This is a really odd post, it starts as a nice, fluffy love letter to an album I’m completely loving, and at the end goes completely off the rails and becomes a tirade.
I would say, read the warm, fluffy part, and leave the tirade alone. Especially if you know nothing about the Nate Parker controversy, or better yet care nothing for it.
I’ll give you ample warning when to stop reading.
Not sure where it came from, but it came.
My ire, and disgust with the media.
But it came.
And I thought it was honest, not necessarily right, but it was honest and deserved its say. So I left it.
You have been warned.
I think what Nate Parker is doing with BIRTH OF A NATION, a hundred years after DW Griffith’s love song to racism by the same title, is nothing short of inspired. The audacity of it, the brilliance, the balls of it, Something Percival Everett does wonderfully in literature, overturning assumptions, and re-appropriating those parts of our shared consciousness, our story, that we have relegated too long… to the worst angels of our nature.
I can’t wait to see the movie when it breaks on wide release. It sounds completely on my page. However I haven’t seen the movie so the jury’s out, but I have listened to the soundtrack, and… I LOVE IT!!!!
LOVE IT!!!
To listen to this one album was reason enough to sign up for Spotify.
And speaking of Spotify, how did I get involved with it?
Well I’m not at all a social media type. But I like things that enrich us and after a month of using Spotify I have to say… I’m feeling enriched.
This is going to sound hyperbolic. And maybe it is. I’m too close, I can’t say. I can only say I’m listening to THE BIRTH OF A NATION as I write this and I’m feeling… thankful.
I think as we get older, and side-tracked by adult concerns, one thing that falls by the wayside, is our time to enjoy and follow and discover music. And I think that moving away from that discovery of new sounds, new voices, new visions, new wonders to buoy our souls, is when we begin to die,
I know, extreme.
But bear with me.
What if the world began with a song, and will end with one.
What if all we are is notes, in some unfathomable composition.
That would mean that what we feed on more than food is music. And it would mean what we starve for lack of, more than food, is music.
The lack of it, the relinquishing of it, perhaps just a little death.
A little death we let wedge its tip into our hearts.
And widen, till everything we are… escapes.
So I’m finding SPOTIFY, with its easy ability to allow me to find and listen to this music I would otherwise not find or find time for…I’m finding it, in my emotional state of listening to THE BIRTH OF A NATION, I’m finding it… of great value.
That said MP3 is great for sampling music, and SPOTIFY is great for introducing me to music, but great music deserves to be listened to on the highest quality CD you can find. I’ve spent a month on SPOTIFY and I have bought easily a couple hundred dollars in CDs.
I’d like to buy BIRTH OF A NATION but unfortunately it is not yet available on CD. But when it is, it’s going on constant rotation in my portable cd player.
It is that good.
“When they say make America great again, they mean make us all slaves again.”— WAR Nas
“No matter if you’re red, white, black, if you want freedom, then we’re all like Nat!”— WAR Nas
OKAY STOP READING HERE!!!! Beyond this place, like the old maps once said… “There be Dragons!” I’m bat guano ranting in the next section, and it goes strange quickly, so if strange is not your friend, stop reading NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh and if you have a problem with Nate Parker, and are part of this new spate of using the media to lynch Black Men before trial, be it Bill Cosby or Nate Parker, or really going back 20 years to OJ Simpson, eff you and the horse you rode in on.
“Oh, but they are guilty, they did this, they did that.”
Then let a court prove it. Not the news, not talk shows, not soap boxes.
I don’t stand with lynch mobs, whether you wear a white hood and a shotgun, or a TV camera and a microphone.
Because for a lynch mob it’s never about innocence or guilt, it’s about creating an atmosphere of fear and horror and distrust, so they can sell a message, usually to keep a certain demographic in line.
Me, I’m not the message buying type. In a Nation where less than a hundred years ago, thousands of Black men (many of them war heroes) were lynched by ‘god fearing’ ‘people’ I’ll side with Black ‘villains’ before I side with a biased lynch mob media, everyday of the week, and twice on Sunday.
If they are guilty try them in the courts. Do not effing try them on your TV program, or radio show, or ‘news’ show, or at the water cooler, or on your lynching scaffold.
Until you’ve done the good of a Bill Cosby, or a Nate Parker, or even an OJ Simpson; don’t presume to judge their evil. That’s for a court room… your soul is not sinless enough for the task.
I say again…
Your soul… Christian, or Muslim, or Jew, or Hindu… is not sinless enough for the task.
I think any Presidential candidate you can name has done more evil than all three of those men combined. The pursuit of power is a bloody road, and the achieving of it even more so.
You kill one person (allegedly) they call you what, OJ? 🙂 You kill thousands of people, they call you Reagan or Bush.
Save your hate for mass murderers, but for other flawed men, and for yourself, pray to be better.
That is the justice of honest men, who are wise enough to know, there… but for the grace of God… go I.
Woah… that came out of nowhere.
But hey, that’s what you can expect in a nation that is honestly considering Trump for the highest office in the land. Derision. :).
God keep you all from rage, and keep you all from harm, and most of all god keep you from the folly of thinking you are bloody better than the poor slobs the media chooses to lynch today.
Amen.
If you like this crazy post, or just like the blog, support by checking out and purchasing the following cool and recommended items!
Sylvania SDVD7029 7″ Portable DVD Player-Swivel Screen (Certified Refurbished)
Kids these days, in this age of MP3s and Itunes and Spotify have no idea what CDs are, or how good they can sound. For $40 you can give them the gift of not only a portable CD player, but a portable DVD player.
But it’s as the former, a portable CD player, that currently interests us. In addition to the portable player you want to get them a couple CDs to play on it, and I recommend the following two:
It Follows (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Sinister (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Azend Group Corp BDP-M1061 Maxmade Portable 10-Inch Blu-Ray DISC/DVD Player (Black)
Sony S1500RF Multi System Region Free Blu-Ray Disc DVD Player
MURDER AT CAPE THREE POINTS (A DARKO DAWSON Mystery)- Kwi Quartey’s Ghana based mystery is a welcome change from the Swedish and Norwegian Noir that’s arguably over saturated the American market.
Heroic Times 