Doug
Hakki Alacakaptan wrote:
>Rapper posturing turned out to be as fake as it looked: Rappers are "bad"
>only as long as it sells.
>
>Hakki
>--------------------------------------------
>'Draft me!'
>
>Once they wanted to 'fight the power'. Now they want to fight for their
>country. Whatever happened to US rappers, asks Dorian Lynskey
>
>Tuesday January 22, 2002
>The Guardian
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/story/0,3604,637224,00.html
>
>(...)
>Last month Canibus, a once hotly tipped MC whose debut album was produced by
>Wyclef Jean, released a song called Draft Me. Wholeheartedly supporting the
>war in Afghanistan, he urged, "Draft me! I wanna fight for my country/ Jump
>in a humvee and murder those monkeys!/ Draft me! I'm too dedicated to fail/
>Justice must prevail, justice must prevail!"
>(...)
>Opposing viewpoints have been surprisingly thin on the ground from a genre
>that once produced such protest anthems as Public Enemy's Fight the Power
>and NWA's Fuck tha Police. In recent months several commentators have
>suggested that African Americans have good reason to resist the tidal wave
>of patriotism that is sweeping the country, citing Muhammad Ali's famous
>explanation for his refusal to fight in Vietnam: "No Vietcong ever called me
>a n-word." While such undercurrents certainly exist, they are as yet
>virtually inaudible in the music that one would have thought should be their
>natural platform.
>(...)