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...when a big-jowled Dixiecrat Senator leans into the microphones to ask, mock-incredulous: 'Now, Mr. Costello, isn't it in fact the case that you once cowrote and also authored a book published under the title Significant Wrap-per, in which you argued that Mr. Brown's habit of saying "Huh" and "Sm…

Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it's not depression, not even discomfort; it's a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of…

[...] The thing is [...]: what if the artists are not influencing or informing, but rather just reflecting their audience, holding up the mirror their world can see itself as world in? [...]

... Well except most of it turned out to be lame hype, these shivered images we'd all formed reading about rap and posses, listening to Ice T's war raps, Public Enemy's prolegomena to any future uprising. [...]

[...] It's way too easy for the pale to hurry across the deck, past the thick, light-wobbling window, and not once hear rap as anything but the weird anthemic march of one Other'd nation, marginalized and yet trapped in our own metropolitan center, a nation that cannot secede and may not assimilate…