This is a repost from my Yahoo! 360 blog. There is a picture for this entry. Follow the link to see it.

Wednesday January 18, 2006

A few months ago I saw a bike locked up to a signpost in my neighborhood. This bike stood out from most bikes – It was bright and pink and it had beads hanging all over a big basket attached to the front. Overall it was a little girly for my taste, but I couldn’t help but appreciate the magnificence. Somebody must have been very happy to get a new toy like that. As soon as I saw the bike, a particular friend of mine popped into my head. I knew that it was imperative that I show it to her because she would love to see it and, as a fellow bike rider, would appreciate the significance that such a bike would have in its owner’s life. Just to explain it to all the non bikers – a new bike can make any day of the year feel like Christmas (the gift/Santa part anyway) even if you’re a dedicated Buddhist with no legs. Now combine the normal new-bike-happiness with the happiness added by the fact that this bike was obviously customized and/or picked out specifically to fit the tastes and personality of the owner, and you have one happy biker. In this day and age there is much talk about jealousy and “haters” (I haven’t seen much evidence that this is as widespread a problem as Puffy says it is, but that’s another post), but I decided to put my “hater” ways aside and be happy for the faceless stranger who had gained the happiness of a new bike.

Now fast forward. Every time my friend happened to be in the area, the bike would slip my mind until the next time that I saw it while she wasn’t around. I brushed it off because I figured that eventually I would get to show it to her, I was in no rush. I should’ve been. One day I noticed that the front wheel was gone. Fast forward. The back wheel was gone. After that, every time I passed the bike, instead of sharing in a stranger’s happiness, I would think about what a shame it is that it’s so hard for someone to keep something nice. Yesterday I got a new camera and the first thing I did after getting home was go out to get a picture of that bike. I guess the cake needed a little icing. Last night I found that the handle bars were gone along with the attached basket and the beads that had been hanging from it were in a pile on the sidewalk. I never got to show my friend the bike. (Never put off until tomorrow what . . .)

Now, so far I’ve been writing with a pretty facetious tone, but damn! I watched this bike get transformed from what must have been someone’s dream bike to a frame and a pile of beads – piece by piece. I wish I had a before picture so I could convey how dramatic the transformation was. And the worst thing about it is that if I had paused to think about it, I would have seen this coming the first time I set eyes on the bike. That’s the worst thing about this because it’s not an isolated set of incidents. New things exposed to the public just don’t last. It’s not because of normal wear and tear, it’s because people purposely break them, steal them, or otherwise misuse and mistreat them. I like to think that people are generally good, but what use does that do when it’s the deviants from the average whose actions affect us the most?

This is reposted from my Yahoo! 360 blog.

Tuesday January 10, 2006

So I’ve been considering starting a new blog for a while now, and here it finally is. The purpose was to write down my random thoughts on random things, not really to write about myself or my life. The problem is now that I’m sitting at the keyboard, there are no random thoughts. Randomness can be so inconvinient at times. It never happens when I plan for it to.

Well, since I can’t count on the unpredictable , I’m going to pick a subject that I had a heated discussion about a few weeks ago. I post regularly on a message board for musicians (and music related people). A few weeks ago somebody posted an article about a studio owner who was shot and robbed by some guys who initially gained his confidence by posing as rappers and prospective clients. You lose ten points if you can’t guess what happened next. A bunch of people posted some ignorant ass responses, things like “that’s why I never work with rappers.” A long time ago somebody told me “choose your battles” and I try very hard to live by those words because they make sense. Why fight a battle you can’t win or if winning isn’t worth what it takes to fight? I knew it wasn’t a battle I was going to win, but as its so close to home, I had to jump in to let those people know that that was some dumb shit to say. Of course then a long back and forth followed with more ignorant comments and in vain responses to them. I had a few backers along the way, but I think most of the people who were smart enough to understand what was wrong with what people were saying were also smart enough not to waste time on that conversation. I’m not going to rehash the whole thing, but if you’re really interested in reading it, here it is.

So from that argument I realized two things that I already know. (What? Sometimes you need to be reminded of what you know)

1 – Hip hop is seriously misrepresented in mainstream media

2 – A lot of people don’t know that

Let’s take a very rough trip back through hip-hop history. Hip-hop music started out as a party thing – fun and good times. Hip Hop music evolved and developed new species. there were different sounds and different subjects. Some hip hop was still about parties, some was political and social commentary, some expressed racial pride, some was about love and relationships. Most of it wasn’t very big with the “mainstream.” In the 80s and early 90s, it definitely seemed that hip-hop was for black folks and rock was for white folks. At some point that changed. Back then, the jewish kid who used to lend me Ice Cube CDs was an oddity, today he would be the norm. It seems that around the same time that that change was happening, the whole “Gangsta Rap” thing was getting big. I remember at first the radio was loving it, but then some of the “leaders of the black community” (Maybe I’ll explain the quotes in another post sometime) started getting upset and making noise about the negativity they were hearing on FM frequencies. I remember when WBLS in NY decided that they were boycotting gangster rap.

I guess that despite (or maybe because of) the controversy and protests, gangster rap sold well. Record companies decided it was profitable and media companies agreed. Today, when you hear rap on the radio, chances are its about how hard someone is, how much ass someone gets and/or how much money someone has. That is what a large chunk of the population believes hip-hop is about. Nowadays if you listen to the radio and watch TV, you rarely hear uplifting words or social commentary or anything substantial coming from a rappers mouth. If Sony and ClearChannel and all these other corporations are right, hip-hop is a culture of violence, excess, negativity, and nothing more. But what happened to the diversity that used to be there? Did the rappers who had something to say beyond these three categories suddenly stop talking?

I’m going to end this here and leave the (probably 1 or 2) people who read this with that question along with the answer’s rmifications to think about. Also, I’m tired of typing.