on Tuesday to eight years in prison at an emotional court hearing that touched off violence moments later outside the court.
Minutes after the sentence was imposed, in a hallway outside the courtroom doors, Ms. Smith’s fiancé, Shamele Mackie, flew into a rage, lunging and cursing at court officers, then overturning a garbage can near the elevator banks. Mr. Mackie shouted at the guards, “Go ahead, lock me up!” as a group of his friends surrounded him and forced him, flailing and howling, from the courthouse.
Tension had been building in Room 1123 of Supreme Court in Manhattan from the moment Justice Rena K. Uviller imposed the sentence and delivered a withering appraisal of Ms. Smith, calling her “an extremely angry young woman” who assumed herself to be beyond the rules of civil society.
Ms. Smith’s friends and family seemed aghast at that and began to weep and mutter as a large contingent of officers in the room stiffened visibly at their posts.
An angry crowd soon formed in the hallway around Mr. Mackie, a fellow rapper who was to have wed Ms. Smith on Monday at Rikers Island. The wedding was canceled when jail officials found a key on Mr. Mackie’s key chain that could be used to open handcuffs.
The officers tried to disperse the crowd, when Mr. Mackie, the rapper known as Papoose, tossed his baseball cap to a friend and lunged forward, reaching for the officers and shouting insults.
A court officer, who declined to give his name because he is not authorized to speak about security matters, said later that the detail had been ordered to proceed with caution because of Ms. Smith’s fame and her volatility.
Ms. Smith, who performs under the name Remy Ma, is known for her eye-catching outfits — on the day she was convicted she was wearing a version of a Little Miss Muffet outfit, gray bloomers and vest — but also for her easily available emotions, evidenced on Tuesday by the tearful statement she read to Justice Uviller.
In it, she excoriated some of the reporters who covered her trial for calling her a “hip-hop hellion,” saying her aggressive stage persona was precisely that: a “music industry creation” and “a facade.”
“Remy Ma is not even close to who I am,” she said through tears. “I’m not a thug. I’m not a hardcore anything. I have feelings and emotions, and I’m a human being like anybody else. I’m Remy Smith.”
Ms. Smith, 26, was found guilty on March 27 of first-degree assault for shooting Makeda Barnes Joseph, a member of her entourage, after a celebration of Ms. Smith’s birthday at a nightclub in the meatpacking district last July 14. At the party, Ms. Smith asked Ms. Joseph to hold her purse and said that when she got it back, $3,000 in cash was missing.
As they left the club, Ms. Smith pulled her Cadillac Escalade up to Ms. Joseph’s Nissan Maxima, then climbed into the Maxima with a cocked gun and tried to search Ms. Joseph’s purse for the money. During the struggle, Ms. Joseph was shot in the belly, and Ms. Smith fled in a taxi, abandoning her $69,000 Cadillac on the street and her victim in pool of blood.
In her own statement, read to the judge by Michael McIntosh, a prosecutor, Ms. Joseph, who was in the courtroom, said she was baffled how a night “so fun and enjoyable” could suddenly turn so violent. One minute she was hugging Ms. Smith, she said in her statement, and the next she was bleeding in a car.
“After July 14, I stopped existing as a person,” Ms. Joseph wrote. “I am now known as a victim, a gold-digger, a groupie, a liar and thief.” Her statement continued: “I will always be the girl they will whisper about. I will always be the girl who was shot by Remy.”
Before Ms. Smith sat down, she addressed herself to Ms. Joseph and spoke in her direction but did not look at her directly.
“I apologize,” she said, “and I’m sorry for not saving you. I feel so bad for all the physical and mental pain you went through, and go through. Myself, I have a lifetime scar on my face. So I know the pain you feel when I look in the mirror.”
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
I'm not a player, I just f!#@ my daugther
I know it's been a good 2 weeks since our faithful readership has had something with which to occupy their time, so therefore, I wanted to share this lovely New York Times story with you, which, ironically, is also about 2 weeks old [NOTE: I was going to blog about the Papoose/Remy Ma wedding, but apparently that's off for at least the next 6 months.
Here's the Times story [ONE MORE NOTE: I am 1/4 Austrian, so please don't let this be a reflection on me] (SOURCE):
AMSTETTEN, Austria — With his Mercedes-Benz and his fine clothes, Josef Fritzl looked every inch a property owner, neighbors in this tidy Austrian town said Monday. Even when running errands, they said, he wore a natty jacket, crisp shirt and tie.
Mr. Fritzl’s apartment house, its back garden obscured by a tall hedge, was his kingdom, one neighbor said, and interlopers were not welcome. On Monday, investigators in white jumpsuits combed the house and garden for clues. The authorities said Sunday that Mr. Fritzl, 73, had kept one of his daughters imprisoned for 24 years in a basement dungeon, where she bore him seven children.
The daughter, Elisabeth, now 42, is in psychiatric care, along with two of her children. Her eldest daughter, Kerstin, 19, who was also kept in the basement and whose illness pulled apart Mr. Fritzl’s secret after he had her taken to a local hospital, was in a medically induced coma and was in critical condition, the authorities said.
The authorities said Mr. Fritzl confessed Monday to imprisonment, sexual abuse and incest. The case has left this town of 22,000 people, 80 miles west of Vienna, in stunned disbelief. Neighbors milled around the three-story apartment building on Monday, watching the investigation unfold and asking how such an atrocity could have occurred in their midst.
“One cannot comprehend the dimension of this,” said Doris Bichler, 34, a neighbor who was walking with her daughter. “Natascha Kampusch was bad, but this is of a totally different scale.” Ms. Bichler was referring to the notorious kidnapping of an Austrian schoolgirl, who was hidden in a windowless cellar for eight years until she escaped in August 2006. Until now, the Kampusch case was considered by many as the epitome of depravity in the post-World War II history of this country.
But as details of this latest case filter out, it seems even harder to fathom than Ms. Kampusch’s abduction, involving nearly a quarter-century of confinement and sexual abuse, and the birth of seven children, three of whom never emerged from the cellar into daylight until last week.
It also raises a troubling question: Why did two such horrifying crimes occur in the same period in Austria, known as a tranquil, picture-book land?
There seems no easy answer — and Austrian officials, while insisting that similar crimes had occurred in other countries, said they were struggling to make sense of Mr. Fritzl’s singular misdeeds.
“He was man of stature,” Franz Polzer, the chief of the criminal investigations unit for the Province of Lower Austria, said at a news conference here, holding up a photograph of Mr. Fritzl, a heavyset, gray-haired man dressed in black.
“He led a double life,” Mr. Polzer continued, “with one family of seven children, with his wife, and a second family of seven children, with his daughter.”
The police described Mr. Fritzl as an authoritarian figure who had brooked no dissent.
Trained as an electrician and an engineer, Mr. Fritzl owns the small apartment building, renting out a few apartments and living on the top floor. Over many years, he built an underground world for his captives in a warren of cramped, windowless rooms. He provided them with food and clothing, bought outside town to avoid suspicion.
Photographs show a miniature bathroom, finished with tile and wood trim on the ceiling. A claustrophobic passageway leads to a bedroom. The chamber was accessible through a four-foot-high door that opened with a remote-control device, for which only Mr. Fritzl held the code.
The police said his wife, Rosemarie, 68, had no inkling of his secret life, believing that their daughter had fled the family for a cult and was unable to take care of her children. Mr. Fritzl forced Elisabeth to give up three of the children as babies, and he and his wife raised them. A seventh child, a twin boy, died soon after being born; Mr. Fritzl told the police he threw the body in an incinerator, the authorities said.
“You have to imagine that this woman’s world fell apart,” a local official, Hans-Heinz Lenze, said of Rosemarie.
Here's the Times story [ONE MORE NOTE: I am 1/4 Austrian, so please don't let this be a reflection on me] (SOURCE):
AMSTETTEN, Austria — With his Mercedes-Benz and his fine clothes, Josef Fritzl looked every inch a property owner, neighbors in this tidy Austrian town said Monday. Even when running errands, they said, he wore a natty jacket, crisp shirt and tie.
Mr. Fritzl’s apartment house, its back garden obscured by a tall hedge, was his kingdom, one neighbor said, and interlopers were not welcome. On Monday, investigators in white jumpsuits combed the house and garden for clues. The authorities said Sunday that Mr. Fritzl, 73, had kept one of his daughters imprisoned for 24 years in a basement dungeon, where she bore him seven children.
The daughter, Elisabeth, now 42, is in psychiatric care, along with two of her children. Her eldest daughter, Kerstin, 19, who was also kept in the basement and whose illness pulled apart Mr. Fritzl’s secret after he had her taken to a local hospital, was in a medically induced coma and was in critical condition, the authorities said.
The authorities said Mr. Fritzl confessed Monday to imprisonment, sexual abuse and incest. The case has left this town of 22,000 people, 80 miles west of Vienna, in stunned disbelief. Neighbors milled around the three-story apartment building on Monday, watching the investigation unfold and asking how such an atrocity could have occurred in their midst.
“One cannot comprehend the dimension of this,” said Doris Bichler, 34, a neighbor who was walking with her daughter. “Natascha Kampusch was bad, but this is of a totally different scale.” Ms. Bichler was referring to the notorious kidnapping of an Austrian schoolgirl, who was hidden in a windowless cellar for eight years until she escaped in August 2006. Until now, the Kampusch case was considered by many as the epitome of depravity in the post-World War II history of this country.
But as details of this latest case filter out, it seems even harder to fathom than Ms. Kampusch’s abduction, involving nearly a quarter-century of confinement and sexual abuse, and the birth of seven children, three of whom never emerged from the cellar into daylight until last week.
It also raises a troubling question: Why did two such horrifying crimes occur in the same period in Austria, known as a tranquil, picture-book land?
There seems no easy answer — and Austrian officials, while insisting that similar crimes had occurred in other countries, said they were struggling to make sense of Mr. Fritzl’s singular misdeeds.
“He was man of stature,” Franz Polzer, the chief of the criminal investigations unit for the Province of Lower Austria, said at a news conference here, holding up a photograph of Mr. Fritzl, a heavyset, gray-haired man dressed in black.
“He led a double life,” Mr. Polzer continued, “with one family of seven children, with his wife, and a second family of seven children, with his daughter.”
The police described Mr. Fritzl as an authoritarian figure who had brooked no dissent.
Trained as an electrician and an engineer, Mr. Fritzl owns the small apartment building, renting out a few apartments and living on the top floor. Over many years, he built an underground world for his captives in a warren of cramped, windowless rooms. He provided them with food and clothing, bought outside town to avoid suspicion.
Photographs show a miniature bathroom, finished with tile and wood trim on the ceiling. A claustrophobic passageway leads to a bedroom. The chamber was accessible through a four-foot-high door that opened with a remote-control device, for which only Mr. Fritzl held the code.
The police said his wife, Rosemarie, 68, had no inkling of his secret life, believing that their daughter had fled the family for a cult and was unable to take care of her children. Mr. Fritzl forced Elisabeth to give up three of the children as babies, and he and his wife raised them. A seventh child, a twin boy, died soon after being born; Mr. Fritzl told the police he threw the body in an incinerator, the authorities said.
“You have to imagine that this woman’s world fell apart,” a local official, Hans-Heinz Lenze, said of Rosemarie.
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