Monday, January 22, 2007

Wynton on Chainsaw

No, my ears weren't deceiving me; in fact, Wynton Marsalis' From The Plantation To The Penitentiary is even worse than I thought. If I didn't know better, I'd think it was a contract breaker.

Sample lyric from WM: "I see women dragging the souls of their womb-vanquished dreams never to be.” Wha?

Another ripe one: “The rap game started out critiquing/now it’s all about killing and freaking.”

What is most disturbing, though, is his premise that black Americans (read under-educated black Americans) have moved directly from white-imposed slavery to self-imposed slavery — or as Marsalis puts it "from yassa, boss, to ghetto minstrelsy." Talk about blowing off the entire black working class!

And, if that's not enough, he writes about America's obsession with "expensive fluff" in a song he calls "Supercapitalism." Now, that's one song we'll never hear on a Movado watch commercial.

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