No Credo but Freedom: Activism, Litmus Tests, and Liberation in the 21st Century

The anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination has come and gone many times in my lifetime, but this year it seems to have particular impact for me. We sit now in the long view of history; able to see the trajectory from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. But what lies in between and its wake? COINTELPRO, The War on Drugs, Mass Incarceration, the extrajudicial killing of Black people by police, and the chilling advent of drone technology.

 

From this vantage point, it seems to me that the urgent project of our time is figuring out what resistance will look like in twenty-first century and onward. The other urgent project, in my opinion, is losing our fondness and nostalgia for outdated modalities of change, and most importantly, ridding ourselves of litmus tests and the hierarchies they create. Audre Lorde, poet-mother, said, (I'm paraphrasing) that relating as allies across difference, outside of a hierarchy was fundamental to any kind of real sea-change in our quest to live as free beings on the planet earth.

 

This goal in mind, I'm reminded of something my Daddy says about the struggle. My Daddy grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, integrated his elementary school, and lived through countless traumas of that day. He says it takes a player in every position to get to victory; nobody’s role is more important or necessary than the other. I think about the lead up to the arrest of George Zimmerman, the man who murdered Trayvon Martin. Yes, the thousands of protestors surely had their impact, but I think a close look at the timeline will reveal that the New Black Panthers threat to shoot him on sight was influential as well. Don’t you doubt that for a second. Call them agitators, showboats, etc.  if you like, but the proof is in the pudding.

 

The point is... there is more than one way to skin a cat. More to what activism is than the simple criteria provided by the bourgeoisie. People who live in poverty, people who have been the victims and soldiers of the War on Drugs, or mass incarceration, live and breathe the struggle in their everyday lives. Every day survived is an act of resistance inside of an apparatus that has literally been set-up to destroy you. The smallest acts of support are exchanged between neighbors, and friends, and families. These acts are not visible to most of the middle class. These acts don’t come with a name tag, a title, a seat at a table, an invitation to a party, a paycheck, or a 401K. There is really no reward, except love and survival, if you are lucky. I want to thank anyone who looked out for me, so that I could be here to write this, and be one of those lucky ones. This kind of “looking out” is what there needs to be more of, so that activism ceases to be a title, or a club you must apply to join. In this incarnation it is just a way of simply being.

 

Castigating those whose “activism” does not include or privilege the picket line and other traditional forms of civic engagement, which in America, are often the luxury of a middle class lifestyle, is ineffectual, futile, and dangerous in the modern era. A vision that does not take into consideration the new and all-encompassing project of the transnational prison industrial complex, and state violence, here and abroad, strikes me as remarkably short-sighted. A focus on sanctioned actions of “doing,” as opposed to real deconstruction and opposition to the structures that keep us oppressed, speaks to the worst kind of Black Horatio Alger complex. The omnipotent American myth that a “can-do attitude” is the ticket out of poverty, and in the religion of middle class activism, apparently racism and colonization too.

 

I hate to break it to those invested in imitating the strategies of those, who gave their actual lives and livelihoods to the causes they believed in, but outside of direct action and a reconstruction of the way money flows in this society, all else is theatre. Literally song and dance. And I’m not motherfucking singing for my freedom in 2013, fuck that. Call me what you want. But my people have been through too much.

I’m not here to, nor can I, give you a formula that can add up to who’s who. It’s far more complex than that. What the path toward true liberation will look like is beyond what is quantifiable. Using your work as a vehicle to demean others, who think differently, or the very community who is alleged to be being served by these sanctioned actions of “can-do activism” is a waste of time. And frankly, thinking about Martin, Malcolm, Medgar, Fred Hampton, Huey Newton, Patrice Lumumba, and all those who names we’ll never know;  people who gave up their literal lives for the cause, I find this kind of jockeying over whose “real” out here to be embarrassing, sad, and disrespectful to their memories. What Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, Wendell Allen, Justin Sipp, Rekia Boyd, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair,  Wharlest Jackson, a list too long to type need more than anything else is people who will NEVER FORGET they lived and how they died…

 

I love all my brothers and sisters in the struggle, even those don’t love me. Sometimes coalitions fall apart, but that does not mean the death of an idea. Not all of us are meant to run with the pack, and because rap quotes just soothe my soul…here it is…

 

 

Humans beings in a mob,

What’s a mob to a king?

What’s a king to a god?

What’s a god to a non-believer?

Who don’t believe in anything?

---No Church in the Wild

 

One Love,

Gypsy

(Government ID: Kristina Kay Robinson)

 

Black Cool...

VOTE

Street Dreams: Hip Hop is Dead and Twitter Killed It

At this point, the furor on twitter  over dream hampton"s tweet has quieted a bit ,at least ,on my TL. A million other bloggers have written about the "controversy ". Yet still, days later, all of it is still bothering me. So much so that I feel have to address it.

If you are lucky enough to have missed this whole debacle,what it boils down to is this, in the midst of a discussion about rap and social responsibility, and in response to a question comparing the lyrics of Jay-Z and Nas, dream said ,Stic from Dead Prez and Jay Electronica wrote much of Nas' Untitled (Nigger) album.The misogynistic fury that tweet unleashed was shocking, even to me, someone all too familiar with twitter and it's bully culture.

I find myself wondering, out of all the misogynistic rants my peers of both sexes have engaged in on Twitter, why can't I let this one go?

The answer to this question has many layers. The first one involves a little bit of conjecture. Nas and dream hampton were two people who had a profound influence on me as a young writer. Nas was the first person whose writing I tried to imitate and he made me want to rap. I wrote so many of them, but when i realized I couldn't spit, dream hampton made me realize all was not lost. Just like I wrote poetry and stories, I could write about the music I loved. Seeing a young woman, who was smart and loved Pac, was just what thirteen year old me needed. I admired dream so much because she was a young woman doing what I dreamed about. And her writing was beautiful. She wrote this piece for the love issue of a hip hop magazine that I kept taped to my mirror, from the time i read it in the late nineties, till Katrina washed it away in 2005. So that they are the two embroiled in this non-controversial controversy is but one of the reasons this has impacted me on such a deep level.

The rest of why this hurts so much is because I'm a black woman and a writer. I want to create new worlds and discuss the one I live in. I want to voice my opinion, in a beautiful way. That's the goal and I don't think I should have to be threatened because someone doesn't like what I have to say. Or have my name slandered, or people speculate over who I've slept with in order to assess my credibility.

If you don't believe dream that's your business, but this suggestion that she was somehow "wrong", or "out of line", or somehow brought threats on herself for discussing the authorship of an album is ridiculous, and smacks of a misogyny, I can no longer bear. Since when did saying something, spontaneous or pre-meditated, something raw, or something that made other people mad, and not giving a fuck about it , become wrong in the hip-hop world?

 Back in the day, being that I am a product of the cassette tape/CD era, one of my favorite things to do was open up the jacket of an album, read the lyrics and liner notes. If you ever did that than you know, rappers use co-writers all the time. Rappers also use ghostwriters for a myriad of reasons, writer's block, time constraints, etc. etc. The line between the two is a blurry one, and I don't know when everyone in rap music got so uniformed, so puritanical, or so naive.

Stic says they collaborated, he's listed in the credits. When you are putting down bars + bridges and choruses, what exactly do you boys think that means?

 Knee- jerk stupidity annoys me. I mean really.

After reading all the "you's a hoe", "dreams a liar and dick rider", threats of bodily harm, and just overall disrespect in the tweets of men and women, concerning a he-said, she-said between two people unknown to these tweeters... I said to myself , there has always been misogyny in hip-hop, but damn, when did it all become sooo misogynistic? So utterly vapid and shallow?

This shit with dream confirmed for me what a lot of us have known for awhile. The game has changed and the niggas that run it now, have fucked it up, real real good.

Hip hop is dead.

It ain't what it used to be or was supposed to be. Shit's gone too far and no one has the balls to stop it. Funny that Nas was dissed by a lot of people just a few years ago for this very same statement. I don't think I was quite there yet, but now...I see where Nastradamus was coming from. The culture of misogyny,stupidity, and dishonesty that envelops a lot of hip hop and the mentality of us, the people that consume it, right now is pretty disgusting.

What was a genuine art form and mode of expressing an outsider perspective is now just a record company cash cow, selling icy ghetto fantasies for white suburban youth.  Anytime you can lie about being a C.O., steal a nigga's identity, predicate his career on a total lie, and that's cool, it's no wonder these same niggas can't handle any discussions around the topic of authenticity. When all your heroes are people trying to sell you something, then know that most of what informs your identity is a fraud.

You're a vic.You've been bought, got, tricked, and flipped.
                                                                    

  ****
The kind of writing dream and others did about hip hop, like her article "Ice Ice Baby", which appeared in Village Voice in 96, has mostly disappeared . Today all anyone wants to do is be a part of an entourage. Today very few rappers will sit down for an honest conversation  Today rappers will run up in your face because of something you tweeted.

I have a three year old son. I can't wait for his generation or it may be even sooner, to come and Nirvana the current face of hip-hop. Make the formulaic flow and content as passe as Kurt Cobain made hair bands and stadium rock.

Right now, one of us is killed by the police every thirty-six hours, our right to vote is being trampled on, yet we are making writers, intellectuals, our prey. It pisses me off that we've degenerated to this place. My sincere prayer is that one day these young men will attack the power structure that incarcerates and murders them at disproportionate rates with the same ferocity that they attack a black woman, they perceive as out of pocket. Really this ordeal of who wrote the Nigger album ain't news, and maybe I should have worked on my novel's draft, or wrote this piece about Rekia Boyd, or Wendell Allen, or Chavis Carter. But I had to get this off my chest so that I can go on and write without fear.


Remember, a lot of us nerdy lovers are handy with the steel.
Never scared,
You can be hurt but not deterred....

Get free.

Love,

Gypsy

Because I'm a Nas fan, I remember Escobar...

Right Above It: 3DNATEE & Azealia Banks

It's official... all of the testosterone filled, homoerotic, terrain of Rapland, is being run by the same crime-families/labels, who dictate to their artists what music is.   I'm over it....really. It all sounds the same, has the same subject matter, same flow, most of which my man, Lil' B satirizes perfectly in his, "Obama Based God" track. When that dude bust out with that "superfragilisticexpialidocious, dump head is car, dump his body in the ocean..." My heart went pitter-patter, cause seriously that's how random it all is. Like my favorite, 3dnatee says, all  they rapping about, is "cash, swag, and ice" .

Meanwhile, the women of rap seem to be rocking entourageless and trying to make a name of their own, on their own. I have two favorites right now, 3dnatee and Azealia Banks. They couldn't be more different as artists, which I think is the strength of what they bring to the game. Azealia Banks is on her Harlem bird in Europe flow and NaTee keeps close to the earth, bringing the beauty, humor, and pain of growing up in New Orleans.

Let me tell you why I'm going hard for these two particular girls. They both speak to something  inside me. Something that is simultaneously new and old, meaning classic, about being a black girl growing up in the city. Specifically, the way you have to fend, defend, and fight for your damn self, yet motherfuckers act offended and surprised that you have something (articulate) to say about it all. Neither of these two women seem to scared to offend, or feel the need to stroke the egos of their male counterparts. Why should they? They are both as brash, vulgar when they want to be,  and supremely talented lyricists. Banks loves tongue twisting lyric to the borders of unintelligibly and 3dNatee comes on raw, no bullshit, delivering her lines, as we would say in the N.O., straight like that.

This isn't a comparison of the two women, because there is none. In a battle I'm a hometown kind of fan, but this is about appreciation. Right now, I am appreciating these young women for putting their voices out there.

Azealia caters to my imagination. I love all that genie witch mermaid shit she be talking. I was a little girl that listened to rap and danced to bounce music at parties, but still liked to play dress up, in my grandma's old clothes and lipstick, dreaming of a land far far away from where I was growing up.When I want to know how I might behave if suddenly I was in Europe, with all my ratchet down South ways, I listen to Banks spit about her new found love of the white boys pursuing her, and talk shit to all the boys back home, who can't believe her skinny black ass  is sitting up in Karl Lagerfield's house. 

When I want to reflect on where I been, and where I want to go, I listen to 3dnatee. She brings me to real life,  and you really can't ask for more from an artist. Honestly, I'm a bit in awe of Ms. NaTee, so wise beyond her twenty-four years. Not since Foxy's, Broken Silence, do I think, a girl has put down such a complete range of emotions and experiences on wax. If you been in through the places she visits in her songs, and even if you haven't, she will truly give you the chills. Plus make you laugh out loud with a kind of humor that could only come out of girl from New Orleans' mouth.

3dnatee released a some bars awhile back on the "Thuggish Ruggish Bone" beat that have stuck with me since I heard them, she said,

I spit the shit for the have nots
the chicks that sit in they stash spots
the dudes who pitch from they crack spots
won't leave to they move the last rock

I shivered...when I first heard that... literally. Cause while it ain't raps, I write stories too and that's who I want to put on the page, because we have a story too, and the lord knows  a lot of these rappers, and these so-called "urban" lit novels ain't telling it. I'm so grateful to a woman like 3dNatee for not being scared to be herself in a world that tells you, you gotta be everything but that.

There are a lot of people who say different, but you know what I think...

I think some people are about to get the shock of their lives...

Black girls are the wave, & we got next,

Bahlee that,


Love,

Gypsy


If you haven't  already, download Azealia's, Fantasea and 3dNatee's, The Coronation,
you won't be dissapointed.

A bunch of videos to watch <3 class="more" hr="hr">

3DNatee

Azealia Banks

A Pu$$y By Any Other Color Just Ain&apos;t as Sweet....

Okay...So, I'm going to step out on a limb and say the YMCMB mentality has officially gone too far. As a blackgirl, I know how to take one on the chin. You know, how to get my personhood degraded on the daily...how to hear that I'm too loud,too fat, too ugly, too whorish, not supportive, too dependent, too independent, the list goes on and on. And while many of theses messages are pumped from the mainstream media, the biggest pimps of this shit are a bunch of ain't-shit black men, who, now in their list of beefs with me, include the fact that my pussy is the wrong color.

That's right ladies. All this time you thought, at least, our vaginas were good enough. But no, as these ain't shit men move about the world and get exposed, and sometimes rich, the pinker the pussy the better. And for all you brown girls whose inner labia doesn't match the  "it's a girl" balloons" in the neo-natal ward, these ain't shit men now have a new bone to pick.

 Thank the arbiter and biggest waste of genius walking the face of the earth, DWAYNE CARTER, for the further advancement of this warped mentality. Lil' Wayne's career tells the classic tale of self-hate. I don't think anyone can dispute that his black-girl disses have increased with with each successive album or mixtape. It went from what's up redbone, what's up caramel, to beautiful black women, bet that bitch look better red, to his bomb ass pussy from a white lady, to now the declaration that his weed is purple like, you guessed it, a black girl's pussy.

Really?

Now, Lil'Wayne certainly didn't invent the phenomenon of black men, who attain a certain level of success, choosing non-black women. But let's just say, he fetishized it for a brand new generation. And his own rags to riches story means now it's not just Tiger Woods, who wants an Elin, it's the nigga in the club drinking Peach Ciroc too. And it ain't just Lil' Wayne, it's a whole bunch of ignorant motherfuckers, who think  dating non-black women makes them special. I guess in this constant quest to outdo one another, and have that exclusive thing that your boys don't, means a woman from outside the community.

Let me be clear, I'm not opposed to interracial love,dating, or fucking. I'm a big advocate of do what the fuck you want in life, but I'm also willing to call a spade a spade and coon-shouting what it is.  And much of this ain't about love or sex. It's about validation and self-esteem and the sad fact that when a lot of black men look at us, they see something they view as lesser in purity and value.

Like take Lil'Wayne's girl, this white girl, whose occupation before Wayne was chicken-wing waitress. If she was black, she would have been every gold-digger in the book for trying to holler. And can't nobody convince me for a nano-second, she would date Dwayne Carter Jr. from Hollygrove with the braids and messed up grill. But he knows she wouldn't and that's exactly the point. She, like for so many of these boys, is a visual reminder that they are not who they used to be. Or, at least, when the world sees them with their Dhea, people will know they are on their way...

I hope one day black men can pick their manhood up and define it and their boss status on the basis of something other than the fact that they no longer have to date us.

As for me,
 I love my pussy,
my future and my past,
I love my attitude,
and my swag...

White boys like it too...
Now isn't that ironic?



Runtelldat,

Love,

Gypsy



P.S. Where is David Banner

Because A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words...

No Justice No Peace...














































 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

An Azalea/Azaelia By Any Other Name Smells as Sweet?

So I been loving on Azaelia Banks for a little while now. I love that vulgar lil' Young Rapunzel. American born black chick rocking the mic all over Europe, while just as in the days of Josephine Baker, Amerikkka ain't quite ready for her yet. I ain't been feeling the new white girl on the block, Iggy Azaelea, not quite as much. If any body missed Azaelia's beef  with Iggy over her "runaway slave master" comment in her rap, it's an interesting one to consider.

Far more interesting, in terms of its implications about the current culture of hip-hop, than the "to sing or not to sing" battle between Drake and Common. Some true hip-hop discourse about rap music charting its course and the battle for its soul, is being waged by these chicks, if you ask me.

T.I. who is executive-producing Iggy's album recently took to the airwaves to respond to Banks' objections to Iggy and defend her honor. Banks got on Twitter and summed up my thoughts regarding T.I.  perfectly...corny. It's a real long way from trappin' to yappin and nobody is scared anymore.

Before I get called an angry, bitter, black bitch for backing my girl Azaelia's comments, let me say this. Let the lil' girl get her money if people wish to consume. She has an " interesting" look, by interesting I mean, it;s the way black girls and chola girls been rockin' but it is visually provacative on a white body...I guess. So, whoever wants to ride with a white girl playing dress-up can. I'm just not and call me what you will.

If you want me to accept that a white girl from a small coastal town in Austrailia, practicing in the mirror, trying to sound like me, while staring at a Tupac poster till she got it down pat, is the "new classic", as she is referring to herself, I wont.

Fuck that.

And a nigga like Tip can condescend all he wants, he may be fooling some with that annoying ass Father Knows Best act, but not me. I say that shit out of love believe me, because nobody was a bigger fan from I'm Serious to Paper Trail . But I keep it real for whatever that's worth in an age of digitally constructed realities. Shitting on a black girl that Europe is eating up for her wordplay, while hyping this YouTube sensation, this trick-poodle, with the voice and body of a black girl and the packaging of Pam Anderson, is I would say real real fake.

It seems most rap niggas are too pussy to call this type of shit out or too ignorant to care. But I do because hip-hop and black girls are important to me. Plus, I will always love a saucy bitch over one that just sits and nods, anyday no matter what color she is!

And if that's beef then...

Tell your crew don't front...I'm a hoodlum nigga ....
You know you were too once...


Love,

Gypsy

Check out the divinely vulgar "212" by Azaelia Banks below, as well as, "D.R.U.G.S". by Iggy Azalea for the lyric that started the beef....




"Come on T.I.... N***** is not scared of u and whatever sh*t u got to say on some radio show," ---> Tweets by Azaelia...LOL..love a bitch that ain't scary...





I concur.