Prologue to Act II:
"...The black man should no longer be confronted by the dilemma, turn white or disappear...if society makes difficulties for him because of his color, if in his dreams I establish the expression of an unconscious desire to change color, my objective will not be that of dissuading him from it by advising him to "keep his place"; on the contrary, my objective, once his motivations have brought him into consciousness, will be to put him in a position to choose action (or passivity) with respect to the real source of the conflict-that is, toward the social structures."
--Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Act II: Mask In The Mirror
"I'm hearing rumors that his coffin is coming, and that would be insane if it happened!"
--A giddy mourner/fan, talking to an MSNBC reporter,
outside of the Staples Center, 7 July 2009.
Tuesday, 7 June 2009, 9:05 am, PST, and I'm tuned into MSNBC, watching the throngs of fans on the periphery of Los Angeles freeways and side streets cheering the quiet luxury armada of the Michael Jackson funerary motorcade. Minutes later, members of the Jackson family and other mourners file out of the Hall Of Liberty, on the grounds of Forest Lawn Cemetery. Funerals are the closest thing to slow motion in real-time; like falling through a bottle of invisible embalming fluid. We talk slow and move slower, as the life of the decedent scrolls across the reels of our revisionist recollection. Give your roses to the living y'all, because they can't smell them at the graveyard, or when the cremated ashes walk hand in hand with the wind.
by Barry Michael Cooper
"...human beings are still human beings and not piano keys, which, though played upon with their own hands by the laws of nature themselves, are in danger of being played so much that outside the calendar it will be impossible to want anything."
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Notes From Underground
ACT I: I WANT YOU BACK
Thursday, 25 June 2009, is the day everyone will live outside of the calendar, because that's the day when time stopped and hovered over U.C.L.A Medical Center in Westwood, Ca.
That was the day our King Of Pop--Michael Joseph Jackson--died from cardiac arrest (a.k.a., a broken heart), at 2:26pm, Pacific Standard Time.
(Sandwiched between the 1999 Columbine massacre and 9/11/2001, America was getting its first taste of stateside terrorism. Though the frightening violence seems to have resurfaced with the Virgina Tech slaughter two years ago, the carnage at a retirement home in North Carolina last week, the mass murders at an immigrant-outreach program for new American citizens in Binghamton, N.Y. and the assassination of three brave police officers in Pittsburgh responding to a domestic dispute in the last two days, the horrific attacks reached epidemic proportions a decade ago. Middle schools and high schools became the battleground for a dysfunctional revolution, launched by a cadre of teenage guerrillas-in-the-midst of psychopathic implosion. I wrote this essay in 2001, after a bloodbath at Santana High School in Santee, Ca. Fifteen-year-old Charles Andrew Williams shot 15 people. Two of them died. He is now serving a sentence of 50 years-to-life. This is his story.)
"...Nothing will drive us away/ we can be heroes/
just for one day..."
-David Bowie, Heroes
March 9, 2001
Your name is Charles Andrew Williams. You are fifteen. Correction. You were fifteen. On March 5, at 9:25 a.m., you became timeless. Immortalized. Infamous. When you went on a shooting rampage which killed two people and injured 13, you lost your age. You lost your name. And you lost your identity. Now you're reduced to a human jigsaw. Your life story has been scattered about and snapped into place by the media. And the pieces still don't fit.
"Remember what we talked about so much?" Bigger asked in a flat neutral tone.
"Naw."
"Old Blum."...Bigger took a deep breath and looked from face to face. It seemed to him that he should not have to explain.
"Look, it'll be easy. There ain't nothing to be scared of. Between three and four ain't nobody in the store but the old man. The cop is way down at the other end of the block...Can't you see? This is something big," Bigger said.
Richard Wright,
Book One: Fear
Native Son, 1940.
"What nigga, you wanna rob the muthaf-----' train? Is you crazy?!"
(Background noises inside a New York subway station: Biggie responds
to his hesitant accomplice)
"Yes, yes, you muthaf-----' right! Nigga, it's '87, nigga. Is you dead broke?!"
"Yeah, nigga but...it's a train, ain't nobody ever robbed no muthaf-----' train!"
"Is your mother givin' you money nigga? It's time to get paid. Is you wit me?" (Biggie clicks the cartridge on his 9 milimeter.) "Muthaf----, is you wit me?!"
"Yeah I'm wit you, come on!"
"Alright, nigga, let's make it happen, then!"
(Biggie and his accomplice step onto an arriving subway train and brandish their guns. Biggie barks out his instructions to the passengers.) "ALL YOU MUTHAF-----, GET ON THE F-----' FLOOR!" (Biggie fires two shots into the air. Screams of fear and pandemonium fill the subway car.) "GIMME ALL YOUR MUTHAF-----' MONEY!..."
Christopher Wallace and Sean Combs,
Intro Skit from Ready To Die, 1994
January 19th, 2009, was truly an amazing day. It marked the observance of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday, who would have been 80 years old (his birthday is actually January 15th). It was also the day before Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of The United States. This historic confluence of events not only boggles the mind, but it reinforces the words of Dr. King, who quoted abolitionist Theodore Parker; "The moral arc of justice is long...but it bends towards justice."
(reprinted from The Huffington Post: 15 October 2008)
by Barry Michael Cooper
The definition of Hip Hop has always been a political one: at the heart of democracy lies the aorta of free speech. Be it George Orwell, V.I. Lenin, Karl Marx, or Donald Oliver Soper shooting the gift (of gab) in London at Speaker's Corner of Hyde Park, or KRS-One and Chuck D voicing their opposition to Reaganomics and a Dickensian New York in the late '80s, or Jay-Z, Puff, and Kanye describing their Brave Rich World from Gulfstream-V windows 40,000 feet above Monaco in rhythmic iambic pentameter, Hip Hop is the vox of the common man speaking to power.
