Click on the title to link a YouTube film clip of the late hip-hop artist, Bigger Small, performing Juicy.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
Markin comment:
Ya, Biggie Smalls was speaking some truth. Not our refined language Marxist truth but on the same page, mostly. Here are the lyrics raw, like life. Christmas kind of missed us, and birthdays were the worst days around my home too. Living while being poor, black or white, is a m----------r, that's for sure.
*********
Biggie Smalls LYRICS
"Juicy"
[Intro:]
(Fuck all you hoes) Get a grip motherfucker.
Yeah, this album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me
I'd never amount to nothin', to all the people that lived above the
buildings that I was hustlin' in front of that called the police on
me when I was just tryin' to make some money to feed my daughters,
and all the niggaz in the struggle, you know what I'm sayin'?
Uh-ha, it's all good baby bay-bee, uh
[Verse One:]
It was all a dream
I used to read Word Up magazine
Salt'n'Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine
Hangin' pictures on my wall
Every Saturday Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl
I let my tape rock 'til my tape popped
Smokin' weed and bamboo, sippin' on private stock
Way back, when I had the red and black lumberjack
With the hat to match
Remember Rappin' Duke, duh-ha, duh-ha
You never thought that hip hop would take it this far
Now I'm in the limelight 'cause I rhyme tight
Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade
Born sinner, the opposite of a winner
Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner
Peace to Ron G, Brucey B, Kid Capri
Funkmaster Flex, Lovebug Starsky
I'm blowin' up like you thought I would
Call the crib, same number same hood
It's all good
Uh, and if you don't know, now you know, nigga, uh
[Chorus:]
You know very well who you are
Don't let em hold you down, reach for the stars
You had a goal, but not that many
'cause you're the only one I'll give you good and plenty
[Verse Two:]
I made the change from a common thief
To up close and personal with Robin Leach
And I'm far from cheap, I smoke skunk with my peeps all day
Spread love, it's the Brooklyn way
The Moet and Alize keep me pissy
Girls used to diss me
Now they write letters 'cause they miss me
I never thought it could happen, this rappin' stuff
I was too used to packin' gats and stuff
Now honies play me close like butter played toast
From the Mississippi down to the east coast
Condos in Queens, indo for weeks
Sold out seats to hear Biggie Smalls speak
Livin' life without fear
Puttin' 5 karats in my baby girl's ears
Lunches, brunches, interviews by the pool
Considered a fool 'cause I dropped out of high school
Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood
And it's still all good
Uh...and if you don't know, now you know, nigga
[Verse Three:]
Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis
When I was dead broke, man I couldn't picture this
50 inch screen, money green leather sofa
Got two rides, a limousine with a chauffeur
Phone bill about two G's flat
No need to worry, my accountant handles that
And my whole crew is loungin'
Celebratin' every day, no more public housin'
Thinkin' back on my one-room shack
Now my mom pimps a Ac' with minks on her back
And she loves to show me off, of course
Smiles every time my face is up in The Source
We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us
No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us
Birthdays was the worst days
Now we sip champagne when we thirst-ay
Uh, damn right I like the life I live
'Cause I went from negative to positive
And it's all...
(It's all good)
...and if you don't know, now you know, nigga, uh
Uh, uh...and if you don't know, now you know, nigga
Uh...and if you don't know, now you know, nigga, uh
Representin' B-Town in the house, Junior Mafia, mad flavor, uh
Uh, yeah, a-ight
[Thanks to jarulesbabe66@aol.com for these lyrics]
[Thanks to michael.dunbar@us.sanofi.com, dhall15@bellsouth.net for correcting these lyrics]
Showing posts with label working poor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label working poor. Show all posts
Monday, August 16, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
*The “Shame” Culture Of Poverty- Down In The Base Of Society Life Ain’t Pretty
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the late Irish-American writer and my muse on this post, Frank McCourt.
Commentary
Recently in reviewing Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood in Ireland, “Angela’s Ashes”, I noted that McCourt’s story was my story. I went on to explain that although time, geography, family composition and other factors were different the story he tells of the impoverished circumstances of his growing up “shanty” in Limerick, Ireland, taking all proportions into consideration, was amazingly similar to those I faced growing up “shanty” in Boston, Massachusetts a generation later. The commonality? I would argue that down at the base of modern industrial society, down at that place where the working poor meets what Karl Marx called the lumpen proletariat the sheer fact of scarcity drives life very close to the bone. Poverty hurts, and hurts in more ways than are apparent to the eye. No Dorothea Lange photograph can find that place.
I also mentioned in that McCourt review that the dreams that came out of his Limerick childhood neighborhood, such as they were, were small dreams. I immediately picked up on his references to what constituted “respectability” in that milieu- getting off the “dole” and getting a low-level governmental civil service job that after thirty some years would turn into a state pension in order to comfort oneself and one’s love ones in old age. That, my friends, is a small dream by anybody’s standard but I am sure that any reader who grew up in a working poor home in America in the last couple of generations knows from where I speak. I can hear my mother’s voice urging me on to such a course as I have just described. Escaping that fate was a near thing though. The crushing out of big dreams for the working poor may not be the final indictment of the capitalist system down at the base but it certainly will do for starters.
In the recent past one of the unintended consequences of trying to recount my roots through contacting members of my high school class has been the release of a flood of memories from those bleak days of childhood that I had placed (or thought I had) way, way on the back burner of my brain. A couple of year ago I did a series of stories, “Tales From The ‘Hood'” (see archives April 2008), on some of those earlier recalled incidents. Frank McCourt’s recounting of some of the incidents of his bedraggled upbringing brought other incidents back to me. In “Angela’s Ashes” he mentioned how he had to wear the same shirt through thick and thin. As nightwear, school wear, every wear. I remember my own scanty wardrobe and recounted in one of those stories in the series, “A Coming Of Age Story”, about ripping up the bottoms of a pair of precious pants for a square dance demonstration in order to ‘impress’ a girl I was smitten with in elementary school. I caught holy hell for that (and missed my big chance with the youthful “femme fatale” as well-oh memory).
I have related elsewhere in discussing my high school experiences in that series, that I did a couple of years ago at the request of one of my high school classmates, that one of the hardships of high school was (and is) the need , recognized or not, to be “in”. One of the ways to be “in”, at least for a guy in my post-World War II generation, the “Generation of ‘68”, and the first generation to have some disposable income in hand was to have cool clothes, a cool car, and a cool girlfriend. “Cool”, you get it, right? Therefore the way to be the dreaded “out” is….well, you know that answer. One way not to be cool is to wear hand-me-downs from an older brother. Or to wear oddly colored or designed clothes. This is where not having enough of life’s goods hurts. Being doled out a couple of new sets of duds a year was not enough to break my social isolation from the “cool guys”. I remember the routine-new clothes for the start of the school year and then at Easter. Cheap stuff too, from some Wal-Mart-type store of the day.
All of this may be silly, in fact is silly in the great scale of things. But those drummed-in small dreams, that non-existent access to those always scarce “cool” items, those missed opportunities by not being ‘right’ added up. All of this created a ‘world’ where crime, petty and large, seemed respectable as an alternative (a course that my own brothers followed), where the closeness of neighbors is suffocating and where the vaunted “neighborhood community” is more like something out of “the night of the long knives”. If, as Thomas Hobbes postulated in his political works, especially "Levithan", in the 17th century, life is “nasty, short and brutish” then those factors are magnified many times over down at the base.
Contrary to Hobbes, however, the way forward is through more social solidarity, not more guards at the doors of the rich. All of this by way of saying in the 21st century we need socialist solutions more than ever. As I stated once in a commentary titled, “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” (See archives March 2009), one of the only virtues of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks among the working poor is that I am personally inured to the vicissitudes of the gyrations of the world capitalist economy. Hard times growing up were the only times. But many of my brothers and sisters are not so inured. For them I fight for the socialism of the future. In that socialist future we may not be able to eliminate shame as an emotion but we can put a very big dent in the class-driven aspect of it.
Commentary
Recently in reviewing Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood in Ireland, “Angela’s Ashes”, I noted that McCourt’s story was my story. I went on to explain that although time, geography, family composition and other factors were different the story he tells of the impoverished circumstances of his growing up “shanty” in Limerick, Ireland, taking all proportions into consideration, was amazingly similar to those I faced growing up “shanty” in Boston, Massachusetts a generation later. The commonality? I would argue that down at the base of modern industrial society, down at that place where the working poor meets what Karl Marx called the lumpen proletariat the sheer fact of scarcity drives life very close to the bone. Poverty hurts, and hurts in more ways than are apparent to the eye. No Dorothea Lange photograph can find that place.
I also mentioned in that McCourt review that the dreams that came out of his Limerick childhood neighborhood, such as they were, were small dreams. I immediately picked up on his references to what constituted “respectability” in that milieu- getting off the “dole” and getting a low-level governmental civil service job that after thirty some years would turn into a state pension in order to comfort oneself and one’s love ones in old age. That, my friends, is a small dream by anybody’s standard but I am sure that any reader who grew up in a working poor home in America in the last couple of generations knows from where I speak. I can hear my mother’s voice urging me on to such a course as I have just described. Escaping that fate was a near thing though. The crushing out of big dreams for the working poor may not be the final indictment of the capitalist system down at the base but it certainly will do for starters.
In the recent past one of the unintended consequences of trying to recount my roots through contacting members of my high school class has been the release of a flood of memories from those bleak days of childhood that I had placed (or thought I had) way, way on the back burner of my brain. A couple of year ago I did a series of stories, “Tales From The ‘Hood'” (see archives April 2008), on some of those earlier recalled incidents. Frank McCourt’s recounting of some of the incidents of his bedraggled upbringing brought other incidents back to me. In “Angela’s Ashes” he mentioned how he had to wear the same shirt through thick and thin. As nightwear, school wear, every wear. I remember my own scanty wardrobe and recounted in one of those stories in the series, “A Coming Of Age Story”, about ripping up the bottoms of a pair of precious pants for a square dance demonstration in order to ‘impress’ a girl I was smitten with in elementary school. I caught holy hell for that (and missed my big chance with the youthful “femme fatale” as well-oh memory).
I have related elsewhere in discussing my high school experiences in that series, that I did a couple of years ago at the request of one of my high school classmates, that one of the hardships of high school was (and is) the need , recognized or not, to be “in”. One of the ways to be “in”, at least for a guy in my post-World War II generation, the “Generation of ‘68”, and the first generation to have some disposable income in hand was to have cool clothes, a cool car, and a cool girlfriend. “Cool”, you get it, right? Therefore the way to be the dreaded “out” is….well, you know that answer. One way not to be cool is to wear hand-me-downs from an older brother. Or to wear oddly colored or designed clothes. This is where not having enough of life’s goods hurts. Being doled out a couple of new sets of duds a year was not enough to break my social isolation from the “cool guys”. I remember the routine-new clothes for the start of the school year and then at Easter. Cheap stuff too, from some Wal-Mart-type store of the day.
All of this may be silly, in fact is silly in the great scale of things. But those drummed-in small dreams, that non-existent access to those always scarce “cool” items, those missed opportunities by not being ‘right’ added up. All of this created a ‘world’ where crime, petty and large, seemed respectable as an alternative (a course that my own brothers followed), where the closeness of neighbors is suffocating and where the vaunted “neighborhood community” is more like something out of “the night of the long knives”. If, as Thomas Hobbes postulated in his political works, especially "Levithan", in the 17th century, life is “nasty, short and brutish” then those factors are magnified many times over down at the base.
Contrary to Hobbes, however, the way forward is through more social solidarity, not more guards at the doors of the rich. All of this by way of saying in the 21st century we need socialist solutions more than ever. As I stated once in a commentary titled, “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” (See archives March 2009), one of the only virtues of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks among the working poor is that I am personally inured to the vicissitudes of the gyrations of the world capitalist economy. Hard times growing up were the only times. But many of my brothers and sisters are not so inured. For them I fight for the socialism of the future. In that socialist future we may not be able to eliminate shame as an emotion but we can put a very big dent in the class-driven aspect of it.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Another Walk On The Wild Side with Nelson Algren
BOOK REVIEW
A Walk on the Wild Side, Nelson Algren, The Noonday Press, 1984
As I have mentioned in other reviews of Nelson Algren's work, such as The Man With The Golden Arm and The Neon Wilderness, I am personally very familiar with the social milieu that he is working. Growing up in a post-World War II built housing project this reviewer knew first hand the so-called `romance' of drugs, the gun, the ne'er do well hustler and the fallen sister. And I also learned the complex mechanisms one needed to develop in order to survive at that place where the urban working poor meet and mix with the lumpen proletariat- the con men, dopesters, grifters, drifters and gamblers who feed on the downtrodden. This is definitely not the mix that Damon Runyon celebrated in his Guys and Dolls-type stories. Far from it.
Nelson Algren has once again, through hanging around Chicago police stations (does anyone describe that milieu, cops and criminals, better?), other nefarious locales and the sheer ability to observe, gotten that sense of foreboding, despair and the just plain oblivion of America's mean streets down pat. In this, probably his best literary endeavor in that vein, Algren has gotten down to the core of existence for the would be world-beater hustler Dove Linkhorn a character who symbolizes a certain aspect of American life in his way, as say, Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby or Hemingway's Robert Jordan do in theirs.
Several factors make this an exceptional work. Not the least is the beginning section’s description of the antecedents of the "white trash" phenomena, as exemplified by Dove, that as always been something of a hidden secret about the American experience. In short, what happens when the land runs out, or in Professor Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis-the frontier ends. Nobody has put this in literature better than Algren, even Steinbeck. Furthermore, he has moved the story line here back in time from his usual 1940's and 1950's to the 1930's when some cosmic shifts were occurring in American life.
Algren has also moved the geography from Chicago to New Orleans and integrated some of his short story characters and story lines found in his collection Neon Wilderness into this project. Changes in time, place and characters there may be but that raw struggle for survival for those down almost below the base of society is still the same. The only objection that I have is that the portrait of Linkhorn, as described here by Algren, gives me an impression that old Dove could never ever make it in his `chosen' world unlike, say, Frankie Machine who has that urban grit almost genetically build into him in order to survive. Frankly, I do not believe that Dove could have survived in my old housing project. Frankie Machine would have been the `king of the hill'. Read this valuable book about an America that, then and now, is hidden in the shadows.
A Walk on the Wild Side, Nelson Algren, The Noonday Press, 1984
As I have mentioned in other reviews of Nelson Algren's work, such as The Man With The Golden Arm and The Neon Wilderness, I am personally very familiar with the social milieu that he is working. Growing up in a post-World War II built housing project this reviewer knew first hand the so-called `romance' of drugs, the gun, the ne'er do well hustler and the fallen sister. And I also learned the complex mechanisms one needed to develop in order to survive at that place where the urban working poor meet and mix with the lumpen proletariat- the con men, dopesters, grifters, drifters and gamblers who feed on the downtrodden. This is definitely not the mix that Damon Runyon celebrated in his Guys and Dolls-type stories. Far from it.
Nelson Algren has once again, through hanging around Chicago police stations (does anyone describe that milieu, cops and criminals, better?), other nefarious locales and the sheer ability to observe, gotten that sense of foreboding, despair and the just plain oblivion of America's mean streets down pat. In this, probably his best literary endeavor in that vein, Algren has gotten down to the core of existence for the would be world-beater hustler Dove Linkhorn a character who symbolizes a certain aspect of American life in his way, as say, Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby or Hemingway's Robert Jordan do in theirs.
Several factors make this an exceptional work. Not the least is the beginning section’s description of the antecedents of the "white trash" phenomena, as exemplified by Dove, that as always been something of a hidden secret about the American experience. In short, what happens when the land runs out, or in Professor Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis-the frontier ends. Nobody has put this in literature better than Algren, even Steinbeck. Furthermore, he has moved the story line here back in time from his usual 1940's and 1950's to the 1930's when some cosmic shifts were occurring in American life.
Algren has also moved the geography from Chicago to New Orleans and integrated some of his short story characters and story lines found in his collection Neon Wilderness into this project. Changes in time, place and characters there may be but that raw struggle for survival for those down almost below the base of society is still the same. The only objection that I have is that the portrait of Linkhorn, as described here by Algren, gives me an impression that old Dove could never ever make it in his `chosen' world unlike, say, Frankie Machine who has that urban grit almost genetically build into him in order to survive. Frankly, I do not believe that Dove could have survived in my old housing project. Frankie Machine would have been the `king of the hill'. Read this valuable book about an America that, then and now, is hidden in the shadows.
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