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Bad Space Comics: The Suit

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Okay here's my obligatory post about Tumblr users and their ignorance of rap, as a (white) fan of rap:

Saying "Not all rap music is about violence, here are alternatives" is not helpful, because the violent music ALSO has meaning.

When Biggie Smalls postures about his gang connections and packing heat, he isn't doing it because wow violence is so edgy, it's a powerful statement. Youth in urban areas where gang activity is heavy are often treated as lesser than by default, especially compared to black people the same age from a wealthy background. There's a reason that the "wholesome and respectable" black-lead entertainment of that era was stuff like the Cosby Show, with doctor-lawyer parents, or Family Matters, with a cop dad. There's a reason why the big joke of Fresh Prince is someone with a more unstable upbringing moving in with one of these model black sitcom families.

Standing up and saying yeah, I came from the mean streets, I was molded by this violence and yes, I did what I had to do to survive in a world that refuses to acknowledge my existence as meaningful or worthy of protection. I protected myself, I made my own way, and fuck anybody who tries to stand in the way of that.

Refusing to demonize that environment and wearing it like armor in a way that protects from the authority that wants you to see them as sub humans incapable of only violence and hatred, and saying HEY. I'm here, I lived this, and there is love and there is pain and there is ART in this.

That is powerful. That is the essence of gangster rap.

It isn't about hurting people for fun, it's about holding a mirror up to a society that does the hurting and then calls you a monster for what it's made you. Its about validating the experiences of the disenfranchised and biting back at authority. It's about turning a pain that the world say you deserve being one of those people from those places into POETRY. Into ART.

And thats why it matters.

And thats why you need to shut the yell up and stop dismissing it as violence without substance when you all sat on your ass listening to songs about Hatsune Miku eating people in middle school.

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hired a galapagos finch at my burger joint and after 2 generations it evolved to take peoples orders

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I think Stardew Valley, The Sims, and Minecraft are all in the same category of game in that you play it obsessively for weeks, losing all sense of time, and then don’t touch it for months

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Ribbed condoms don’t even taste like ribs.

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Thomas Jefferson experiences dysphoria

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people who see buff women and only think abt them inflicting violence on them are stupid. her muscles are so sore from working out so much you have to massage them for her

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They will destroy nature and call it saving the planet.

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That's a Gen 2 awoo if I ever heard one!

YT version | Support/commission me on Ko-fi <3

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um. meow

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Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” 1995

An astonishingly irreverent piece of work.  This triptych features the artist dropping a Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) in three photographs.  

When questioned about the work, he suggested that the piece was about industry: “[The urn] was industry then and is industry now.”  His statement, therefore, was that the urn was just a cheap pot two thousand years ago, and the reverence we feel toward it is artificial.  One critic wrote: “In other words, for all the aura of preciousness acquired by the accretion of time (and skillful marketing), this vessel is the Iron Age equivalent of a flower pot from K-Mart and if one were to smash the latter a few millennia from now, would it be an occasion for tears?”

However, the not-so-subtle political undertone is clear.  This piece was about destroying the notion that everything that is old is good…including the traditions and cultures of China.  For Ai Weiwei, this triptych represents a moment in which culture suddenly shifts (sometimes violently), shattering the old and outdated to make room for the new.  

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thoughts elsewhere

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thinking abt this tweet again