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... Is it real freedom, though: a world where Chuck D. can serenade his Uzi in art exactly because in the S. Bronx 'Uzi's' such a perfect metonym for irresistible force? For all the exciting formal innovations and transformations of rap, what's finally, for us, its most affecting quality is that …

[...] He had served only one day when he was told that an anonymous 'well-dressed Negro' had paid the $178 fine. King protested; he wanted to stay jailed. The Albany police chief refused, explaining that since King's fine had now been paid, it would be illegal to keep him behind bars. The 'well-dre…

[...] it's quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today. 'Real' (viz. academic) U.S. poetry, a world no less insular than rap, no less strange or stringent about vocab, manner, and the contexts it works off, has today become so inbred and (against its professed wishes)…

Rap, under close scrutiny, becomes 'critic-heavy'—a unique pop opportunity for the application of Marxist & poststructural principles to the cultural production, not just reception, of texts, lyrics, art [...]. Rap is the self-conscious–self-consciousness loop academic feminists and deconstruct…

A PLEA FROM D.

Bette Midler's intuition—which I share—is that there's some fundamental difference between: (1) pirating a piece of music and its attendant pavlovs for artistic reasons; and (2) doing so, as Ford seems to, as part of a cold, calculated effort to increase sales of a product. Well, …