Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Freestyle Life

The Art of Freestyle in Hip Hop culture involves putting bars together on the fly. No rehearsal, no premeditation. The application of this skill has shifted a little, but that is more a product of the mainstream machine, rather than the art form itself. If only I had the musical inclination to place random thoughts into rhyme, I could probably spit a hot 16 myself. My brain splits into many alternate tangents at any given moment. I gather a particle of reality, then begin to weave my own, adding dialogue and characters as we see fit. Unfortunately, this process isn't as elegant or deliberate as I make it sound.

What's funny, is that 90% of the time, these alternate tangents are not even an improvement on my current reality. Reminds me of a movie I saw not too long ago, called Danika. The main character, Danika-played by Marisa Tomei would have these precognitive dreams that would serve no purpose besides increasing her paranoia for the safety of her children, and the fidelity of her husband-who she was still trying to trust again after he had an affair with the Nanny. Her disturbia led her family into utter disaster-till the end of movie. Turns out, everything you had witnessed for the past hour and a half was fantasy, created in the head of a bag lady, homeless, with all of her possessions inside of a shopping cart.

The thought that someone could suffer through such a harsh reality, and not even gain escape through fantasy was a bit haunting to me.  Now obviously, by virtue of me being able to create this blog automatically means I'm doing a damn slight better than Danika, but I can't help but draw some similarities. No matter where my head takes us, no matter who the players are, the results seem to parallel-sometimes even worsen. Makes me wonder if  "real" even exist. Maybe we all just make up our own reality, on the fly. Like a Freestyle.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Music Monday Time Machine Vol. 2

I ain't got no time top play witcha / I'm Phonte, international stage ripper - done -
made friends and made figgas while you stuck on the front porch mad like you fixin' to shave Mistah
That's reality, so color me purple / My name in history, nigga thats what I work for
Better keep it moving like the laws of inertia before these Carolina boys come hurt cha
better tellem bout it...

Phonte, Rapper Big Pooh, and 9th Wonder together form the group Little Brother. This track, "Watch Me" is one of my favorite LB tracks, it was from their 2nd studio album, The Minstrel Show. A very special friend of mine frequently recites quotes from the movie The Color Purple, so that particular line stuck out when posting this. As the title suggest, this is the second posting in which I hope to be a series. To carry on the tradition of the 1st MMTM submission, I will attach some brief musings that I associate with the song.


This was bad...
It took about 15 minutes on average to get from my residence to my place of work. I woke up after about 3 hours of sleep at 3:49 AM and needed to be at work by 4 AM to complete my 10 hour day. I was also on strike #2.5 for prior late infractions I earned within that same week. Obviously, the sum of this equation =  fucked, doesn't take a mathematician to figure that out. Now normally, this is the part where I begin to build crescendo before arriving at some grand finale of pain and fuckery. Well, let me spare you mundane details and skip to the back of the book-I definitely was late for work-because I crashed my car. (sound familiar?) My car smoked, wouldn't start, but my music still continued to blast through the speakers. I let Watch Me finish, even the brief dialog between the wiggers at the end of the track, then stepped out of the car to curse the heavens for not giving me the common sense to replace my tires which were as bald as Charles Barkley's head at the time. Not like it was my fault. Good job me.

This has a good ending...
You have to excuse the snippage of my previous Tale of Tracy, but I was rather anxious to entertain you with a more fonder memory. Me, and Mia were in rare(er) form, because it seemed every sentence, whether declarative or interrogative somehow arrived at a nasty arguement. To a bystander I imagine it would have been quite remarkable to watch. Me "hey, were you gonna fix anything today, or were me, you, and the kids doing pizza AGAIN?" Her "how about you fuckin goto work, and come the fuck home to a dirty fuckin house and see how much you fuckin feel like cookin!!!" Me "........."

I probably could've started a disucssion about Captain Planet and Deer Park Water that would have also been gunned down in a haze of cuss words like Alonzo at the end of Training Day. To minimize the carnage, I decided to exercise my right to remain silent, word to Chappelle. To help combat the awkward silence, Mia reached down to the audio controls to interject some music into our 2 door debate box on wheels. Our car had a 12 disc changer, with roughly 10 of these featuring music that she preferred to ride to. 1 of the remaining 2 being the same LB CD that kept me company that faithful day I wrecked my Ford. To my surprise, she quickly cycled the changer all the way up CD 11. I was shocked, didn't think she dug LB. She then rapidly tapped forward till she reached track 13, Watch Me. She did this while barely taking her eyes off the road, like she had done it 100x's. I looked at her with my seldomly used "pleasantly surprised face" which she felt, but never directly acknowledged. She glanced over briefly and gave me a half a smirk, ever so slightly as to say "yeah, you didn't know I liked this song, there's alot you don't know about me that you should probably find out, BUT, I'm still pissed at you. So just lets just not say shit and let this song ride out" It was the best conversation we had all day.