On the reservation...

Living on a reservation would really suck. It seems to me that it's like your living your life as a dead end job. There is no way to have success on a reservation there are no busineses that are stimulating the small economy and even if there was there is no money to sustain it. It's just a continuous circle of depression heavy drinking and fry bread. If the movie is my only window into reservation life it would lead me to believe that no one that lives on a reservation seems to contribute anything to the larger community. I completely understood the motivation to just uproot and leave it all behind, what could your motivation be to stay in such a place besides for the obligation of living out your days with the people you call your family.
These reservation have been put in a box of what they can do. No matter what they cannot be independent of the goverment because unless the group is fortunate to have a good location and can open a casino and reak havoc on the white man who put you there by running their pockets and crunching their coin purses on the coin slots there is next to no chance of prosperity of anyform.

Propoganda

We all are aware of the propaganda that surrounds us every where. I don't think that it can just be classified as the government doing it but it has become a standard practice in the advertising world. Vilanizing the other side, or in most cases the other products. It has become the norm to boost up your product by not showing what it does better than everyone else but by showing the flaws of every one else, breaking down their products all the while building up your own. But of course this is not what we think of when we think of propaganda no we think of something much more negative and dark. Something used by the government to exploit the people to get them to follow along like mindless drones to the biddings of big brother. I cannot see the explicit representation of this anymore because it has taken a new form. They have no need to directly represent what they are trying to say, they have ever major news network where they can process what the nation sees so they can sympathize with the pain others are going through, so we will always support them. 

give credit where it is due.

I am sure you have ready every blog and seen every angle on beat street and black boy that a teenager could think up, and I am sure your getting a little bored of it. So I  am going to switch things up for you and maybe introduce you to some new music. Now if you frequent music blogs I am sure you have heard about the group from L.A. called odd future. As a warning everything about this group is vulgar X rated and some of it is just disgusting but thats what I've come to love about them. Its so good to have a group that doesn't sensor themselves because they are afraid that they will sell less albums because if they have been trying to they aren't doing a good job. I am proud to say that I have known about them for a while now and am not just catching on after they are starting to make it onto a much larger stage than they are on now. The more you buy into the music that they are throwing at you the more you start to like it and the more you want to listen to it. Maybe the most impressive part of it though is that the leader of the group, wolf haley, tyler the creator whatever you want to know him as, he makes most of the beats that the whole group raps on. The group is starting to come into the extremely lacking pop culture of my generation. um. this relates to beatstreet because they were both the pop culture of the time and while we like to think that they are polar opposites the way people express themselves as an individual goes against grain it creates a taboo that the masses glom onto and try to commercialize but hopefully odd future doesn't give in and keep doing what they do.
listen to the first sample of tyler's new alblum at http://oddfuture.com/
its odd

who cr cra crav craves attentionen

I DO, YOU DO, WHO DO? YOU DO.
Don't ever try to deny that we are attention whores, if given a preference of having the attention given to a new born baby or given to yourself, you are going to put a blanket over that baby for the time being strip down to a speedo tie a cape around your neck and seep it all in. This is not wierd but this is what I think is human nature. We would do almost anything in a time of desperation to get attention, shave our head, get a ridiculous tattoo, assault a kangaroo at the lincoln park zoo. I am not saying that any sane person would do somthing like that, but does that really sound like somthing you would NEVER do? Sometimes we want the attention so bad that it become habit for us to do these things with out even going through the mental process of wanting attention. It is a subliminal want and in some cases a subliminal need. Maybe it is our most human trait but then again it could be our most primal, after all the apes bang on their chest and hoot and holler to get attention. Even the shyest person in the world dreams about being a rockstar!  Who would have a dream about sitting in the middle of class and watching everyone else get attention, oh wait that is a dream, its just a nightmare. (excuse any spelling errors or whatever i was definitly in the school library before i usually have gotten out of bed!)

MLK

I cannot imagine what it would be like if I still lived in a society of segregation, fear, and hatred. I can not imagine  how different my life would be if these changes had not been made. The intolerance that went on during that time period I simply cannot understand and I hope that something like will never happen again. When we look back at history and think about people who have changed the tide of history who do we think of? I think that none are more influential than MLK who knows what could have violence could have been birthed from the tension between ethnicities during that time if not for Dr. King to preach about the importance of nonviolence  

*modern day slavery and us vs. them

The discussion that we had in class about how big corporations manufactured their products and treated their workers so unfairly really opened my eyes to the injustices of these corporations. Do not get me wrong i was not oblivious to the sweat shop or how everything was getting outsourced to be made cheaper. I was unaware of how little it really did cost for these companies to make the product, five dollars to make a pair of shoes that could sell for a hundred plus dollars? I find this practice sick and extremely unjust to the consumer who wants to buy the product, but no more. It is not hard to buy things that are not made in China, it is just a bit more pricey and if that means that I buy less clothes but still spend the same amount of money because i know that what I am not feeding the profit margins. I vow to only buy clothes that are either made in Canada and Mexico because they are trade partners with the United States or to buy clothes that are made in Europe. I will not buy clothes that are made in a third world country were the worker is being exploited to the point of being akin to slavery. While I do know that I will not be able to completely follow this I will certainly take advantage of whatever opportunities to do so I am given.
China is becoming a world power because of American businesses. We are creating a world power that does not have a democratic government, censors the news and is so power hungry that it has taken over the country of Tibet  in recent years killing protesters or anyone standing in their way. The situation is so bad the Dalai Lama has left the country and is in exile in India. There is speculation that the Chinese will be the one who will be selecting the next Dalai Lama instead of the usual comity of the Buddhist hierarchy that goes through the long process of finding the Dalai Lama's reincarnation who will become the next Dalai Lama. Instead it is rumored but still highly likely that the Chinese will try to select and march around their own version of the his holiness but will be no more than a puppet and representation of the ever controlling Chinese.
 It is simply appalling what the Chinese are doing and the western media has turned a blind eye and allowed to let this happen. At this rate with the Chinese gaining more and more influence through out the globe they will soon become a global super power that will even overshadow that of the United States. It almost seems inevitable that there will be a power struggle between the Chinese and the United States in the not too distant future as seems to be the trend when there is a changing of the guards of world powers. I hope that my insight is completely wrong that relations between us and them will never come to a boil but in my mind the future looks bleak. Who knows who would come out on top either we have the experience and the allies to do the job but they have a nation of hundreds of thousands of men if not millions who would be eligible for a draft. What would happen to the companies that have factories over there? what about all of the workers that they employ? I don't think anyone can answerer these questions but the future.
    

http://kanyewest.com/

Kanye West had a vision of what he knew his music should be and thats exactly what he did on his new album. He has come up with his own signature sound that would be very hard to emulate. The rap music that we are used to hearing is so one dimensional , there are the lyrics over a beat just track after track. I have been listening to the album since thanksgiving and i still can't completely wrap my head around it. The one thing that I know for sure is that it is one hell of an album. Most albums are 50% killer 50% filler it is so rare that every song on the album is worth listening to multiple times. The album varies from what we expect from Kayne with old school samples integrated into his beats (see devil in a new dress) to something new like runaway which is a fusion in between 808 and Heartbreak and Graduation.