I’m a child of the 80s when, as emcee/producer/label-owner El-Producto puts it, every Hip-hop record that came out was that new sound, that next shit. As you all know, I’m still a huge Hip-hop fan, but those new styles just don’t drop that often, much less with every new release. Now typically someone hits it big with a style and others scramble to sound the same. Not so with El-P. His musical M.O. is from that previous era where you had to innovate or you fell off, and biting was not allowed or tolerated under any circumstances. Read more

I just found out that Jean Baudrillard died last week. As much as his work has been loved, debated, and dismissed, I feel a great loss. As Steven Shaviro once put it, “The success of a work of theory should be measured by its capacity to provoke diversities of response, and not by its ability to compel unanimous acceptance.” I have a great many of Baudrillard’s books and, for what it’s worth, he had the diversity of response down.

Peace to Baudrillard and his family. He will be missed.

“Let us go on outdoing ourselves; a revolutionary man always transcends himself or otherwise he is not a revolutionary man, so we always do what we ask of ourselves or more than we know we can do.” –- Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther Party Library (AK Press), taking its name from the two categories that Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale divided their ten-point program into when forming the Black Panther Party in 1967, is a four-disc set of short documentary films from Newsreel Films and archival video and audio clips of interviews, panel discussions, and reunion events. Read more