Bambu-The Queen is Dead-Video

Congratulats to Bam, Cicharon Adventure, and Oishi Media!
(Peep my cameo at 1:32!)

"Listen, I'd rather have brothers call you queen than bitch/ but if the intent behind it is motivated by sex/ then genuine it's probably not/ so that's why I said the Queen is Dead."

~Bambu

Check out Bambu: http://www.bambu.la/

Twelve-year-old Ian Hamrick on his gruesome death in M.I.A.'s 'Born Free' video

From: LA Times Music Blog

“M.I.A. wanted to show people what an ethnic cleansing looked like,” Hamrick said in a phone interview Thursday. “She wanted to show that it can happen in any country, not just a place like Iraq. Just because this is America doesn’t mean horrible things don’t happen here.”

Read more on HERE.

Sade vs. Beyoncè on Motherhood

This week Sade and Beyoncè both released videos portraying themselves as housewives doing what I hate to call, “women’s work.” In full 50s pinup girl regalia, Beyoncè asks, “Why don’t you love me, when I make me so damn easy to love?” While washing windows, attempting a burnt dinner, and in one scene, sloppily downing a martini, she sings a song of a mother who has perhaps given too much of herself. Sade, brings a more nostalgic feeling to mother’s work, singing an ode to fathers as she happily washes dishes dressed in soft, sexy silk. I wish I could feel like that when I’m faced with a sink full of dishes.

For the most part, roles for mothers within the household haven’t changed much since the 50s. When women have children, it is usually she who is stuck with the housework and childcare. For mothers, there are very few other options and even the most feminist of us find ourselves falling into these traditional roles. French author Stendahl once wrote, “All geniuses born women are lost to the public good.” I can’t tell you how many countless mothers have told me that they’ve given up writing, singing, painting, dancing, higher education, or other passions in order to keep their homes and raise their children. I’ve spent years now telling myself that I’ll finish [fill in the blank with abandoned creative endeavor] after I wash the dishes, or after I fold the laundry, or after the bathroom is clean. Or better yet, I’ll pick up where I left off next year when my daughter is in school full time. However disappointed, most mothers I know who have put their ambitions on the sidelines or even retired them completely seem to come to the conclusion that they have made the right choice for their children. And so it goes. We lose a genius. Having to make these choices between children and creativity or children and career is not much different than having to make a choice between paying rent and eating. They are not really choices. More so, it is a lack of choices. And we are constantly asking our women to make this choice.

 

 With mother’s day on the horizon, I have to say my feelings are more Beyoncè than Sade. And I don’t think I’m alone either. I know few mothers who smile upon a pile of dishes or do laundry with such dreamy looks in their eyes. Many mothers I know are resentful and angry about what they’ve given up for motherhood, turning their rage against the only logical person they know to blame: their men. I am not impervious to this unproductive thinking. However, we, as mothers, can’t wait for some miracle Netherlands-like legislation to pass that will pay us for our labors of love, nor can we wait for our men do their fair share, but we can stop telling ourselves that our dreams are not important. Writer and feminist Clarissa Pinkola Estès tells us that art was not meant to be created in stolen moments only and we must love our creative lives more than cooperating with our own oppression. Part of the reason we’ve given up so much is because we convince ourselves that our passions and ideas are not worthy enough to see through to fruition. We kill our ideas before they get a chance to breath. We develop no concrete method to hold ourselves accountable to our artistic progress and projects mysteriously disintegrate. But if we put ourselves at the helm of our own destiny, there can be no one else to blame. Then maybe we might find ourselves happy to do the dishes! This doesn’t, however, mean that the men are off the hook. This mother’s day, don’t stop at praising Mama’s sacrifices with flowers and candy, make a commitment to support her dreams so she doesn’t have to sacrifice so much, because chances are, she has.

Vai, vai, vai, vai, amar

O amor só é bom se doer
Pergunte pro seu Orixá
O amor só é bom se doer
Vai, vai, vai, vai, amar
Vai, vai, vai, sofrer
Vai, vai, vai, vai, chorar
Vai, vai, vai, dizer
Que eu não sou ninguém de ir
Em conversa de esquecer
A tristeza de um amor que passou
Não, eu só vou se for pra ver
Uma estrela aparecer
Na manhã de um novo amor

Born Free- M.I.A. 's New Video

When Erykah Badu took her historic walk to the grassy knoll buck naked, much of America agreed that it was an act of obscenity. Though her method might have been shocking to some, it is undeniable  that she comes with intent and purpose. Her message: Individualism is not rewarded. It is assasinated. With her new video looping continuously on her website, like Badu's "Window Seat," M.I.A. shows us the arbitrary nature of discrimination using graphic imagery and now finds herself caught in the crosshairs. She tapped Romain Gavras to direct, son of filmmaker Costa Gavras. Not a lightweight choice by any measure.

Is this video shocking? Yes. It is violent? Yes. Will she sell more records because of it? Maybe. Does it make her message any less poignant? I think not.

What do you think?

river

rocky rivera live

rocky rivera rockin' the joint at el cid's.
check out her blog guerilla busfare here.
purchase her cd here.

RIP Victor Pantoja

Some of the last footage of Victor rehearsing for the Azteca reunion.



We will miss you Pops!

cactus tree by joni mitchell

new badu

counting down to her 3.30.2010AD release date,which she dubs 333, of new amerykah pt 2 : return of the ankh, ms. badu promises to tease us with leaks at 3:33 central time until her album drops. today ms. badu offers us her self directed video "jump in the air and stay there" feat. bilal and lil wayne via her "erykahdiloscope". click here to see the video.

If you missed the previous leak, here is "Window Seat."

manong & manang

Kalinga, Philippines 2001

8.5x11  

c-print

danum 

salidummay

RIP Dilla

dwele ft. the suite for ma dukes orchestra "angel"

i love all this footage cuz you know that some of these musicians are used to playing classical music and don't listen to hip hop, but you can see them doing the obligatory hip hop head nod.

Open Your Heart by Mia Doi Todd

dir Michel Gondry
This video is truly a work of art.

i'm a soldier of love video

dopeness-lasso and all!

Rocky Rivera Album Release Party

Congratulations to Rocky!

If you haven't seen the video yet, you are hella late.

Download the MRSHMLO Rmx by 6Fingers at the Smoking Section
Check out Rocky's Blog, Guerilla Busfare.

David Byrne & Fatboy Slim’s Imelda Marcos Tribute Album

From: Prometheus Brown

When I first heard about this project a month ago, I thought to myself, either David Byrne and Fatboy Slim don’t know or don’t care that Imelda Marcos was essentially a co-dictator of a third world country who suffered greatly under her and her husband Ferdinand Marcos’ regime. That her tens of thousands of shoes, a symbol of audacious glamour and wealth to hipsters like them, is for us Filipinos (and most normal human beings) a symbol of the poverty and repression their wealth was built upon. I didn’t want to lash out against a project I knew little about, so I waited to hear and see more.

Then this slideshow video promoting the album dropped, with quotes from David Byrne himself as he narrates an even more sugarcoated story than I could’ve imagined. It opens with a shot of young beauty-queen Imelda, followed with some revisionist history claiming that she was “forced to flee the Philippines” as if she were the victim. Then something about being fascinated with “the needs that drive powerful people” and how her story resonates and how she loved going to dance clubs in New York. All while her people starved and got jailed, tortured or killed for trying to do something about it. The slideshow doesn’t include that last part, of course.
(Read more.)

Rain Dance- Herbie Hancock

in memory of aaliyah jan 16, 1979 - august 25, 2001

i was 14 when aaliyah came out with "back & forth". we were about the same age. singing about things that a 14-year-old shouldn't be singing about on her debut album, "age ain't nothing but a number", i thought i was grown listening her. the day she died i was waitressing at a pizza joint called giorgio's on clement street (one of the best pizza joints in frisco). i listened to "back and forth" on the way home from work and cried.

change is gonna come...

my christmas sentiments exactly....