This right here proves Mos Def is quietly carrying on the tradition of innovation that is the history of African-American music...

Meanwhile, what this current generation of kids play on their iPods ignore this tradition for the chance to be TV.

M-1 of Dead Prez in Palestine

I don't buy a lot of the revolutionary rhetoric espoused by Dead Prez. I do believe it's sincere, but I also think it's part of their image and how they are marketed. Still, M-1 has been to Palestine. That says a lot right there. When was the last time an American rapper was in Palestine?

Do you know how Halloween started? Be honest, you probably don't.

But the Dead Kennedys knew what it meant to the American psyche!

Black Star - Respiration

This is what plays in my fancy Audio-Technica M50 headphones (http://www.audio-technica.com/cms/headphones/57a64f4a9fdbefd9/index.html) when I feel something redeeming about living at the moment history ends, capitalism fails, the most important truths become too hard ignore after  being repressed for far too long, and the dichotomy of human nature (barbaric agression vs. genuine altruism) makes itself lucid. During this time, I also forget that I'm not a fan of rapper Common because to me, he's Kayne West Lite.

The Roots - Rising Down (Unofficial Video)

I'm usually not a fan when Youtube users make their own video versions of their favorite songs, but this works, especially using the Mos Def's part during the Black Star video for Respiration. I've been impressed with the last few albums the Roots put out since 2006. Game Theory and Rising Down are both masterpieces.

Anyway, this song is the reason The Roots have been particularlly good at capturing the madness we're all living through.

Only two good things came out of Houston: D.R.I. and Bill Hicks

And they both did, not only an excellent job at exposing American hypocrisy through their art, but made an everlasting impact. How many hardcore and thrash bands tried to sound like D.R.I. in the late 80s and into the 90s? How many stand-up comedians would sell their kids into slavery to have just a morsel of Bill Hick's talent?

Chuck D visits Long Island hip hop landmarks...

Anybody who knows anything about the development of hip hop in the early 80s knows cats like Spectrum City (comprised of Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee, and Chuck D) out in Roosevelt were making just as much noise as cats in the city. Staring in 1979 as a Long Island mobile DJ unit, Spectrum City later released one twelve inch in 1984 called "Lies/Check Out the Radio".

Here is a priceless story of Spectrum City - http://citinite.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/spectrum-city/

Also, check out Chuck D as he drives around his old stomping grounds:

What Yo La Tengo has in common with Boogie Down Productions

I Can Hear the Heart Beat as One will probably go down, according to most music critics whose taste isn't swayed by what's catching the attention of the low bar set by music listening public, as one of the best rock records of the nineties.

Unlike certain indie rock bands who have become either insanely popular like the Arcade Fire (sentimental bourgeois crap) or Tv on the Radio (talented musicans who create unoriginal  hipster crap), Yo La Tengo has never been overhyped and whatever hype they may have received, it has been warranted.

Coming out of Hoboken, New Jersey has made Yo La Tengo an even more valid and enigmatic force. Instead of bumming around gentrified locales as Williamsburg or the Lower East Side, Yo La Tengo's place of origin is where their musical journey through an Americana begins and then terminates on that precise spot on a Venn diagram where city, suburban town and rusticated country meet. If one is to take a cross country trip staring in New York City, Long Island, or Westchester, it does not really begin until one crosses the Hudson and arrives in Jersey. This is the place where Yo La Tengo, fronted by the music critic's musician, Ira Kaplan, begins to carry out its vague purpose that reflects the cosmopolitan pulse and ethic that always gets mistaken for just existing in the infinite concrete in urban environs of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Known for playing covers that slide back and forth on the spectrum of rock, R&B, and punk, evident by their legendary appearances on New Jersey's WFMU, the longest running American independent radio station, highlighted on Yo La Tengo is Murdering the Classics, Yo La Tengo's music is more likely to tell the story of a Jewish kid graduating high school in West Virginia like Soupy Sales or a young French doctor sent to Detroit to study the health of autoworkers who later unforunately became an anti-Semite than middle-class art student who recently graduated, moves to the city and tries to make it as an artist while doing busy work for his uncle's law firm.

"We're an American Band" is the second to last closing of I Can Hear the Heart Beat as One. It's not a tongue-in-cheek response, but perhaps a serious challenge to the Grand Funk Railroad song of the same name. Yo La Tengo's version, written sometime in the 90s, just like the video for "Sugarcube" predicts the commericialization and branding of indie rock, a term that would become as empty and meaningless as the term alternative rock was when the faces Kurt Cobian and Eddie Vedder were plastered all over Mtv. Furthermore, "We're an American Band" is an unconcious fuck you to the excesses of the old rock & roll cliches epitomizing the American capitalist consumption that Grand Funk Railroad glorified in 1973.

With lyrics such as "So hard to choose between conceit and rock, Some college in the spring, the sound is all wrong/Reset the mate to our Flamin Groovies song/Driving, night again, they're late, car crash/We'll turn to look unless we're going too fast",  Yo La Tengo's "We're An American Band" is about the real shit, the everyday shit, working class shit, middle class shit. If Yo La Tengo made a hip hop record it would be Boogie Down Production's "Love's Gonna Get You." Grand Funk Railroad's American band shares a semblance with the rich boy fantasies of Puffy or even the throngs of the Brooklyn bourgeois, new arrivals to the borough who have driven up the cost of living for the borough's natives. It's the same newly arrived Brooklyn bourgeois who came to Prospect Park one summer night a few years ago to watch Tv on the Radio play, believing their tastes were so much different than everyone else, but unbeknownst to them, their tastes were trite and the least bit unique.

* It should be noted that Yo La Tengo has covered Grand Funk Railroad's "We're an American Band". Why Yo La Tengo has remanded releveant is because they know when to not take themselves too seriously, unlike that whiny elite prep school punk ass bitch, Win Butler.

Dear Jay-Z, I'm sure you are well aware...

before you were around, there was Big Daddy Kane, who you should respectfully hand over at least 5% of your royalties in order to pay homage.

They definitely never played this on Yo Mtv Raps

Poor Righteous Teachers - Nobody Move.

They never played this on Yo Mtv Raps, if I remember correctly.

The Clash - This is Radio Clash/Combat Rock

Back in 1981, Blondie's "Rapture" was the first record by a new wave or punk band to pay homage to the underground emerging hip hop scene that had recently traveled downtown after developing in the desolate poverty jungle of the Bronx the previous decade. Unlike Blondie's attempt a year earlier, The Clash's Combat Rock is not a novelty. If one wants to be cynical enough, Blondie's "Rapture" was intended to be a one-off, a way to cash in before the hip hop fad that briefly caught the attention of the country after the release of "Rapper's Delight" in 79' disappeared. On the other hand, Combat Rock is a record often inspired by New York hip hop. Even though "Know Your Rights" is a straight away political punk song, it conjures up a pathos of an angry and indignant kid riding on the subway, feeling the injustice of the world being carried on her shoulders. Combat Rock is a political record. There is no political insight found on Blondie's "Rapture". It's really just about partying and the glitz and mystique yuppies like Debbie Harry an Chris Stein found in the city. The name dropping of Fab Five Freddy, who was also made a cameo in the video along with his graffiti colleague, Lee Quinones, assures Blondie has credibility, but nonetheless, on Combat Rock, with the exception of Futura 2000's appearance on "Overpowered by the Funk", nobody is rapping. And yet,  most songs on Combat Rock are a million times more hip hop than "Rapture". What makes Combat Rock, in a sense, a hip hop record, has much to do with diverse influences that inspired The Clash, very similar to the eclectic choice of records that Kool Herc, Flash, Bambaataa, and Grandwizzard Theodore spun during hip hop's earliest days back in the 70s.

In hindsight, Combat Rock predicted that hip hop would not be just a quick fad. The greatest thing about Joe Strummer was his sincere belief in the power of music. The video for "This is Radio Clash" capture's Strummer's spirit. Despite The Clash's inner-dysfunction, an experience most innovative bands go through, Strummer's spirit was infectious to the rest of the band. It is this spirit that allowed Combat Rock to be an authentic and genuine creation, a document of inner-city counterculture during the late 70s and early 80s, whether it was in London or New York. Blondie's "Rapture" is disposable in comparison.

Smoothe Da Huster/Trigger the Gambler - Broken Language

When I use to take the LIRR from Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn out to Long Island, I would have this cut playing on my iPod. And that's because when then the train would pull into and past the East New York Station, not to far away, a slight turn to the northeast was Brownsville, the stomping grounds of Smoothe da Huster and Trigger tha Gambler. They wrote offensively clever lyrics at a time (1995) when most people would feel uncomfortable with a black guy saying he was the neighborhood crack supplier and white girl gang banger. Unfortunately, sixteen years later,  the world has forgotten these Brownsville wordsmiths and believes Lil' Wayne should be appointed the Poet Laureate.