About mid February 2006, amid the thickest of the Black History lecture season, I was having an animated discussion about hip hop, media, and history at Stanford University. The diverse student body seemed to be fed up with the McDonaldization of the culture and longed for a visitation of some resemblance of the original elements that powered it, from the Bronx to the rest of the planet. The hype that helped boost it in its past was now narrowed to business, termed promotion and marketing, as intake, what best fits Amerikkkana and chop the rest to the side. A few weeks later while attending Lumumba (Professor X) Carson's wake, on a much too quiet night in Brooklyn; I, like everyone there, had been swept by the special video presentation dedicated by VJ Ralph Mcdaniels in memory of X, Blackwatch, and X CLAN.

Ralph Mcdaniels in a short, candid, eloquent speech had noted that he'd shot every single XCLAN video from 1989-1995 when the big company deemed, in their always limited opinion, that the black rap wasn't no longer profitable. What powered the screen were images of true history and blackness, African imagery, Black Brooklyn community, togetherness and protection - symbols that transcended the mere fashion of the time. I was seated next to Ronnique Hawkins, the head of the Anti-Lynching Movement (her organization monitors racial and gendered mistreatment) and she wondered why these videos weren't seen in schools and why they've been seemingly scraped off the screen of hip hop today. Everyone from Afrika Bambaataa to Freedom Williams spoke on how to break from the modern day programming of rap as millennium COINTELPRO. All those minds in one place, seemingly silenced by society, including myself, made me think of the rattling of that 1988-1994 period when fighting the power turned to gin and juice.

Later in that same week another Professor, my long-time friend and brother by the name of Griff, had witnessed a slandering of his name in a couple of magazines and distorted history in recently released hip hop books. For all he has done in the hip hop game, from being the first DJ, to placing a form of regimented stage, style, dress, recording, production and speech to rap and hip hop; to be reduced to an accused anti-Semitic footnote is disrespectful -especially in the obvious light of today's position. Really the upchucking, reflux, backwash of it all seems programmed to scare all newcomers in the past ten years to anything black and cultural. To the unblind, it's becoming more obvious. I was there. Those conversations with the press started in the UK press, with complex discussions about the one-sided Israel-Palestine situation, that seventeen years later presidents, governments and media still don't know how to call anything other than the mess that it is.

Granted in the heat of the infamous DC 1989 conversation-interview with David Mills that followed in the aftermath of those earlier international discussion, the statements morphed and took a bad road. But a peep of the past seventeen years, looking at who’s in charge today, allowing what’s represented in the culture cancels out perhaps 75% of what Griff was accused of. At least when you consider people in power positions who may for all the wrong reasons have ethnicity and religion attached to their names. Look around, only the blind can't see it.

The Academy Awards go to Denzel playing a superthug cop, and Halle screwing Billy Bob (something and somebody she probably wouldn't ever consider in her regular life) musically there it was 'Hard Out There For A Pimp'. The black faces in the music business, in order to stay there and get money, have to be as Negro as they can be, and turn whatever they consider the urban department into a 'nigger factory' to keep those same white faces happy. They will all tell you that it's all about the green, but behind closed doors whimper that black doesn't mix with green. Making a killing is diametrically opposed to making a living, but buzzards hover across death for greed of self. That itself has reduced the climate where only parasites and buzzards can eat. Even the blind will read this piece and simply read this as a bitter-perhaps racist rant (probably NY POST readers) but the fact of the matter was that the change in the game has been one of almost complete reversal.

The white execs of the classic 88-94 period were held at a respectful bay by the importance of the music itself beyond the art, artists, and art form of the period. I know for a fact that some execs that I consider decent human beings, without going into the shallow calling out of them being white, black, or whatever; The problem is that this usage of black, poured as black, has immediate impact on the black community and plants a twisted perception in the world community. I would believe that such humane execs such as Danny Goldberg, Don Lenner who've in the past went out on the business limb supporting the root while knowing that, increasingly, the corrupted climate would make black hard to make green (which I believe even Don Lenner's stomach had to twist a bit having Destiny's Child go from Survivor and Independent Woman to 'Soldier' and 'Check Up On It' just to keep down with the Jones').

The appointment of mere black faces, with little concern or meaning behind them, really allowed this corruption to take place. Publicity departments tuck their heads shamefully in the sand, as their artists get better coverage from getting locked up from crime. Sixteen years back, Blackwatch shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, showed all that Blackwatch was a movement with activist first and artists second. Same thing with Professor Griff who started UNITY FORCE on Long Island as defense against ignorance, racism, and bullsht; thus later morphing that image and meaning into PE's S1W unit. Hip hop's mainstream acceptance filtering the blackness out is bound to lead the mentally active and clear to disillusionment, frustration, and anger. Not for self, as glamorously underreported,.. the movements were meant to place the 'WE' instead of 'I'. We've come to accept VIACOM, Clear Channel, and the publishers of mainstream mags to peddle the truth, as if it's for sale to the thickest bidder or biter. After the so-called statements that are associated as PE's so-called tragedy, It was my calling to reduce that 'I' into a 'WE' and get him out of the way of so much media shrapnel that even he cannot kick or see. it was far from a firing. Shrapnel is still flying only now there are few shields, armor or helmets to defend against or protect (the cultural truth of the matter)it. Seriously the audacity of conscious hip hop to snarl in the face of the oppressor in the name of not only Griff, PE, or XCLAN, but Poor Righteous Teachers, Paris, Arrested Development etc. scared white folk in power and their appointed Negroes for the sake of losing green. Many unblind folk know this, but the yells reduced to whispering defense of seeing all the sht results into an on-going tune of' 'Enough Already'. Check your facts, and check your back.

Mistachuck@rapstation.com