Joy & #JusticePourNahel & the NEXT 50 Years of Hip Hop & RIP Alan Arkin

 

featured title ^^  from Baldwin Books in New Orleans, where Nikole Hannah Jones held her talk last year after Essence Festival wouldn't host her (which has some of us asking about corporate event ownership change of leadership as right now, especially, that literally makes no sense)

(TW -- teenage death at the hands of police)

Just one more warning that if we don’t contain authoritarianism in the States that creates & sustains the permission structure for white nationalist terrorist violence – under color of state authority, no less – to expand globally

I don't know about you, but I didn't know the protests had been going on for five days

I didn't know they had spilled into Lausanne

and I didn't know Elon was doing the same thing to limit public information about the protests (eta: NOT "riots" -- h/t Meh-zuzah) and their instigating cause and their duration and the police misinformation (and their union's demands of the French government to "crack down") -- just like he affected info flow on the platform during the last elections in Turkey

This is but one set of reasons hip hop remains both relevant and necessary 50 years after its birth in the Boogie Down

as well as a reason why you don't want billionaires in charge of too many things (and why we really don't need any more in the first place, just like AOC reminded us)

... as well as a reminder in the wake of Joy Reid’s interview with Fab Five Freddy and the prophet KRS-One just yesterday that the urgencies that drove the proliferation of hip hop are just as salient now as they were 50 years ago when Chuck D proclaimed hip hop “Black America’s CNN”

And one more  - to paraphrase KRS  – that the culture is bigger than anything else

 

“You need a little clarity?  Check the similarity” – KRS-One

Let's shift our attention to our neighbors up north

and go back in time and start digging through our collections

(I think I'm going to have to make a few lists)