GHETTO PROVERBS

HOUSTON, WE HAD A REAL PROBLEM

2012-02-12T08:55:00.001-08:00

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

-- Albert Einstein:

Deep in the hearts of many of the community’s members -- if we were really, truly honest with ourselves -- we knew this wasn’t going to end well. Sudden death (absent of a sporting event) rarely does. No matter how many examples of this Shakespearean cycle we witness you never get used to the heartbreaking headlines:

Whitney Houston dead at 48.

Back in 2000, I read an article in Savoy Magazine that begged, almost pleaded with Whitney to get back to the place that made her a mainstream, household name and leave the arm pits of Newark, New Jersey in her life’s rearview. I find it ironic that mainstream believes that it’s the solution and not a huge part of the problem. Clearly a debate for a less somber time. One of the more memorable quotes from the Savoy article went as follows: “Whitney, we love you but you are starting to act like the cousin no one wants to invite to the family cookout.” A couple of years later, Being Bobby Brown made its Bravo television debut – or as some might bookmark, the beginning of the ending.

If being Bobby or Whitney wasn’t distressing enough, adding television footage probably illuminated the CHECK ENGINE light. I watched Being Bobby Brown, not because I like reality shows or Bobby or Whitney. I watched for the same reason Dave Chappelle quit – I just wasn’t sure why I was laughing anymore.

In life, one’s career can easily be confused with WHO we are instead of WHAT we do. When you walk through the inner city streets that raised you, you’ll find yourself skipping to the choruses of: “That’s little Johnny, he works for UPS.” Or “That is Ms. Sharon’s kid, Rachael, she’s an executive at IBM” or “That’s Barack, he’s OUR president.” In the ‘hood that blurry idolatry is cemented on your life’s resume with very little room to wiggle. It’s a badge that stays on long after the uniform doesn’t fit anymore – many wonder if it ever did. There are so many unspoken dynamics that make-up the 8 million stories in a ghetto like Newark – and most are too difficult to explain. Muddled in that fact is an audience of millions far more concerned with what we do verses the horrific, viral inspirations that led us to do it. The price of that duality can be costly, sometimes deadly. Obviously.

Honestly, outside of Whitney’s sultry, angelic voice there wasn’t anything remotely “mainstream” about her. It was funny catching a glimpse…, like in her less than mainstream single: “My Name is Not Susan.” Lyrically, Houston confronts a partner for uttering an ex’s name during sex. We all breathed a sigh of relief when that “beef” stayed in the studio. There were also the less subtle revelations into Whitney’s upbringing. One came in the form of a late-night interview with then-host Arsenio Hall. Hall asked Whitney: “Do you think Bobby will have a problem with you starring in a love scene with Kevin Costner?”

Whitney sharply replied; “Nah, just as long as he doesn’t try to stick his tongue down my throat!” Those unfamiliar with the 201 area code gasped in astonishment.., everyone else felt reassured, almost relieved, that despite the TV and movie screen presentation Whitney wasn’t all that removed from the 'hood.

Or as Biggie -- another victim of the streets -- once preached “if you don’t know, now you know.”

There were other more revealing interviews like the one with Diane Sawyer, which had the drug dealers questioning their mode of operation. Through it all, if you were paying attention, Houston always found a way to remind us of the paradox of loyalty. You name it: child custody battles, public court appearances or slap boxing with old edition Bobby Brown -- in Newark, that's called Monday. This R&B couple became the poster parents for a 12-step program and you couldn’t help but pray for the reproductive steps that Bobbi Kristina seemed destined to inherit.

Despite the many years of pushy public relations people; hours of A&R laborers, hair sessions of industry-styled weaves and wigs, Whitney was and always has been – for better or worse -- that chick from Newark, New Jersey.

Newark is a tunnel ride from Manhattan’s fashion frenzy fanfare in New York City but it is centuries away from anything remotely fashionable. Newark is home to the most notorious, drug-infested, crime-riddled communities in this nation, any nation. Many boys and girls use basketball as an escape mechanism, but the New Jersey Nets said, fuck this, we’ll leave.

Being a rugged resident like a Whitney Houston is the sort of rep that often affords an inner city dweller “diplomatic immunity”. The rough exterior allows one to riffle through the streets with minimal collateral damage, almost like a bullet proof vest fitted for your inevitable character assassination. You can really see it when you peep through the iron gates to watch a Rucker Park legend or if you stand in an apartment window watching the corner drug dealer. It’s almost like a bible verse; you may not always understand it, but it’s necessary if you are plotting an escape.

The scripted bios of the hoop legends and drug dealers tend to intoxicate the young, wanna-bees that are mad at “The System, or mad at “The Man” or just mad!! Sometimes the anger fuels the success and while the community celebrates, mainstream counts the “wins” with a gold statue or concrete star. Take the Grand Master Flash & the Furious Five Rock and Roll induction; or a CSI investigation led by criminal Queens resident LL Cool J. Even TBS gets an occasional Ice Cube for their Ice T. It’s funny, sometimes in the ‘hood, even the wins feel like losses to the community that never changes.

Whatever the outcome, the ‘hood stream-to-mainstream story always starts the same. An industry insider is willing to pluck a rare, talented jewel from their community and roll the dice or bet on black that true talent will triumph the toxic traits that plague the streets that bred them. It’s a dynamic that has eluded the most-seasoned psychologists, who only tallies the mainstream wins.

I’ve seen published reports that rejoice in the fact that Whitney Houston’s illustrious voice has scanned more than 170 million copies worldwide. I’d be very curious how many of those people ever spent one night in Newark?
Or how many understood that the fatal fact Whitney never left.

1 love,

Ray Lewis

SAY IT LOUD

2011-10-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

"Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change." Muhammad Ali

Who Are We? What are we doing? Where do we go from here?
The Black Power Mix Tape Documentary takes a rather serious and widely successful effort to unveil the very real conditions of black folks in America through the eyes of a handful of powerful leaders. Swedish filmmaker Goran Hugo Olsson’s basement-stored footage does a remarkable job of taking the temperature of blacks in a tension-filled, highly-divided America from 1967-1975. Intended or unintended, Olsson’s non-American roots glare with the film’s (missed) opportunity to link the black power movement in the latter 20th Century to today’s very similar climate – thus leaving on-lookers with a more magnified mirror to scrutinize.

Black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it. S. Carmichael

One of the documentaries’ frequently memorable moments was certainly captured with the unfiltered flashes of the brave and spirited Trinidadian-born Black Panther leader, Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael’s unyielding, uncompromising, unapologetic speeches truly underscored the leader’s relentless "audacity of hope" – a remarkable irony occupiers of Wall Street will find impossible to ignore. Carmichael’s impromptu interview with his mom divulges an inflexible, pit-bull aura that Caribbean men like: Harry Belafonte, Louis Farrakhan, and Marcus Garvey (among others) have been known to frighten white America with.

Another [perhaps] unintended reward of the Black Power Mix Tape is the neutrality of another Swedish journalist who approached Angela Davis with a concern about the alleged violence that was associated with some of the movement‘s leaders. Davis’ reply is nothing short of riveting.

Much to my delight the film more than captures the foundation that real Hip Hop is rooted.

Talib Kweli does a magnificent job of unveiling his influences birthed from the black power movement. Ditto for Erykah Badu, whose entire presence can be traced to Angela Davis’ plight in America. Once the credits roll, you may have a series of unanswered questions. However, one thing is certain, if this black power movement continues to fade at this alarming rate, look no further than where you were and what you were doing when it happened.

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1 Love Ray Lewis

AL B. SURE??

2011-05-25T12:48:00.000-07:00

"A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights." Napolean Bonaparte

The year was 1989 and New York was in the mist of its sweaty, sweltering summer madness. The seasonal discomfort is masked only by illegally opened fire hydrants, bells from Mr. Softee, Italian Ices’ and window-shaped air conditioners (fully throttled) attempting to make sense of the shade-less temperatures. The unbearable summer climate in the concrete jungle confines is matched by the short-fused residents. Somehow, the wind-less heat always has a way of igniting those not-so-tempered temperaments. Often times the summer atmosphere in New York inspires the dehydrated natives to escape to a land lined with [more] trees and grassy walkways – somewhere far south of the Lincoln Tunnel.

On August 23, a boiling Brooklyn block erupted to an unspeakable level that is more suited for those infamous confederate states found 800 miles south of the tunnel. On this day, a 16-year-old black kid named Yusef Hawkins rounded-up a few friends to take a look at a used Pontiac that Hawkins found in an ad the day before. What the eager shoppers didn’t know was an angry mob of (mostly) Italian-American boys were waiting to “lynch” a black kid that was rumored to attend a Sweet 16 party hosted by one of the Italian boys’ ex-girlfriend. The mob armed with sticks and bats were more heated than the boiling 90-degree thermostat centered in the core of The Apple. As the shoppers entered the Bensonhurst block in Brooklyn, the gang attacked -- beating Hawkins as if Emmett Till was the party’s co-host.

While Yusef’s friends staggered to safety, Hawkins was continually beaten – until a slick-haired kid named Joey Farmer pulled out a pistol and shot Hawkins in the chest killing him instantly. Farmer escaped to upstate NY, while the close-knit Italian community went silent, hoping the tragedy would simply go away and Farmer would elude prosecution.

What happened next was nothing short of the north, gone south. As the days turned into nights and the nights turned into days; the temperature rose faster than a Monica Lewinsky date. Still there was no justice in sight. That is until a local activist named, Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. emerged. Rev. Al – would be his brand name once his media-made audience grew. However, on this August summer day, Sharpton was a local 60’s preacher searching for justice the old fashion way. Sharpton organized and led a nightly march in Brooklyn that attracted scores of news media and famous New York movie stars and pop singers – including a short, Brooklyn film maker named Spike Lee. The peaceful protest included many NY Knick ball players and budding stars like Chris Rock who were greeted in Bensonhurst with tossed watermelons, hurdled chicken bones and chants of “monkeys go home!” At the head of the protest line was a sweaty, stubby, perm-haired man, donned in a velour jogging suit…, igniting so much national pressure on this small Brooklyn Block that Farmer eventually emerged from hiding, as he turned himself in (aided by a neighborhood resident).

That’s Al Shaprton in summary. He has ALWAYS been DEEP in the trenches, fighting for the voiceless and underserved. If there is a cause or fight for injustice (especially a black one), if there is a need for fair and equal treatment you can set your clock to an Al Sharpton appearance – unless Jesse gets there first.
Nevertheless, you name the injustice: Jena 6, Sean Bell, Bernhard Goetz, Mike Tyson, Amadou Diallo, the Dunbar Village Rape, the Howard Beach uprising, the Crown Heights Riots, the US Military in Puerto Rico, Sony Music vs. Michael Jackson, Proposition 48, and who will ever forget, Tawana Brawley.

I LOVE Al Sharpton – mostly because he is one of the few people whose actions often match the What Would Jesus Do conundrum. I’m not always sure He would address these issues the same as Sharpton, which is why we are ONLY built in His image – the execution is our puzzle.
On this past Sunday’s edition of 60 Minutes, Al Sharpton officially unveiled a different phase in his life. Some supporters will call it growth. And, some questioning his motives will call it a digression. And, many others will see it as a 180-degree about-face – sadly, the latter is probably where you’ll find me. And it hurts. I mean it really hurts. Badly.

"A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself." -- Titus Livius

If you turn your clocks back to 2008, a black Chicago truth-fighting native was building a rocket headed straight for the White House – a familiar target of Al Sharpton. Barack Obama was different though. He talked of many struggles that he and Sharpton shared. In fact the only real difference was their approach to justice. As often reminded by the media, Barack has a Dr. King-like design. He crosses his legs when he speaks. Obama looks you in the eyes, and his articulation is a thing of American beauty and comfort. Barack dresses the part too. Neat suit, handsome ties, Harvard Law diction, two adorable kids, no mistresses, white shirt, polished shoes, neat American hair cut, no posse and an almighty Oprah endorsement.

Hell, I almost sent him a check. Obama’s Save the World campaign speeches not only won America’s Oval Seat it earned him a Nobel Peace Prize – something Sharpton wouldn’t even be considered for – although one can argue Sharpton’s history is probably more deserving. Barack Obama made the same ‘ole promises that every would-be president proclaims: No free rides for the rich, no more wars, no children left behind, no more new taxes, no [more] blow jobs in the office. Yet, even a political skeptic like Rev. Al had to admit, this run for office was a wee bit different. This guy seems to have a different aura, a different appeal, a different vibe. In fact, he seems more Koffi Anna and less systematic. Barack seems more Jim Brown and less Kobe Bryant. He seems much more Arthur Ashe and less Don King. More Prince, less Diddy. Much more Powell than Thomas – much more Roses than Guns. What American citizen wouldn't want a US President that pointed less guns?

Well, since Barack has been in office, with his peace prize polished and tucked away there has been: One additional war, 10k more troops in the Middle East, several Wall Street bail-outs, one beer summit, an unchanged 9.9% unemployment rate (and we won’t even mention the black community numbers), an amended Patriot Act with HIS signature and extension, and NOT ONE WORD ABOUT A MOSTLY BLACK NEW ORLEANS which has been buried in a sea of rumble for over 5 years. Normally, Al Sharpton would’ve led a uprising march on the White House lawn during dinner. But, as Al said in his 60 Minutes interview: “…in exchange for access to the White House I will never criticize Barack Obama in public again." In fact, when black activists (such as Cornel West, Tavis Smiley or others) attempt to challenge Barack’s OBVIOUS black community apathy, it is Sharpton who will defend Barack's policies or lack thereof.

It is really hard to imagine that after all these years of truth fighting that all one had to do to keep Al Sharpton quiet on issues that adversely affect the black community is to grant him access to the people that make the inequality just.

It is plainly obvious that Al Sharpton’s White House badge grants him access to a room that is much cooler than all of those New York summers combined. Maybe Sharpton has one more march up his tenured sleeve. Maybe Sharpton has elevated his fight and has pulled off the ultimate Spook by the Door deception. No one will really knows what Sharpton’s eventual plan is. My only hope is… if Al Sharpton’s legacy is contingent on the right side of justice, then Al (better) B. Sure…, the den you’ve entered doesn’t belong to the lying.

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1 love,
Ray Lewis

Decoded

2011-01-08T11:43:00.000-08:00

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Douglas Bradbury

To be honest I’m really not a huge Jay-Z fan. I like him and I believe his music can be revealingly witty (at times). However, too often he abandons that path for the fast, commercial commerce road that many of his juniors take because (unlike him) they actually have no other alternative. It has been widely accepted that his first CD Reasonable Doubt is one of the best LPs of its time and without question, one of Hip Hop’s classics. Unfortunately, Jay-Z hasn’t come close to ever doing that again – and why would he since it was one of his least profitable -- and that my friends is where the music satire begins.

Naturally, as art would have it, his book Decoded reads like Reasonable Doubt (reincarnated) with a hint of Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door and the commerce from this book is sure to follow. The semi-autobiography highlights the interesting crossroad between the streets & the suites and by the time Mr. Carter is done you are really not sure what side of the fence is safer, more profitable or more immoral. Additionally, if you were in his shoes the quizzical path you may choose. Just image the dynamics of a 14-year-old paying the light bill so that your mom can have enough light to sign the truant letter denoting her teen son skipping school? This is a scripted tale within this scripted tale.

Decoded tackles the paradox of loyalty and what makes Shawn, Jay-Z and vice-versa. It literally reads like a season of HBO’s The Wire – and you’ll find yourself rooting for the bad guy, because the so-called “good” guy’s hustle is just as foul -- just not as illegal – which in itself should be criminal.

Decoded is the epitome of irony in the most straight-forward, concise manner. You'll learn a great deal about language and how great Hip Hop is far more complicated than the inane people who are too lazy or unqualified to analyze it. The lyrical ending in many of the book’s chapters seems to be directed at many of those people. Honestly, you don’t have to be a fan of Jay-Z or Hip Hop to find enormous value in this book. And, if you happen to be a fan of either, it’ll be a blueprint that you’ll treasure for years – no doubt!

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1 love,

Ray Lewis

THE LONG & SHORT OF IT

2010-09-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. John F. Kennedy

There are certain phrases that on the surface seem fairly normal, but in your lifetime, you’ll never hear them uttered aloud. Phrases like “hand me that piano;” or “you know, I never realized how cute Flava Flav was,” or “I think Sarah Palin would make a great tutor.”

Recently, a friend in Atlanta called me and said, Ray!!!! Have you heard the news (blah, blah…..and on the call went for what seemed like an hour); finally she paused long enough to say: “Man, poor Eddie Long!!” I thought, hmm, I never, ever thought I’d hear a member of New Birth say that. In fact, that goes against the very foundation of their recruitment process. I believe that team will probably be dusting off their résumés real soon.

CNN’s: Sexual Molestation by a Decatur Pastor: “breaking news” headline didn’t seem that “breaking” or “news” worthy to me – especially after my phone call the night before.

.

However, given society’s level of intellectual engagement, my CNN assessment isn’t even newsworthy anymore either.

There are a few things in life worst than:

a) Being accused of a sadistic act you didn’t commit. Or
b) Abuse of power. Or
c) Not experiencing the benefit of the doubt for either.

For over 20 years, I’ve lived less than 5 miles from New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia and I don’t mind saying Eddie Long was part of the reason I chose Lithonia to reside. I moved from the Bronx, NY to Decatur, GA., mainly to own some land -- but more importantly, I wanted to literally build a community! I wanted to take some land, build a house on it; hopefully surround myself with like-minded neighbors/friends; and circulate our dollars more than 10 times before it fell into the hands of community oppressors.

[Don’t worry they know who they are, even if you don’t].

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love New York (hence my temporary residency in Queens Village now). But New York City just isn’t the type of place to actually build a new community. The only thing new in New York is the growing number of people wondering will there ever be a middle class again?

The first Saturday, after my move to Decatur, Ga., my cousin took me to the South Dekalb Mall.

My first reaction was, WOW, I wonder who is sponsoring this weave-a-thon? Then I realized oh, it’s just Saturday in the Deep South. Fun though.

After a half-hour of watching people purchase things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like,

I went outside for some much needed air – again something the Bronx summers didn’t offer enough of.

When I got outside, there was a cat standing next to a black, dark-tinted, sweet, wide-bodied S-600 Benz-O. The whip, windows and wheels were wiped project clean – underlined with some deep-dished, chromed rims (hey it was 1990). The paint was just glistening – so much so that it was hard to directly stare at it – counter to the owner’s purchasing goal, I’m sure. I am a huge fan of clean cars no matter what the make, but clean foreign cars always seemed real cool to me. So, despite the shine, I stared endlessly until this cool-looking cat popped out – leaving the doors open wide enough to hear the instrumental version of Rob Base’s “It Takes Two.” I didn’t really know how much I missed New York until those doors opened. Man.

The dude that pimped out of the ride was wearing a fuzzy Kangol cap (turned to the back), a black ADIDAS jogging suit and matching shelled-toes. I thought oh, he must be here for the weave-a-thon too. Nice whip though.

My cousin finally came out of the mall and walked up to the Benz driver and dapped him up. I thought, hmm, my cousin doesn’t have a weave. When we headed to her dirty Toyota Camry, I asked, “Who was that guy you greeted?” She said, ALL IN ONE BREATH, “Oh, that’s Eddie Long, he’s the fabulous preacher at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, they have 3,500 members and it’s around the corner from the house, he’s really cool, he’s great, smart, funny – and you’ll like him because he does wonderful work in the community.”
I thought:

a) Man that was a long sentence.
b) Who knows the exact head count of a church they don’t attend? And why?
c) He probably had nothing to do with building this mall.
d) My cousin, who just spent $200 in a marbled-floor flee market knows an activist?

The activist thought is the only one that lingered in my brain until the next day.
On that day, I got dressed and went to New Birth – probably more out of suspicion than salvation, but I have since repented for that choice. After the 30-minute recital from the largest choir I had ever witnessed, the Benz cat from the day before strolled on stage to a Prince-like ovation – really, prince as in royalty, not artist. In either case, I’m not real sure Jesus was ever this popular. Long spoke for about an hour and while I don’t really remember the topic or message, it was truly entertaining, sort of like Prince (the artist), not royalty.

It took Coretta Scott-King’s death to get me to attend another service at New Birth; not surprising, since all of my appearances on earth can be neatly traced to activism.

The TRUTH: It may not lead you to where you thought you were going, but it will always lead you somewhere better. When ignored, it will eventually show itself. The closeness of your relationships is directly proportional to the degree to which you have revealed the truth about yourself. It can be painful.

My cousin was right, through my years in Lithonia, Long was credited with a great deal of the “happenings” in the Lithonia community – most of which are free or of a minimal charge. Long’s outreach is well-noted: He’s funded private businesses, offered countless professional workshops, health and sports initiatives, limo services, restaurants, political podiums, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes' funeral service, concerts featuring: Mike Phillips, Rachelle Farrell, Bebe & Cece Winans, Fred Hammond, and the ever-popular, annual Fourth of July fireworks show.

Oddly, it’s the alleged fireworks of a sexual allegation involving two boys (and former members) that has the community reeling about the fate of Bishop Eddie L. Long. The reaction has been as predictable as a holiday sale. The members (that I spoke to) said they are standing behind their pastor. Non members are saying this is one of the many worldly reasons they would NEVER join New Birth. Few have given any unsolicited thought to the boys –whom quite frankly (whether innocent or guilty) will never be the same. One current member told me, I need you to pray for my Bishop – note the possessive term. I wonder if that ownership will be there if Long is actually found to be culpable?

I asked my friend just that…, what if he’s guilty? She said, I never thought of that... – then he’s really going to need your prayers. I thought an attorney would be more immediate (which I believe he’s addressed). A prayer for wisdom is where the LONG-term resolution will ultimately end. Or, maybe it’s me praying aloud for this short-sighted community to grow.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

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Fields of Dreams

2010-06-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Gloria Steinem

If you would, please take the minute to think about the most demeaning, embarrassing, worthless, humiliating, degrading situation ever bestowed upon you. Take another minute, in fact, take two. Multiply that “situation” by 10! Now, take a knife and drive it through the heart of your self esteem. If you’ve followed this traumatic exercise you are now half way down the dark alley of understanding the psyche of a rape victim. And, no matter how normal a person may appear on the outside, these victims will probably never (fully)recover from this on the inside -- literally.
As horrific a violation as rape is to one’s human rights and dignity; there is a legal aspect that is equally discomforting. And for Ghetto Proverbs regulars – you probably already guessed, this is where our frightening discussion will begin.

Ben Roethlisberger is a 28-year-old player for the famed Pittsburgh Steelers and the youngest starting quarterback to ever win a NFL Super Bowl.
Mike Tyson is a 43-year-old retired boxer and is the youngest undisputed heavyweight champion to ever to win the WBC, WBA & IBF world heavyweight titles – the sport’s Super Bowl equivalent.

If you just landed from outer space, welcome. Please note, there are two sets of laws that govern life in America. There are rules for the rich and rules for the poor. And if you are a highly-compensated public figure, those rules are a tad bit blurry. If you are a highly-compensated white male, that blur is a mirage. If you are a black male, that mirage just became a nightmare. If you are a woman, start packing for outer space.

Roethlisberger and Tyson have more in common than two highly sought-after, highly visible, and highly-compensated sports icons. They both reached their (public) low by raping a woman (in private).

In March 2010, Ben Roethlisberger met a 20-year-old female college student in a nightclub in Milledgeville, Georgia. After a couple of hours (and a few drinks) he was having sex with her in the club’s bathroom, while his bodyguards manned the door -- manned being the operative word.

In July 1991, Mike Tyson met an 18-year-old female beauty queen at a pageant in Indianapolis, Indiana. Later that evening the woman graciously accepted a chauffeur-driven limousine ride to Tyson’s hotel room. After her arrival (roughly 1:36am), the two had sex, while Tyson’s bodyguard manned the door -- manned being the operative word.

The spectators’ accounts leading to both “proceedings” are almost as unbelievable as the [eventual] outcome. Roethlisberger’s on-lookers flagged Ben’s vile, contemptible, and intrusive in nature; while Tyson’s observers applauded his very candid, explicit, straight-forward “goal(s).” Both playas had their share of tainted off-the-field incidents, but nothing close to rape.

The college student and the beauty queen both filed rape charges; after unveiling horrific accounts of their respective recollections. For their “participation” Ben got community service, while Tyson got 10 years – or one year for every hour the jury deliberated. Tyson was released after serving three years...

... perhaps one year for every side to a story.

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1 love,
Ray Lewis

The Rebirth of a Nation

2010-06-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. Abraham Lincoln

It’s a warm, moist, muggy pre-summer afternoon weekend in Atlanta. Naturally, the malls are predictably packed with a high degree of traffic searching for non-essential items to add to Visa’s very essential assets.

And, so goes a nation once built to lead; now struggling to follow, and teetering in the final stages of irrelevance. America’s reality is being swallowed in a flat-screen of scripted, high definition reality. Entertainment is being masked as news and [would-be] news journalists are being assigned to chase kids hiding in air balloons; or finding Tiger Woods’ “playmates,” or hyping American Idols – the latter being the saddest of oxymoronic. Meanwhile “Rome” is burning in a blanket of apathy stitched by a pyromaniac. How on (what’s left) of the earth did we get here?

Charred are the IBMs of the American fabric. Imploded is the once-leading car manufacturer, General Motors. Grounded is wing-less United Airlines. Exploded is the World Trade Center. And, while the rubble is gone, the rumblings remain. What were once financial staples in the world’s fabric of business is now an ad-hoc of infamous mergers and emerging uncertainties.

I truly believe that America’s deepest desperation has reached record proportions and the voices of reason are drowning or being sponsored by bloody oil spills. The growing gap of “who matters,” “who cares,” and “who’s left” is widening with every corporate merger – which increases the triage of the unemployed.

America’s triangular structured wealth chart is getting pointier and the circular vision of saving the poor is spinning endlessly in a shore of political pessimism. Entertainment isn’t even entertaining anymore. Bands are synthetic replications birthed from an expensive suit. Movies are 3-D sequels of the top box office receipts from the week prior, while sports are the real estate version of “Let’s Make a Deal” or “Pin the Tail on the Lebron."

The question atop of the “100,000 Pyramid” is, who is going to step to the podium of truth and justice? Who holds the band-aid to impartiality? Who? When is greatness going to ignite this new millennium and save our souls – or (at the very least) resurrect soul music? You know…, there was a time when the former provoked the latter.

Where is King’s DNA? I still see his bloody murderers – in fact, Barack is perched at the tip of their organizational chart. How’s that for irony? Who is going to reveal the mask of perception and plow the road of redemption?

Naturally, Jesus could, but half of His so-called followers would probably be conflicted if His attire was too casual when He returned. Again.

Barack could – and there are more than a handful of "his" citizens that believe Obama is doing all he can right now -- especially given his “inheritance.” I interpreted that as a rosy-colored no! The fact that a LARGE portion of his blueprinted campaign strategy was funded, designed and filed in the board rooms of British Petroleum…, well, you just have to question that silly, unrealistic optimism. Instead of putting my faith in the hands of people that continue to defecate on my head, while calling it fertilizer… I (instead) turn to the largest force on earth; the force of which they’d be no earth. I call on the woman -- mother of earth.

Now I know that most women don’t even like women…, but this rebellion is different. I know no one has been more marginalized, abused, misunderstood, and mistreated than the very species that breathes daily life into the world in nine month intervals. I know being a mother, wife, or First Lady is one of the more thankless jobs on earth (you can search the Bible for further confirmation).
Sadly, aside from Mother’s Day and the occasional “Hi, Mom” from an attention-deprived athlete; what universal honor can woman hang her hat on? In fact, this sexist nation isn’t even courageous enough to elect a female president. History has proven some of the world’s greatest decisions are made with the total exclusion of women, yet women are always there to wipe the tears of their fallen counterparts.
It is for these reasons (and so many other untold ones) that women should conspire to change the world… literally.

No society can exist without the strength, love, charm, compassion, birth canal or maternal instincts of a woman.

So, here’s the plan.

What do you think would happen if women banded together and stopped having sex with men for one year? Bedroom Boycott -- the headlines would read. [At times the media can be so creative].

Never let a problem to be solved become more important than the person to be loved.
-- Barbara Johnson

Clearly, the violence would be immediate and constant – as is often the case with powerful movements. The birth rate would decrease – and it probably should. Men would be more hostile than their typical dented car rage. I think some women would be angry too. However, this band would be the most extreme action since Christ left – and most have forgotten His sacrifice - or don’t believe it ever happened. This call to "non action" would spark a refresher course in the religious dialogue – which is probably necessary too. In fact, this “boycott” may spark some real redemption.

Maybe.

click on blog title for bonus beats

1 love,
Ray Lewis

Sade's Back

2010-02-09T09:51:00.000-08:00

After 3,700-plus days Sade has emerged with (yet) another 10-track similarly smitten, silky-smooth, soulful addition to her well-documented and storied catalog. After months & months of rumors, gossiping word-on-the-streets and the ever-present, calculating, “industry leaks,” Sade’s “Solider of Love” officially dropped today..., just in time for Valentine's Day. I’ll be honest, I like it. The new joint is cool – especially given the other iTunes options.

In the interest of full disclosure, I jumped on the “industry leak” bandwagon [courtesy of my underground cohorts, Cy Prince and Lamar Hawkins and Tony Tone]. I have been spinning "Moon to the Sky" for a couple of weeks and it is officially my favorite on the LP. I think the CD is real cool and no matter how long its been it's tough not to yearn for a Sade project. That said, I’d really hoped that she stepped out of her legendary, safe haven and unleashed a CD that would've thrust her one-named status to record heights (if you pardon the pun). After all, isn’t that the true essence of growth?

Whether you be man or woman you will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor. -- James Allen

I need that growth and courage from her. The souring, close-minded domestic industry needs it. Radio (among MANY other things) needs it. And quite frankly, I think Sade needs it too. I’m not so sure that this soon-to-be-awakened, 4G networked society is willing to wait another 10 years for [yet another] monotone, roll-out-of-bed, bouncing-balled liner note, sing-a-long from the industry’s most-noted and illusive mystery star. At this point, I would settle for a Sweetback backing. Or, what about a cool, “summer night” collaboration with Maxwell – he may need that too! I mean is delightful dubbing with D’Angelo too much to ask?

What about collaborations with the likes of: Jose James, Shaun Escoffery, Aya, Jonathan Butler, Wax Poetic, or the British Soul Wonder, Omar? (As if you didn't see that suggestion coming!)

I know its Sade “safe” to avoid any musical departures that could possibly tarnish her tabloid-free career. However, isn’t the opposite true as well? If Sade went out on a limb and did a live set with the Roots’ band circled behind her and a host of soul singers like: Erykah, Rahsaan Patterson, Roy Ayers, Lizz Wright or even a now watered down Jill Scott... I'd pay to see that. Wouldn't you?

I think a show along those lines would elevate her embolic career. Quite frankly, at 51 years of age there isn’t much (I feel) Sade can do this side of a T-Pain duet that will remotely smudge her divine and limelight-less career.

If you like Sade, pick up “Soldier of Love” you'll love this one too. However, if you like change, you may have to wait another decade. Maybe longer.

click on blog title/arrow for bonus beat

1 love,
Ray Lewis

Obama's Big Sellout

2009-12-16T06:05:00.000-08:00

This article appears courtesy of Rolling Stone Magazine author MATT TAIBBI

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?
Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.
How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed
'Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal," says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it."
Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama's election.
That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar — former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett — the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama's chief advisers during the campaign, didn't make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama's policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party's platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive "a Nobel Prize — for evil."
But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama's inner circle — and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president's new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama's biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters — chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).
Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama's economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, who happens to be Bob Rubin's son. At the time, Jamie's dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments.
Now here's where it gets really interesting. It's three weeks after the election. You have a lame-duck president in George W. Bush — still nominally in charge, but in reality already halfway to the golf-and-O'Doul's portion of his career and more than happy to vacate the scene. Left to deal with the still-reeling economy are lame-duck Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs, and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, who served under Bob Rubin in the Clinton White House. Running Obama's economic team are a still-employed Citigroup executive and the son of another Citigroup executive, who himself joined Obama's transition team that same month.
So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin's messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that's just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It's the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin's fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. "If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street," former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, "your doubts should be laid to rest."
It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin's former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obama's Treasury secretary!
Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup — Michael Froman — before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.
Wall Street loved the Citi bailout and the Geithner nomination so much that the Dow immediately posted its biggest two-day jump since 1987, rising 11.8 percent. Citi shares jumped 58 percent in a single day, and JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley soared more than 20 percent, as Wall Street embraced the news that the government's bailout generosity would not die with George W. Bush and Hank Paulson. "Geithner assures a smooth transition between the Bush administration and that of Obama, because he's already co-managing what's happening now," observed Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Capital Management.
Left unnoticed, however, was the fact that Geithner had been hired by a sitting Citigroup executive who still had a big bonus coming despite his proximity to Obama. In January 2009, just over a month after the bailout, Citigroup paid Froman a year-end bonus of $2.25 million. But as outrageous as it was, that payoff would prove to be chump change for the banker crowd, who were about to get everything they wanted — and more — from the new president.
The irony of Bob Rubin: He's an unapologetic arch-capitalist demagogue whose very career is proof that a free-market meritocracy is a myth. Much like Alan Greenspan, a staggeringly incompetent economic forecaster who was worshipped by four decades of politicians because he once dated Barbara Walters, Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having fucked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running Goldman Sachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way.
As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year's financial crisis: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed specifically to legalize the Citigroup megamerger) and the deregulation of the derivatives market. Having set that time bomb, Rubin left government to join Citi, which promptly expressed its gratitude by giving him $126 million in compensation over the next eight years (they don't call it bribery in this country when they give you the money post factum). After urging management to amp up its risky investments in toxic vehicles, a strategy that very nearly destroyed the company, Rubin blamed Citi's board for his screw-ups and complained that he had been underpaid to boot. "I bet there's not a single year where I couldn't have gone somewhere else and made more," he said.
Despite being perhaps more responsible for last year's crash than any other single living person — his colossally stupid decisions at both the highest levels of government and the management of a private financial superpower make him unique — Rubin was the man Barack Obama chose to build his White House around.
There are four main ways to be connected to Bob Rubin: through Goldman Sachs, the Clinton administration, Citigroup and, finally, the Hamilton Project, a think tank Rubin spearheaded under the auspices of the Brookings Institute to promote his philosophy of balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation. The team Obama put in place to run his economic policy after his inauguration was dominated by people who boasted connections to at least one of these four institutions — so much so that the White House now looks like a backstage party for an episode of Bob Rubin, This Is Your Life!
At Treasury, there is Geithner, who worked under Rubin in the Clinton years. Serving as Geithner's "counselor" — a made-up post not subject to Senate confirmation — is Lewis Alexander, the former chief economist of Citigroup, who advised Citi back in 2007 that the upcoming housing crash was nothing to worry about. Two other top Geithner "counselors" — Gene Sperling and Lael Brainard — worked under Rubin at the National Economic Council, the key group that coordinates all economic policymaking for the White House.
As director of the NEC, meanwhile, Obama installed economic czar Larry Summers, who had served as Rubin's protégé at Treasury. Just below Summers is Jason Furman, who worked for Rubin in the Clinton White House and was one of the first directors of Rubin's Hamilton Project. The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like "Walmart: A Progressive Success Story" — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. "NAFTA's shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them," Obama declared. A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal. "The president has said we will look at all of our options, but I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement," U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk told reporters in a little-publicized conference call last April.
The announcement was not so surprising, given who Obama hired to serve alongside Furman at the NEC: management consultant Diana Farrell, who worked under Rubin at Goldman Sachs. In 2003, Farrell was the author of an infamous paper in which she argued that sending American jobs overseas might be "as beneficial to the U.S. as to the destination country, probably more so."
Joining Summers, Furman and Farrell at the NEC is Froman, who by then had been formally appointed to a unique position: He is not only Obama's international finance adviser at the National Economic Council, he simultaneously serves as deputy national security adviser at the National Security Council. The twin posts give Froman a direct line to the president, putting him in a position to coordinate Obama's international economic policy during a crisis. He'll have help from David Lipton, another joint appointee to the economics and security councils who worked with Rubin at Treasury and Citigroup, and from Jacob Lew, a former Citi colleague of Rubin's whom Obama named as deputy director at the State Department to focus on international finance.
Over at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to regulate derivatives trading, Obama appointed Gary Gensler, a former Goldman banker who worked under Rubin in the Clinton White House. Gensler had been instrumental in helping to pass the infamous Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which prevented regulation of derivative instruments like CDOs and credit-default swaps that played such a big role in cratering the economy last year. And as head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Obama named Peter Orszag, who served as the first director of Rubin's Hamilton Project. Orszag once succinctly summed up the project's ideology as a sort of liberal spin on trickle-down Reaganomics: "Market competition and globalization generate significant economic benefits."
Taken together, the rash of appointments with ties to Bob Rubin may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in the history of government. "Rather than having a team of rivals, they've got a team of Rubins," says Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. "You see that in policy choices that have resuscitated — but not reformed — Wall Street."
While Rubin's allies and acolytes got all the important jobs in the Obama administration, the academics and progressives got banished to semi-meaningless, even comical roles. Kornbluh was rewarded for being the chief policy architect of Obama's meteoric rise by being outfitted with a pith helmet and booted across the ocean to Paris, where she now serves as America's never-again-to-be-seen-on-TV ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Goolsbee, meanwhile, was appointed as staff director of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a kind of dumping ground for Wall Street critics who had assisted Obama during the campaign; one top Democrat calls the panel "Siberia."
Joining Goolsbee as chairman of the PERAB gulag is former Fed chief Paul Volcker, who back in March 2008 helped candidate Obama write a speech declaring that the deregulatory efforts of the Eighties and Nineties had "excused and even embraced an ethic of greed, corner-cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system." That speech met with rapturous applause, but the commission Obama gave Volcker to manage is so toothless that it didn't even meet for the first time until last May. The lone progressive in the White House, economist Jared Bernstein, holds the impressive-sounding title of chief economist and national policy adviser — except that the man he is advising is Joe Biden, who seems more interested in foreign policy than financial reform.
The significance of all of these appointments isn't that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It's that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants. "Bob Rubin, these guys, they're classic limousine liberals," says David Sirota, a former Democratic strategist. "These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they're willing to give a little more to the poor. That's the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else."
Even the members of Obama's economic team who have spent most of their lives in public office have managed to make small fortunes on Wall Street. The president's economic czar, Larry Summers, was paid more than $5.2 million in 2008 alone as a managing director of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and pocketed an additional $2.7 million in speaking fees from a smorgasbord of future bailout recipients, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. At Treasury, Geithner's aide Gene Sperling earned a staggering $887,727 from Goldman Sachs last year for performing the punch-line-worthy service of "advice on charitable giving." Sperling's fellow Treasury appointee, Mark Patterson, received $637,492 as a full-time lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, and another top Geithner aide, Lee Sachs, made more than $3 million working for a New York hedge fund called Mariner Investment Group. The list goes on and on. Even Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who has been out of government for only 30 months of his adult life, managed to collect $18 million during his private-sector stint with a Wall Street firm called Wasserstein-Perella.
The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place. "You can't expect these people to do anything other than protect Wall Street," says Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida. That thinking was clear from Obama's first address to Congress, when he stressed the importance of getting Americans to borrow like crazy again. "Credit is the lifeblood of the economy," he declared, pledging "the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money." A president elected on a platform of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing fundamental when it came to the economy. Rather than doing what FDR had done during the Great Depression and institute stringent new rules to curb financial abuses, Obama planned to institutionalize the policy, firmly established during the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else.
Obama hasn't always toed the Rubin line when it comes to economic policy. Despite being surrounded by a team that is powerfully opposed to deficit spending — balanced budgets and deficit reduction have always been central to the Rubin way of thinking — Obama came out of the gate with a huge stimulus plan designed to kick-start the economy and address the job losses brought on by the 2008 crisis. "You have to give him credit there," says Sen. Bernie Sanders, an advocate of using government resources to address unemployment. "It's a very significant piece of legislation, and $787 billion is a lot of money."
But whatever jobs the stimulus has created or preserved so far — 640,329, according to an absurdly precise and already debunked calculation by the White House — the aid that Obama has provided to real people has been dwarfed in size and scope by the taxpayer money that has been handed over to America's financial giants. "They spent $75 billion on mortgage relief, but come on — look at how much they gave Wall Street," says a leading Democratic strategist. Neil Barofsky, the inspector general charged with overseeing TARP, estimates that the total cost of the Wall Street bailouts could eventually reach $23.7 trillion. And while the government continues to dole out big money to big banks, Obama and his team of Rubinites have done almost nothing to reform the warped financial system responsible for imploding the global economy in the first place.
The push for reform seemed to get off to a promising start. In the House, the charge was led by Rep. Barney Frank, the outspoken chair of the House Financial Services Committee, who emerged during last year's Bush bailouts as a sharp-tongued critic of Wall Street. Back when Obama was still a senator, he and Frank even worked together to introduce a populist bill targeting executive compensation. Last spring, with the economy shattered, Frank began to hold hearings on a host of reforms, crafted with significant input from the White House, that initially contained some very good elements. There were measures to curb abusive credit-card lending, prevent banks from charging excessive fees, force publicly traded firms to conduct meaningful risk assessment and allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation. There were even measures to crack down on risky derivatives and to bar firms like AIG from picking their own regulators.
Then the committee went to work — and the loopholes started to appear.
P.S I know there are the same people of no etos in the base of the democratic party,Racism is everywhere and I really don't believe the civil war was fought to free the slaves when you cut through the layers.And as far as the honorable solders on both sides they were probably defending against what they believed to be a life altering event to their home land.It kind of reminds me of the statement "The smoking gun will be in the form of a mushroom cloud."
Giovanna | December 16, 2009 11:52 AM EST
OwlRancher, I apologize. I suspected that you might have been being sarcastic, but it's not always easy to tell in this medium, and so I took the opportunity to set a few misconceptions straight, because I get extremely pissed off when federalist propaganda and anti-Southern bias are spouted in an effort to (1) promote federalism and discredit the ideal of confederation, (2) misrepresent the entire ideal of "states' rights" as a euphemism for racism and pro-slavery sentiments, and/or (3) malign the people of the South and praise Northerners as having somehow had anything remotely akin to moral superiority in the conflict that is popularly named "the American Civil War."
OwlRancher | December 16, 2009 11:30 AM EST
And "G: you are right and I had no intention to shame anyone but just point out the obserdity of NBF's statement that the base of the dems,(Which I am not)is all the differant illegal aliens who would get "Free" health care.Why he /she doesn't get that the beef should be against the very people who have allowed the siphning off of wealth of the middle class and what little the poor have.
The beef should be against those who brainwashed we people into beliving Corpratetism and Capitalism is Gooood.
When it is a economic method of making a small group of the wealthiest wealthier and if the have no ethos we are just pawn and slaves to them to be disguarded as they see fit.And BOTH parties are complicite in their EVIL.
And if We the People do not start understabding this fact and stop our partasan bull pissing contests we loss they win,if it's not already to late.
And if you have a perpencity to do it pray our president will step away from the darkness,no pun.
dlt | December 16, 2009 11:22 AM EST
Racism--"dimpled chads," etc--the reason why GW Bush won in 2000. Darwinian, Republican profit motive: health care only for those in the one percent income bracket
OwlRancher | December 16, 2009 11:12 AM EST
"G" The my first statement was not a slap at my southern brothers and sisters It was a to point out that brothers and sisters killed each other on the behalf of the wealthy white plantation owners (who yes did have red/white /yellow but mostly black slave labor),against the wealthy white industrialists (who payed little for long hazardous work with no reguard to the lives of the workers).BOTH ARE EVIL AND A VIRUS TO MANKIND!!
The rebublican base is made up of people like Trent Lott,Jeff Sessions,John Boner,Mel Blunt,Tom Delay.
All tied to the forced prostitution and forced tactile labor camps and forced abortions in the Merianis Islands through Jack Abramhof.
You are right,Hilliary is no libral she was a rich little Gooldwater girl in the late 60's and yes a opertunistic cerpetbagger whos' govenor husband,(a governor who has a not so good record of dealing with the needs of the people he was to serve in Ark.)
Some how got the nod to throw his hat in the ring for pres.( A deal with the power brokers I wont get into here.)
Giovanna | December 16, 2009 5:12 AM EST
(cont from last post)

Oh, speakng of that, tell me where the strongholds of the KKK and other racist groups were in the 20th century. Oh, right, the Pacific Northwest (KKK), Montana (Neo-Nazis), Wyoming (Neo-Nazis), New York (Skinheads), Missouri (Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord), ... Goodness, states that were part of the Union, not part of the Confederacy. Now, I would be dissembling if I didn't admit that there have been racist organizations active in the South in the 20th century as well. There certainly have been, but once again, we see this attempt to shame the "white" Southerners, while the Yankees put on a show of how morally superior they were and are, and the truth, then and now, is something else.

But what is this about, really? This is about the same "Divide and conquer" policy I mentioned in one of my previous posts. This is about pitting Northerners against Southerners, fomenting bias, prejudice, even racism, all in order to keep us blinded to who the actual enemy is, and it's not "white" Southerners, or New England "Yankees," or blacks from anywhere, or "brown hordes," or "the Yellow Peril," or any other average human being struggling just as much as we are to make a living (or, in some cases, to merely survive). No, no, no, damn it!

The enemy is the wealthy and greedy capitalist, corporatist, financier, Wall Street insider -- AND their bought politicians.

So, yes, I take offense at the continuing propaganda that paints "the South" as something to do with pro-slavery and racism and other bullshit, and I'll correct that, but in the end, the real enemy isn't "the North." It's the same privileged leisure class and their toadies that it always has been since feudalistic "Landlords" and the colonial imperialists of the "Age of Exploration," and the conquering imperialists of the earlier empires like the Roman, Hellenistic, Medo-Persian, Assyro-Babylonian ...

Wake up and fight the real enemy.
On the Senate side, finance reform has yet to make it through the markup process, but there's every reason to believe that its final bill will be as watered down as the House version by the time it comes to a vote. The original measure, drafted by chairman Christopher Dodd of the Senate Banking Committee, is surprisingly tough on Wall Street — a fact that almost everyone in town chalks up to Dodd's desperation to shake the bad publicity he incurred by accepting a sweetheart mortgage from the notorious lender Countrywide. "He's got to do the shake-his-fist-at-Wall Street thing because of his, you know, problems," says a Democratic Senate aide. "So that's why the bill is starting out kind of tough."
The aide pauses. "The question is, though, what will it end up looking like?"
He's right — that is the question. Because the way it works is that all of these great-sounding reforms get whittled down bit by bit as they move through the committee markup process, until finally there's nothing left but the exceptions. In one example, a measure that would have forced financial companies to be more accountable to shareholders by holding elections for their entire boards every year has already been watered down to preserve the current system of staggered votes. In other cases, this being the Senate, loopholes were inserted before the debate even began: The Dodd bill included the exemption for foreign-currency swaps — a gift to Wall Street that only appeared in the Frank bill during the course of hearings — from the very outset.
The White House's refusal to push for real reform stands in stark contrast to what it should be doing. It was left to Rep. Paul Kanjorski in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate to propose bills to break up the so-called "too big to fail" banks. Both measures would give Congress the power to dismantle those pseudomonopolies controlling almost the entire derivatives market (Goldman, Citi, Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America control 95 percent of the $290 trillion over-the-counter market) and the consumer-lending market (Citi, Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo issue one of every two mortgages, and two of every three credit cards). On November 18th, in a move that demonstrates just how nervous Democrats are getting about the growing outrage over taxpayer giveaways, Barney Frank's committee actually passed Kanjorski's measure. "It's a beginning," Kanjorski says hopefully. "We're on our way." But even if the Senate follows suit, big banks could well survive — depending on whom the president appoints to sit on the new regulatory board mandated by the measure. An oversight body filled with executives of the type Obama has favored to date from Citi and Goldman Sachs hardly seems like a strong bet to start taking an ax to concentrated wealth. And given the new bailout provisions that provide these megafirms a market advantage over smaller banks (those Paul Volcker calls "too small to save"), the failure to break them up qualifies as a major policy decision with potentially disastrous consequences.
"They should be doing what Teddy Roosevelt did," says Sanders. "They should be busting the trusts."
That probably won't happen anytime soon. But at a minimum, Obama should start on the road back to sanity by making a long-overdue move: firing Geithner. Not only are the mop-headed weenie of a Treasury secretary's fingerprints on virtually all the gross giveaways in the new reform legislation, he's a living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day. And while there are some who think Geithner is about to go — "he almost has to," says one Democratic strategist — at the moment, the president is still letting Wall Street do his talking.
Morning, the National Mall, November 5th. A year to the day after Obama named Michael Froman to his transition team, his political "opposition" has descended upon the city. Republican teabaggers from all 50 states have showed up, a vast horde of frowning, pissed-off middle-aged white people with their idiot placards in hand, ready to do cultural battle. They are here to protest Obama's "socialist" health care bill — you know, the one that even a bloodsucking capitalist interest group like Big Pharma spent $150 million to get passed.
These teabaggers don't know that, however. All they know is that a big government program might end up using tax dollars to pay the medical bills of rapidly breeding Dominican immigrants. So they hate it. They're also in a groove, knowing that at the polls a few days earlier, people like themselves had a big hand in ousting several Obama-allied Democrats, including a governor of New Jersey who just happened to be the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. A sign held up by New Jersey protesters bears the warning, "If You Vote For Obamacare, We Will Corzine You."
I approach a woman named Pat Defillipis from Toms River, New Jersey, and ask her why she's here. "To protest health care," she answers. "And then amnesty. You know, immigration amnesty."
I ask her if she's aware that there's a big hearing going on in the House today, where Barney Frank's committee is marking up a bill to reform the financial regulatory system. She recognizes Frank's name, wincing, but the rest of my question leaves her staring at me like I'm an alien.
"Do you care at all about economic regulation?" I ask. "There was sort of a big economic collapse last year. Do you have any ideas about how that whole deal should be fixed?"
"We got to slow down on spending," she says. "We can't afford it."
"But what do we do about the rules governing Wall Street . . ."
She walks away. She doesn't give a fuck. People like Pat aren't aware of it, but they're the best friends Obama has. They hate him, sure, but they don't hate him for any reasons that make sense. When it comes down to it, most of them hate the president for all the usual reasons they hate "liberals" — because he uses big words, doesn't believe in hell and doesn't flip out at the sight of gay people holding hands. Additionally, of course, he's black, and wasn't born in America, and is married to a woman who secretly hates our country.
These are the kinds of voters whom Obama's gang of Wall Street advisers is counting on: idiots. People whose votes depend not on whether the party in power delivers them jobs or protects them from economic villains, but on what cultural markers the candidate flashes on TV. Finance reform has become to Obama what Iraq War coffins were to Bush: something to be tucked safely out of sight.
Around the same time that finance reform was being watered down in Congress at the behest of his Treasury secretary, Obama was making a pit stop to raise money from Wall Street. On October 20th, the president went to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York and addressed some 200 financiers and business moguls, each of whom paid the maximum allowable contribution of $30,400 to the Democratic Party. But an organizer of the event, Daniel Fass, announced in advance that support for the president might be lighter than expected — bailed-out firms like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were expected to contribute a meager $91,000 to the event — because bankers were tired of being lectured about their misdeeds.
"The investment community feels very put-upon," Fass explained. "They feel there is no reason why they shouldn't earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don't want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown."
Which makes sense. Shit, who could blame the investment community for the meltdown? What kind of assholes are we to put any of this on them?
This is the kind of person who is working for the Obama administration, which makes it unsurprising that we're getting no real reform of the finance industry. There's no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a "moral hazard" creeping over his administration.
"The obvious danger is that with the passage of time, risk-taking will be encouraged and efforts at prudential restraint will be resisted," Volcker told Congress in September, expressing concerns about all the regulatory loopholes in Frank's bill. "Ultimately, the possibility of further crises — even greater crises — will increase."
What's most troubling is that we don't know if Obama has changed, or if the influence of Wall Street is simply a fundamental and ineradicable element of our electoral system. What we do know is that Barack Obama pulled a bait-and-switch on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn't be surprised. Maybe it's our fault, for thinking he was different.
Correction: Due to an editing error, the original version of this story incorrectly identified Jamie Rubin, Bob Rubin's son, as a former diplomat in the Clinton administration.

Community Service

2009-12-09T10:59:00.000-08:00

“We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community... Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.”

--- Cesar Chavez

As most of you know, I started this blog/ site to offer an alternative perspective on this rich and storied community. I address the comforts and plagues; the unity and struggle; the exposure and the escape. Many times it’s not pretty or easy to digest, but I love this community. It is a treasure to me and for all of its ups and downs I will defend it until I’m buried in it.

What This Blog Isn’t
I wanted this blog to be void of the penmanship platform that duplicated the stories that flood the magazine racks on your neighborhood check out line. You know, stories like: Brad & Angelina giving birth to an 11 lb. turkey in the lobby of Bill Clinton’s Harlem Brownstone, during a Jewish holiday, with alternate side of street parking suspended because Mayor Bloomberg stole a third term in office. In short, I tried to leave the sensationalism to the detracting traditional media that continues to under serve the (seemingly) undeserving. After all, why would a sensible student tolerate such a media of mass distractions?

Today, however, I’m going to make an exception to that self-imposed sensationalized rule and offer my perspective on Eldrick Tont Woods or as his shrinking list of friends call him.., Tiger.

I never much cared for Tiger Woods and the under serving newsstands and (loosely-termed) 24-hour breaking news outlets haven’t done much to alter those feelings one way or the other.

Naturally, I don’t know him personally or I may have offered some playa tips. My overall, “beef” with Tiger is I just don’t like elitists or exclusionists. I firmly believe God gave this “green” to all of us, not just an elusive group of white males that (for as long as I can remember) thought a hoe was only used for plowing their manicured greens or sharing their Master’s “head” quarters.

Now I know this restricted sport had their man made clubhouse laws long before Tiger came pawing on the pavement of the pro circuit. But for some reason I got the feeling that Tiger enjoyed -- or at the very least condoned -- this discriminatory / exclusive behavior. You know, like he was immune to not-so-subtle racial, socioeconomic, special, sexist governance. Like his shade of black was better or more acceptable than other black people. The same black people that always seem to find the compassion to support people like Tiger even if they are still restricted from walking on the same green to console him. I got the feeling that Tiger felt like his do-do is more valued or smelled better because the bowl he shitted in had a shiny, more elegant flushing sound. Tiger (no matter what he calls himself) is black and (as of this post) is still married to a lilly white woman. For the record, a black man married to a white woman is cool with me, if that’s how you roll.... around.

I mean Charles Barkley may be the only black person left on Woods’ speed dial. My red flagged issue with Tiger’s marital union and transgression (as he nicely put it) is if you are a black man in America and you ONLY date white women EXCLUSIVELY!! That is a concern for me –not a HUGE concern like the abovementioned, but a concern nonetheless. Now, I don’t mind if you like your coffee with a tad more cream and a bit less rhythm than my taste will allow, but my deeper concern is if that’s the ONLY beverage you dance with. That type of exclusion probably says more about him and further fuels my dislike.

As of this post, Tiger’s sponsors still “like” him and are riding with him like a wrecked Escalade. This is “par for the course” as one would expect a profiteer to side with the color green -- not black, white or blond. That’s just good business nothing personal. Some of these sponsors will make statements like: “We offer our sincere hope that Woods and his family find a peaceful way to move forward.” What that really means is “I cannot wait until the pro golf tour starts again, so we can sell more products to the black families that cannot attend our exclusive events, but want to support Tiger in any way possible.” I don’t own any Woods’ paraphernalia and Buick isn’t even in my top 30 of car choices.

I will however keep my eye on the Tiger and keep you posted, as I feel this is my duty to the community and it’s a pleasure serving you.

If only Mr. Woods felt the same.

click on blog title/ arrow for bonus tracks

1 love,
Ray Lewis

Empire Stakes

2009-10-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." -- John Maynard Keynes

I found this statistic simply astonishing…., during the most recently completed NBA season (2008-09), almost 82% of NBA players were black. That 82% was the highest percentage of black players in the NBA in 15 years. Oddly, that fact was not the astonishing part. After all it was the great, black philosopher, Biggie Smalls who poetically described the only black male exodus from ‘hood as: "Either you slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump-shot!" If the latter in Biggie’s lyrics sing true, the NBA’s personnel statistics support that verse. The rest of Notorious’ rhyme puppets are (either)in prison or resting next to him.

The amazing part doesn’t even rest with the fact that throughout the NBA’s 64-year history, there is STILL only one majority black owner. Yep, the former BET founding father Bob Johnson is the sole, not to be confused with the soul, NBA majority owner and his team is the Charlotte Bobcats. And, for the record, the team name (BOB cats) is not coincidental; but you have to meet him or watch BET to know just how seriously he takes himself and how little he cares about a black plight. The really astonishing fact is Bob Johnson is the only majority team owner of ANY professional team in American sports history!! If there is a slither of a silver lining looming among that empty black cloud it is…, black majority professional team ownership is outpacing black U.S. presidents by 300 centuries. Now that we clearly understand that covert racism, sexism, and collusion are all alive and well, I found the perfect remedy for this situation and it only took 25 years. The answer is.... LeBron Raymone James.

By the start of this NBA season LeBron James will be 24 (he'll turn 25 in December). Equally important is by the end of the 2009-10 NBA season LeBron will be an unrestricted free agent. “Free” being the operative word since we are talking about a league that doesn’t believe in black ownership -- no matter how many trillions the teams owners make off of their backs. In fact, those black players better make sure their tie is straight before and after the game. Ask yourself in what (other) industry could a owner MANIDATE what attaire is deemed "appropriate" before you get to work? Better yet, what group of people will ahere to it? I guess the black ownership rant I'm alluding to is probably nothing more than a hoop dream. As I digress.

LeBron James’ pro hoop dreams begun with his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. But there is ample buzz that Cleveland is not where the bulk of his career will be spent. “Spent” being the operative word; since it’ll cost the Cavs’ owners 3 times what the franchise is actually worth to keep James. Signing LeBron could be really bad for business if the owners inked James to a long term contract and he suffered a career-ending injury or never brought a championship banner to Brownstown — both being real possibilities when you are balancing a balance sheet. Throwing a curve in the basketball equation is... Cleveland has been riddled with double-digit unemployment since the pre Clinton administration, but you’d have to search far outside of a Barack speech to address that fact – "speech" being the operative word. After all, you don't get many presidential donations (i.e. votes) from towns littered with double-digit unemployment.

There are many die hard fans that believe King James should just stay in Cleveland. Those fans translate a King James departure to be more disloyal than the transgressions of his biblical namesake. Now that’s astonishing. James is entering the prime of his career – mainly due to his disloyal departure from attending a college or university that is equally void of black owners. For the life of me I cannot figure out why black people continue to be loyal to people, places and ideas that are un apologetically unfaithful to them. That answer probably rests in the King James version.

There are a minimum of six NBA suitors that have all but tanked this season (which starts tonight at 7pm EST), by clearing salary cap space in hopes of landing James’jock in their draws. Given that there is only one King James (albeit many different versions) there is a good chance five of those jocking teams will NOT be renamed Jamestown. Additionally, two of the most notable suitors reside less than 20 miles apart... one is the the once famed New York Knicks and the other is the soon-to-be Brooklyn Nets.

Look no further than the Barack Bailout addresses to understand the economics of a New York City move. Add the trivial pursuit(ing) fact that Jay-Z -- a (very) minority owner in the Brooklyn-bound Nets has James’number on speed dial just behind B's and just ahead of O’s. Now,(should James leave Cleveland) his destination is probably easier to figure out than your child learning their ESPN’s.

The only way to improve minority anything is for minorities to use their leverage whenever that rare possibilty presents itself. James can sign a contract in a major market and make enough off-the-court endosemennts to improve 10 Ohio cities --even if he had to leave Ohio to do so. After all, what under or unemployed minority cares whether there is a championship banner hanging in a gym owned by a 1% (bailed out) majority? The fact that LeBron has this type leverage to change this at 25 is simply astonishing to me, the fact he may be too loyal to exercise it isn’t!

click on blog title for bonus beats

1 love,
Ray Lewis

THE BOO PRINT 3

2009-09-15T13:07:00.000-07:00

"I don't know anything about music, In my line you don't have to." -Elvis Presley

What I really find insufferably painful about Jay-Z loyalists is… that blind cult of apologists feels as if a person does not like a Jigga Joint then that person is immediately dubbed a “hatar!!” This makes three things perfectly clear:

A. Jay-Z has officially reached Barack’s “above-all critique” status.
B. The days of good journalism hasn’t disappeared, it’s simply ignored—which essentially becomes one of the same.
C. Beyonce must (literally) be sitting on a gold mine.

For those of you that fall into categories A or B, I’ll have to ask that you put your Roc sign down, take your Barack outfit off (the flag pin too) and sprinkle some musical logic when reviewing Carter’s regrettable and unoriginal titled Blue Print 3. This is Jay-Z's 11th Hip Hop attempt and I feel the majestic music maker has penned at least two storied classics in his well documented career. The first is the ageless, street slaying Reasonable Doubt.

This debut was (get this).. both a gift and a curse. The gift was an up close, bird’s-eye view of the droppings that plague the inner city streets —- most notably, Brooklyn. The curse is now that Hova has moved into idyllic status his new address won’t allow him to tell those CNN-less stories anymore. After all, all board members care about is sums & totals, not the sum of the totals.
The second memorable LP in Jay’s catalog was the witty autobiographically depicted, Black Album.

Not many Hip Hop artists have the history, the ingenuity or the public relevance to tell their life story on wax without sounding preachy or self-righteous. The Black Album was truly unique in that regard. Jay-Z’s trifecta would be the Blueprint 1.

I’m not sure I’d call this one a classic (necessarily) but J (for the most part) did put the bottles & chains aside and steered clear of the overflowing boastfulness featured in: "In My Lifetime Vol. 1”, “Vol. 2, Hard Knock Life," “Life & Times of S. Carter” and really corny “Roc La Familia Dynasty” —- all of which collectively sold millions and led to this corny LP -- but more on that in a second. For record, if you turned your Hip Hop clock back to the summer of 1989 — 12 years before Jay-Z’s Blueprint 1 — you’ll find that KRS-One released an album called The Blueprint of Hip Hop. Perhaps, Jay was just paying homage with his thrice mirrored title, huh?

Any who, I will deliberate with anyone on the planet that Jay is the author of two (maybe three) Hip Hop classics and he is one of the top 25 emcees ever. Those facts should virtually exonerate me from being labeled a Jay-Z “hatar" right? Well, just stay tuned…

The Blueprint 3 by all accounts is WACK—even by a school bus strapped helmet standard. The tracks are laced with gimmicky, corn ball beats and underscored with Keisha Cole-ish choruses, which is a far cry from Song Cry. The track featuring Young Geezy is only missing rhyme rivals: Sneezy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Happy, Bashful, Doc and Dopey -— the latter doubling as producer.

The creative control handed to Kanye West was about as wise as a Kanye acceptance speech. Sprinkle producers; Tiny Timberland, Al Shux, the Incredibles, Swizz Beatz and The Neptunes and you have the equivalent of a Christopher Reeves' dance team. This is one of those unfortunate projects that suckered legendary Chi-Town producer, NO I.D. in and regulated his work on this CD to clichéd and corny status. Hope he invests wisely.

As usual, no matter how bad the music, Jay always seems to spit his ever-clever tête-à-tête. His wit was especially evident on his braggadocios, not-so-subtle, middle finger dagger, directed at a grade-school teacher, who apparently, said Shawn Carter wouldn’t amount to much. Maybe the teacher was just referring to this CD. Nevertheless, the Pharrell-propelled track is tolerable, but the lyrics on “So Ambitious” is the only thing that saved this CD from my plastic recycle bin.

Jay-Z The Blueprint 3, "So Ambitious" verse 1

I felt so inspired by what the teacher said/
Said I’d either be dead or be a reefer head/
Not sure if that’s how adults should speak to kids/
Especially when the only thing I did was speak in class/ I'll teach his ass/

Even better what my uncle did/
I popped my demo tape in start to beat my head/ Peeked out my eye, see if he was beatin’ his/
He might as well said beat it kid,/
He’s on the list/ It’s like im searching for kicks/
Like a sneaker head/ You gon’ keep pushing me til I reach the ledge/
And when I reach the ledge, I tellem all to eat a d----/
Take a leap of faith and let my eagle wings spread

Trust me, no matter how corny this CD really is you’ll be treated, by Jay’s loyalists, to many unjust justifications like…”you have to listen to it on Thursday with the kitchen window open and your left foot in the sink”. Or, as one of Hova's Hoes told me, after six Long Island’s, I thought the CD was banging!!

Side bar: after six Long Islands, it’s probably best to remember who you were bangin’ not what!

Fans of radio spins and sound scan swipes will need no justification, but you may need some ice and a designated driver.

click on blog arrow for bonus beats

1 love,
Ray Lewis

THE REAL VIC TIMS

2009-08-19T06:57:00.000-07:00

How did you know that what you sought was redemption and not righteous vengeance?

---- PETE ABRAMS

If you listen closely you’ll hear Mike Vick apologizing (yet) again. And, to be honest it is starting to get on my last nerves. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to (get this) “feel sorry” for someone that in the next two years (or so) will probably net over $7 million dollars. Further punctuating the Vick apathy are people that cannot get a job as a Wal-Mart greeter because of a felony conviction on their permanent record. Those holding their breath waiting for the fairness ship to arrive should probably rent a room in one of those now-infamous dog kennels.

And, what the f#@! is PETA doing? I saw a fat female protester (I’m assuming that eats meat) showcasing her disgust. How ironic! Instead of holding up a sign, she should have considered a mirror. The fact that she had on leather shoes underscores this nation’s blatant hypocrisy. I often wonder if PETA considers transporting dogs in a cage an inch wider than the animal, sticking them in a cargo space under an airplane, all while their “masters” sip coffee in coach any less humane than Vick's crime?

And what in the world was James Brown doing?

Once considered a decent pregame football analyst, in this interview, I feel that James put the Uncle in Tom during his 60 Minutes cameo.

[view the entire interview here]

http://www.cbs.com/primetime/60_minutes/video/video.php?cid=927554855&category=episodes&play=true

All Brown needed was a gavel, a black robe and a Coke with pubic hair on the can's rim. While Brown peppered Vick with questions that my 6-year-old nephew had to answer after spilling milk on the floor... lost were the more prominent questions like:

What type of relationship do you have with the “friends” and family that ran the operation with you?

What would you do if you could NOT play football again?

You mentioned turning to God and reading the Bible; was their a particular passage that stood out for you?

Would you consider donating a portion of your salary to helping other convicted felons finding a job—outside of pro sports?

How has this experience changed your definition of friend?

What part of society (other than speaking to family) did you miss the most?

What do you think of Maxwell’s latest?
No matter what the situation, levity normally puts it in its proper perspective.

Shouts to Tony Dungy who continues to put a face on grace and to Eagles quarterback, Donavan McNabb who clearly knows a bit more about job security that your average 9-to-5er.

The moral of this story is always the same—race plays a part in everything you do in this society—only to be trumped (occasionally) by money, fame, PETA, or house Negros. And, for that....

I’m truly sorry.

1 love,

Ray Lewis

MAX WELL?

2009-07-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

"Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best." - Henry Van Dyke

I have been listening to Maxwell’s new joint off & on, then on & off and right back on again. As a matter of fact, this went on for roughly 11 days straight…and my review is still a wee bit muddled. First and foremost, this nigga can BLOW!! And honestly, what more would one require from an extremely dope lyricist, whom by even the most average account, is a song writing machine? Ah, if it were only that simple.

Maxwell is on another planet when it comes to making memorable melodies — and that certainly has not changed. Add a near decade-long layoff and fans of this “liner notes lion” won’t critique this one very lightly. I was savagely eager to cut the plastic seal on Black Summers’ Night — all the while marinating on what I already knew Maxwell is capable of cooking-up... and this approach was a sure recipe for disaster. Trust me, you will be better served feasting on this methodical (three-part)mystery like you gorged on other (domestic) new artist debuts from Jill, India, Erykah or D’Angelo. Impossible approach in this case? Perhaps? But you’ll thank me for that tip later.

If you make the mistake of thinking urban hair Maxwell, you will be in for an “on/off” spin cycle that you may never untangle. As it stands “Playing Possum” is my absolute favorite track on this LP—possibly ever by Max.. but I've been told that I tend to exaggerate from time to time. Not this time...

Come back from the dead
You left my, my heart here
Say what you will and won't forget
Express disappointment, speak your regrets, yeah
Or baby call out my name, I'll be where you are
I'll be very still, step down to my heart and mend this broken
If only you'd wake up from your constant possum playing
If only you'd wake up
I'm begging you sugar, have some leniency
Call the president and ask him baby, to pardon me and bring you back to me
Oh, oh, oh, oh oooooh
Amend this broken
If only you'd quite this nonsense of your possum playing
If only you'd…..

This song takes a very, very long and deliberate approach to begging, and I mean BEGGING for a resolution to a relationship that left an everlasting scar right across the heart! Then, after two minutes and 50 seconds of complete pleading, some live horns join the track to underscore Max’s pain and sorrow. Clearly I haven’t the faintest idea who the girl is that crushed his heart, but I’m pretty sure she’s awake and drafting an apologetic retort. That is unless she is getting some really bad legal advice.
Maxwell owes no one the slightest act of contrition for the first of this love trilogy, but I may be in the minority in that assessment. Naturally, I don’t want you to take my word for it, especially since he took nine premeditated, reclusive—almost introspective tracks to do so himself. If I could draft a new category to put this one in, it would be something along the lines of Complicated Soul.

If this is the worst of Maxwell, it is still WAY better than anything on your local radio station right now. That is unless the Michael Jackson tributes are still spinning. And, if that’s the case, even Maxwell will understand your spin cycled patience… I think he's earned at least that much.

(dim the lights and click on blog title)

One Love,
Ray Lewis

One Day In The Life……

2009-05-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

Booker T. Washington

The year was 1981 and the sun was pelting down on the concrete like a wide-nosed hose attached to an ocean. The urine scented streets made the unbearable heat…, unbearable. Clearly only the strong could survive such a hot and sticky atmosphere. Nevertheless, these city streets, as well as the surrounding Bronx blocks, made up the actual birthplace of Hip Hop. If a tree never grew in Brooklyn there are some unexplainable roots in the Bronx.
On this day, the Hip Hop culture was being cultivated on the corner of 163rd street and Union Avenue. And, by mid noon, the sun was hotter than a Do The Right Thing scene. The boogie down curtain opened in 23 Park, and as far as the eye could see the park is simply littered with litter and people littering. Twenty-three Park was so named for the public school that once rested adjacent to the playground. Now the (former) school is a part of the litter. It was not long ago PS 23 was the pick of the litter for parents choosing an educational facility for a young child. Rumor has it that the former Secretary of State, Colin Powell attended PS 23—severely challenging that tree growing in a concrete city theory.

There is a silver chain-linked fence that surrounds the basketball courts that are laced with variety of self-titled playground legends. Onlookers peeked through the fence at all of the ballers that are donned in low-top sneakers and high-top fades. At this juncture Nike, the Portland-based sneaker factory, was still a half a decade away from infiltrating this park—the NBA seemed even further. No time or space for advertising, just raining jump-shots drizzling from the blue collar hands of the likes of: Pee-Wee Smalls, Ivan Jackson and Morris High School legend, David Crosby. Spectators from all over the city watched as countless jump-shots and endless finger-rolls, rolled softly in the air, sometimes ricocheting off the metal backboards to a chorus line of ooohs and ahhhs. Witnessing the ball handling wizardry of Willie Mitchell underscores the gap between corporate interest and community confines.

Not far from the basketball goals—not to be confused with goals of playing basketball—are mounds and mounds of neighborhood kids statistically doomed for the grave or steel cage by 21. These kids are dressed in anything but swim wear, but that doesn't stop them from playing tirelessly in the front of an open hydrate. In some states this open hydrate "activity" would be illegal, but here in the Bronx its just another day in the life. The water “sport” that's taking place is just further proof that necessity has always been the mother of invention. The police cruised by, in police cruisers, overtly praying that they were anywhere else—on a cruise, perhaps. Almost simultaneously, the neighborhood B-boys stare back, each side not remotely trying to hide the mutual distain—sort of like a West Side Story script. On this very hot day, the ice grilling almost seems welcomed, if for no other reason than to add a chill to the mugging air. The chilling disdain from the two groups of people (that will never formerly meet) seems unreal—but is real. And, the light blue, Buick duce-and-a-quarter cruising in the one car parade, proves just how real, with the Shalamar hit blaring to a slow speed….

It’s got to be real/ girl, I can write a book on how you making me feel.

The contempt for both the police and the neighborhood B-boys can be cut with a knife—and sometimes it is. On the south end of the park sits a 25-foot high, graffiti –tatted, handball wall. The wall divides couples playing the inner city version of tennis or racket ball (minus the racket and tennis ball).

The ball of choice is a hard, pink rubber Spalding slightly larger than a plum. The Bronx is not far from the U.S. Open, which is annually held 7.4 miles away, (in Queens); but watching this game, that distance seems like 400 years.

As the night begins to creep in and the non-residents creep out, a white moving van (of sorts) pulls up. If U-haul were to do an inventory spot check, I’m pretty sure there would be one motor vehicle missing. Finding the truck wouldn’t be hard either, this despite the spray-painted attempt to hide the brand name. The driver (totally ignoring the NO PARKING sign), hops the curb and pulls right into the middle of 23 Park. About a dozen guys unfold from the two row seating and spill out into the park. Some people stare, while others just ignore them as they ignored the parking restrictions. One of the guys moved to the back of the truck, opened the lift and started to unload a cabin full of equipment. The unloading began: massive speakers & rolls of neatly wrapped speaker wire, a bull horn, lights, turntables, an eight-legged table, a mixer, night lamps, amps, a couple of receivers, another amp, an industrial fan, a orange extension cord, a police barricade—yep a police barricade, and 10 milk crates of records are all amongst the hurriedly emptying equipment. In less than 20 minutes, the crew is set up and ready to perform for the TOTALLY unsuspecting and now semi-circled crowd.

In an instant, with the equipment snuggly plugged into the tax payers street lamp a neighborhood kid from PS 23 named, Melvin Glover picks up the mic and spits….

Broken glass everywhere/people pissin’ on the streets ya know they just don’t care/I can’t take the smell, I can’t take the noise got no money to move out/I guess I got no choice. Rats in the front room, roaches in the back/junkies in the alley with a baseball bat/I tried to get away, but I couldn’t get far/cause the man with the tow truck repossessed my car.

For the rest of the world it’s apparent that a Hip Hop legend is born, but in the Bronx, this is simply just another day in the life.

click blog arrow for bonus beat

1 love,
Ray Lewis

POLITICS FROM A –to- Z

2009-05-06T07:12:00.000-07:00

In a recent fire Bob Dole's library burned down. Both books were lost. And he hadn't even finished coloring one of them." —Jack Kemp

More and more often people have been asking me: “Why do I judge President Obama so harshly?

Not lost in this irony…. Is the fact that the essence of the question is fairly judgmental. I simply love people. The fact of the matter is I don’t judge any man—not even Barack. I take my salary-free job too serious.

Side bar: raise your hand if you are equally committed to a monthly task for no commission…, other than your community.

More times than I care to count, I turn down money for a Ghetto Proverbs post. My fear is compromising the authenticity for my perspective. So, to think that I would judge Barack personally, would be extremely insulting to me…, that is if trading wits with an unarmed person could be remotely insulting.

My universal task is to analyze, critique and offer constructive criticism on any man, woman or organization posing in a position of aid to the community—my community, and the birthplace of this inner city truth. You know, just like Hip Hop.But, I am sure you knew that just from this blog title. That is unless your chamber is empty.

The ultimate goal is to be a voice for the voiceless, while trying to get my community to understand why they feel the way they do. Honestly, I think I have more fun than they do. One day the feelings will be mutual. I have too much faith to believe otherwise.

I think Barack is an interesting person—almost fascinating. This is why he is mentioned in this blog more than any single person on earth. He is an extremely polarizing person. Barack is neutral (unless it’s popular)—then he’s assertive (that’s politics for ya). He’s witty when he has to be and charming (which is very popular) especially during an election. Barack is articulate (which is insulting when you think of the covert assumption). He is athletic (albeit horrible at basketball, bowling, and golf)—thus making him a fan more than an athlete. He is a smoker, which (of course) is almost never mentioned since it will nibble at his popularity—and no one with an unloaded chamber wants that, right? In fact, my dear sweet, sister once told me that Barack is a role model, but she thinks Pookie from New Jack City isn’t because he smokes. Sometimes life is truly stranger than fiction.

Barack denounced his life-long role model Jeremiah Wright, because Minister Wright was upsetting his popularity.I am so glad my mom didn’t take that (Barack) approach when I boo-booed in my pants during a tightly-fitted, close proximity church service. I think true friends and family are with you for life, regardless of how popular or unpopular. Clearly, politicians have different standards—making the title role model ever so quizzical.

Nevertheless, (and despite all the odds telling me otherwise) I decided to tackle this Barack phenomenon philosophically—from A-to-Z. When, I’m done hopefully, we all would have learned something—even if that something is…., how much of your stimulus check will be owed when you file next year’s taxes.

Ready?

A) Have you ever heard a white person described as articulate?

B) Why is it that black people never refer to Bill Clinton as the first black president anymore? Either he wasn’t and the comments were dim-witted or the chamber is jammed, searching for an answer.

C) Name an unarmed Caucasian male that has ever been shot in the back by a police officer. Take your time.

D) What do you think will happen first.., Pontiac will make a come back or (unaided) Barack will mention Darfur in a press conference?

E) How did Clinton lose his “black president” title, but more than half of Barack staff members are ex-Clinton members—including his wife or soon-to-be-ex?

F) Who do you think speaks more to the plight of black people, the largely popular Barack or the marginally popular Farrakhan?

G) I’m still waiting for Hollywood to release a major theatrical with a black man starring as God. FYI: this may be the only job Barack couldn’t apply for since his name is Islamic. Maybe life is stranger than fiction.

H) Who do you think make up the majority of Heaven’s, population democrats, republicans or activists?

I) …. probably, have been invited to my last Barack party.

J) Who do you think Barack will name as the new Supreme Court Justice?

K) Who do you think will win a political battle between Karl Rove and David Axelrod?

L) Lemmie guess how many people voted for Barack, but wouldn’t know the difference between David Axelrod or Axel Foley.

M) In the next 4–to-8 years, Michelle Obama will appear on more “Most Influential People List” without a job, than she would if she did hold one.

N) Never go to law school if you have an opportunity to marry a half white president. After all, the latter is far more influential (see M for more details).

O) Someone reading this just crossed me off Oprah’s book club.

P) If the President’s slogan is change, why did America skip the Geneva Convention on Change? Maybe, “CHANGE” is regional.

Q) I am grading these questions on a curve.

R) During the next election, it’s important to remember that change rarely (if ever) works from the top down.

S) I think it stinks that an American can vote without (first) passing a test in social studies, political science, philosophy, psychology or Greek mythology—especially since capitalisms could never exists without them.

T) Ever wonder why 99% of all media outlet’s headlines only have three words in the title? (i.e. War on Terror).

U) Most portable devices that you own make it much easier for your Barack-led government to keep you under surveillance. FYI: for the device(s) you don’t own, The Patriot Act will take care of that!

V) I saw an “apology expert” on CNN that was analyzing Mike Vick’s face to determine whether Vick’sapology was sincere.

W) WWJD? I saw this on a bumper sticker on my way home from church on Easter Sunday. Maybe the driver left before the pastor got to the resurrection portion of the service.

X) After this post, I have a feeling that X-Ray will take on a whole new meaning.

Y) What are you supposed to YELL if there was an actual fire in a movie theater?

Z) I pray one day that the Zip Codes in America will one day regain their value.

My main man Robert Carter taught me to always end on a positive note. (Z) was just my way of saying thanks, bruth. Rest in peace.

click on blog arrow title for bonus beats

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

Warn er Brother

2009-04-10T05:23:00.000-07:00

Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

If someone stopped me on the mean streets of Lithonia, Georgia and asked me who I believed are the best musical artists of my 44-year generation…

I’d first say, hey man, where’s your Obama shirt?

When I got a bit more serious, the names: Stevie Wonder, Beethoven, Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Earth Wind and Fire or (my personal favorite) but not necessarily my final answer, Omar, would probably come to mind.

However, if the street talker asked me who the most relevant artist of my generation was or is? My answer (without hesitation) would be Prince.

While his live show is simply a must for the living, his recorded music is (for the most part) hit or miss with me. I rarely toggle through my music collection and pull a Prince joint off shelf. However, I love his middle finger industry swag so much that you’ll find countless discs of his in my assortment of artists.

On Tuesday, March 31, The Artist Currently Known As, added another gem to his storied catalog. This time, unveiling the pop life’s protégé, Bria Valente, as a bonus disc to this neatly completed electronic trifecta, just in time for spring break. Aside from the outstanding and refreshing new music, the soon-to-be 51-year-old musicologist just continues to shatter the realm of conventional [industry] wisdom, while driving a stake through the radio slave owner’s counterproductive heart. That fact alone earned my recession-friendly, $11.98 and honestly, it’s worth twice that. Most gems are. His latest sparkler, LotusFlow3R, was unleashed with an exclusive distribution deal with local retailer, Target, and the Purple One’s member’s only website. You don’t have to be a fan of Prince’s music, but rather a champion of revolutionary change (there’s that word again) to understand why his pivotal positioning is paving the way for aspiring artists not even born.

The head-nodding, down-tempo (78 BPM), rock-laced Colonized Mind is currently my favorite, but that could change at the next listening session. Right now, the headphones sound like this:

If you look, you’re sure gonna find
throughout mankind’s history
A Colonized Mind
the one in power makes law
under which the colonized fall
without God, it’s just the blind leading the blind

Quite naturally, when you are digesting lyrics of that magnitude, it becomes increasingly difficult to listen to a melody about an umbrella. Prince’s not-so-passive “rain” on commercial radio’s formulated success is greeted equally with your local radio station [and corporately held entity] shunning any FM rotation spins from anything outside his Warner Bros contract. And, to think they lock Bloods and Cripps up for being gangstas. Now that’s funny.

I think people have gotten so complacent and indifferent to some of America’s subtle, yet shackled conditions that an independent artist is the equivalent to an Independent. Sadly, you’ll never live long enough to see either center stage in the White House.

click on blog arrow for bonus beat

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

It's About Time

2009-03-16T13:59:00.001-07:00

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

James Baldwin

In a feeble attempt to save what’s left of the earth’s ozone layers every spring and fall we mere mortals fine-tune our time on earth by flipping our clocks back and forth like a NaS single. Man, I sure hope Jesus has a sense of humor... but doesn’t wear a watch. Apparently, not even saving energy was a good enough reason for Americans to toy with time. So, in the fall of 2008, we delayed the seasonally scheduled time change to fire up our deteriorating economy.

Wouldn’t you just love to meet the stimulus scholar who penned the amendment to convince the earth’s Creator to delay Daylight Savings by four weeks, just so we had more time to frequent shopping malls? Now, that’s taking In God We Trust to a whole new level.

Along the shores of the U.S., the cloudy economy has overpowered the warm and fuzzy sentiments that usually greet our spring-forward daylight savings. And, from the porch & patio views on Wall Street, this appears to be the only savings plan in America still in tack. In fairness, I haven’t read the entire Stimulus Package, so I trust there just might be a provision in there to bail out the sun too.

Side Bar: Can a package be (both) a Bill and a Stimulus?

Isn’t that humorously ironic fact the equivalent of Chris and Rihanna recording a HIT on domestic violence?

Hmmm, a stimulus bill??? That's almost as funny as losing a pie-eating contest to Paris Hilton? Or, obtaining video footage of a police officer shooting an unarmed white kid in the back.

Side Bar 2: Did you know that Chris “Ike” Brown and Rihanna "Left Eye" Fenty's single drops next month and a Body Guard II movie deal is pending for Rihanna... further proof that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Speaking of Barack….

The other day I was in the grocery store and a neatly packaged lady was on line in front of me. She was very cute and built like a seldom traveled Himalayan mountain. In the interest of full disclosure, most Saturdays in any southern grocery store is flooded with such scenic wonders.... However, underscoring the theory of quality vs. quantity is the fact that this sista was donned in a black velour Barack Obama warm-up suit. The mobile mural of President Obama on the back was simply impossible to ignore. This would probably be a good time to mention my NO such thing as bad publicity hypothesis.

As she turned her back to me, I presumed that I was chuckling to myself. But as luck would have it, she (over) heard me and asked, "What's so funny?" Ignoring the obvious retort, I said…, "Ah, nothing!!" Then I said, "So…., I see you are a HUGE Barack fan."

She rejoiced with a thunderous, "Yep, and I would’ve voted twice if I could." I smiled at the Floridian voting irony and thought (this time firmly to myself)…, I would have voted for a different clothing selection. Apparently, my silent thoughts grew increasingly uncomfortable, so she turned to me…., stared for a second, and sharply asked: "Aren’t you a Barack Obama fan?" Not alert enough to phone a friend who actually might be, I shot back… "ah, I’m more of a NY Knick fan... the outcome of their games are far less predicable."

[Had the hoop conversation ensued, I would have admitted Knick games are much less entertaining than her jogging suit]. Lucky for both of us that conversation never materialized — no pun intended.

She (obviously annoyed by my actual response) said, "All you Republicans are all alike." Brilliant observation, I thought, even though I am not actually a member of any political party. Afraid to burst her false assumption I shot back, "How do you know I am not an Independent?" She said, "I don’t care how many people live in your house, Barack is the only real option we black people have."

I thought, hmm, I moved my clock forward, but it’s still going to be a long summer.

As we walked towards our cars in the parking lot, an old school Chevy Impala cruised by playing a really loud (loosely-termed) song that sounded more like a Lil' Wayne auction. At this point, I offered my buggy and suggested she looked both ways before crossing.

She probably thought I meant the street.

click on the blog (arrow) title for music clip

1 love,
Ray Lewis

Black Epilogue

2009-01-07T07:51:00.000-08:00

Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.
-- Cornel West,

Whew, 2009.

More often than not, some well-educated people (a very relative term) have approached me with this youthful exhilaration about the first black president of the United States heading to the Washington, D.C. in a couple of weeks. Am I alone in the humorously ironic fact that these well-intended, euphoric-laced, enthusiasts are celebrating a black man, headed into a (haunted) white house, in the nation’s murder capital? I didn’t have the heart to remind these blind loyalists that (less than a decade ago) they celebrated the same ritual in “honor” of Bill Clinton—who they foolishly dubbed the first “black” president. Bill is starting to find there is much more to this race thing than your home address. In any event, this blog would be much more difficult without the unsolicited input of some of my black brethren—whom I love and pray for every day.

MOVING ON UP [insert the Jefferson’s theme]

There is a plethora of pastoral pews packing black church parking lots and loading buses and heading to D.C. for this “historic-themed” inauguration. The District of Columbia must be that one exception to that separation of church and state rule. In fact, a former co-worker told me she was going to take the week off and head to the White House, credential-less. I can only assume that CNN must have lifted her recent probation for excessive absenteeism. You know, for a color so rich and uncompromising as the foundation of the Black race, my people sure make tons of effortless concessions for people that could care less about them or the slave ship of free labor the nation was funded on. Yeah, I know Barack is different. He is going to bailout the auto industry, save the economy, reform the school system (by the way his kids are headed to private school) correct the housing market, put an end to war and terrorism, and spit on a Puffy re-mix. If that sounds ridiculous, wait until you see the black church parking lots on January 19th. I actually like half of Barack. After all, he is unflappable, well-spoken, consistent, nicely attired, and very valiant. Of course, so is my accountant, but......

TIME FOR SOME REAL CHANGE

Just imagine if all of the Barack bandwagon ballyhoos decided instead of flooding D.C. for a media-driven photo opt and cormorant dinner plates; they decided instead to cut a credit card in half
and refuse to apply for another one unless the interest rate was fixed at 5% (or less) for the duration of Barack’s tenure in office.

What if my black people decided to protest all NFL games for one year because they felt Michael Vick’s treatment was excessive.

Imagine if we decided to put all of our direct-deposited checks in one community-invested bank (of our choice) in exchange for an interest-free loan on all big ticketed items (regardless of credit score). The only caveat is all interest-free bank loans must be automatically withdrawn to ensure timely payments. The bank will be able to invest the direct deposits of 13 million people starting January 21 and the community has a real jump-start to improving one’s credit score.

Imagine if this rich uncompromising color decided to donate 5% of their annual income to save Morris Brown College—whose campus, as of this writing, is water-less. Can you believe that? In exchange for the community’s good will, Morris Brown would waive the first year of tuition for all incoming freshman, who agreed to help revitalize the campus (based on the student’s field of study) up to 10 years after graduation. Each one, teach one would be my motto.

How about all of Barack’s Baptist backers donating 3% of their income to General Motors in exchange for an interest-free loan and 75% off the reduction off a GM car that is currently rotting on a neighborhood lot?

Finally, what if we all agreed to donate 4 weeks of our professional time—on a rotating shift—to help rebuild New Orleans?

In exchange the volunteers (in conjunction with the corporate workforce) will have their 2009 income taxes waived for a year—you know like real public servants. One day we will understand that the government works for the people, not the converse. I cannot wait for the day that Black people stop using their color to promote silly, political deception and start using it for the intended purpose, pure dominance…, no chaser. Happy New Year. (click on the blog title for video bonus)

One Love,
Ray Lewis

THE LIGHT

2008-10-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

You can measure a nation by the way it treats the least among them

The comical political euphoria that is gripping black America is almost knee-slapping funny to me. Because of my outward smirk, people often ask me, [make that, people often TELL ME]… Ray, why don’t you like Barack, man? As if I am breaking some silly fraternity Faux Pas. The internal giggling intensifies when I respond with: First of all I could never dislike someone that I have never met. That would be ignorant. An objective voter would assess it would be equally ignorant to proudly and blindly support someone they have never met either. But, I digress. As crazy as (local congresswoman) Cynthia McKinney was (and still is) at least she came to my house for a pledge and support. So if I were to try to defend her at least I have a REAL, first hand foundation. Starting to see the light?

Nevertheless, its this type of social observation that got me ushered out of an Oprah book club meeting, when I simply stated, I think Oprah lowers that standard of journalism. Can you believe they kicked me out of the meeting for that? And, the meeting was at my house. I have come to the conclusion that Barack and Oprah have managed to elevate their social platform so high that they are above CONSTRUCTIVE criticism. Think about that for a second! They have not only circumvented the First Amendment Right, they are now reached mythical proportions. Like that of Gandhi, the Pope or Jesus Himself. Actually, I hear people criticizing the latter three all the time and defended much less. Imagine that Heavenly round-tabled discussion.

I think the saddest part of this commentary is layered with irony. For starters, it is my belief that Barack would warmly welcome an open conversation about some of the issues that I have raised (on this site) and that most loyal supporters are in total oblivion to. His two-time Patriot Act support would top that list. I believe his concerted effort to remain race-neutral is worth a lunchroom discussion. Especially since big, fat white women still clutch their purse when I enter an elevator and I am not going to raise anyone’s taxes. We’d probably need more than a lunch to discuss, The Point System, World Banking, Katrina, the real predators behind 9-11, and finally, the consolidation of banks that are being neatly veiled as a “middle class” Bailout. Barack, is so smooth, I almost fell for that one. ALMOST!! We would have to go to sleep-a-way camp to discuss why black kids are moving target practice for white police officers. My rabbit ear antenna must have failed when Oprah did that show.

Now, I know what you electric sliding Barack line dancers keep telling me… Man, just wait until he gets into office, he’ll address all of that and more. Funny, these same loyalists said that about Bill Clinton.

Remember him? Yep, that dumbly dubbed “Black President.” That's right the same president that called your boy…, Boy!! Oh, boy! Clinton and Barack appear to be boys, again. It is amazing what a 30-minute infomercial and a singing, fat lady (warming up an Oval Office) will do for a friendship. Man, politics make for strange bed fellows.

Rest well, Barack. I know black people and their euphoria…. it can turn like an off-key Mary J. concert or a crowded Barney revival. If that happens give me a call man, you know I’ll listen. After all that’s what REAL friends are for.

Click blog title for video, underscore.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

STRANGER THAN FICTION

2008-09-04T11:37:00.000-07:00

"Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper."

Larry Flynt

I remember back in 1985 when the [then] Washington Bullets drafted Sudanese standout 7-7, Manute Bol. At the time bean pole Bol was the tallest NBA player ever.

Two years later the perennial cellar dwelling Washington Bullets Mensa management showcased their “wizardry” again when they drafted 5-foot, 3 inch Muggsy Bogues—who (to this day remains) the shortest player in NBA history. (Queue Ringling Brother’s music here)

These circus-like shenanigans prompted starting Bullet forward, Mike Giminski, to question who will Washington draft next year, “The Bearded Lady?”

Well, worry no longer Giminski, the Nation’s capital is at it again, and this time they actually drafted a woman—albeit, beard-less. (Drum roll, please) In 2008, with world peace, the economy and home foreclosures at stake, the Washington Republican team draft, Friends sitcom reject, Sarah Palin.

Yep, the McCain camp selected a scandal-ridden, snowball tossing, igloo-living, birth control-less, soccer mom, who runs a state that’s whiter than a Taye Diggs barbeque. Palin’s first order of business is to continuously jar the memory of a 72-year-old presidential hopeful, who is one horror movie scene away from an eternal soil bath.

I don’t know what it is about those “game day” Washington DC execs, but it’s clear they (at least) have a sense of humor. There is an unwritten rule in sports (and politics) that state: If you are not going to win the game, you at the very least) should make the game entertaining. I believe the GOP’s week-long celebration has eclipsed that fact. Speaking of funny, has any one seen Condi?

In a recent interview Snow White Sarah said: What exactly does a Vice President do??? Hmm, I have not seen her one page resume, but based on that answer she actually may be over-qualified for this ticket. Now then, assuming she is going through with this charade, I thought it was only fair that I post some her duties; which I obtained from an "unnamed source" that rhymes with Billary:

o Color code index cards to ensure John McCain memorizes the addresses of all his homes.
o Change the lock on the White House bar and medicine cabinet.
o Keep a fresh set of depends for long McCain trips.
o Raise the minimum wage. Once this passed, that bill will be called the “In-Law.”
o Extend a hunting invitation to Barack and Biden and forge Chaney’s signature.
o Make Eskimo Pies mandatory in all school lunch programs.
o Make sex with a 16-year-old illegal unless the teen’s mom is running for Vice President. In that case, make it illegal to discuss it.
o Attend funereal ceremonies of World Leaders that the President murdered.

Man, if I knew the only criteria for the First Lady gig was love for the outdoors and babysitting illegitimate children of teen moms, I would’ve nominated Magic City “dancer” Cinnamon Buns. Heaven knows over the years I have contributed enough to her campaign.

This race would be knee-slappin’ funny, if it were not so pain-stalking sad. As I see it, the presidential seat is to simply instill hope. And, clearly Barack read that chapter of the Ringling Brothers handbook. He is such a great politician (FYI: That’s not a compliment). The overwhelming moral duty of the president is to uphold the will of the people. Unfortunately, those people include some of my friends, who swear Barack is “The Chosen One.” Who knew God was a Democrat?

That will of the people also includes my next door neighbor; who last year, took the seats out of a rented Honda Odyssey and showed a bootleg copy of “Boomerang” on the side of their vinyl-sided house.

I had a hard time holding back the laughter during the restaurant scene when 20 Grace Joneses put their legs in Eddie Murphy’s faces at dinner. After the movie I advised my neighbor what a bad idea it was to show movies on the side of the house. She told me that it’s Black History Month..., besides that fact she told me that her Section 8 vouchers are like a Visa cards; “it’s accepted” everywhere.

The people have spoken and the Washington Minstrel Show rolls on.

click on blog title for music clip

1 love,

Ray Lewis

CULTURE CLUB

2008-06-03T11:17:00.000-07:00

"No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive."
--Mahatma Gandhi

The western hemisphere's 2008 calendar has just reached the half way point, which metaphorically indicates that life in America is really about to heat up. Yeah. Unfortunately, for more and more U.S. residents this warmth is not always fuzzy.

The Barack Watch
Any day now Barack Obama will step to a podium near you to make his triumph speech underscoring this new & improved culture that he is attempting to bring to Washington. I wonder what side of his dark suit his flag pin will reside? I don’t know why but this ornamental presidential nominee kind of reminds me of putting pretty, decorative curtains on the window of an abandoned building. I’ll admit I am almost intrigued by the colored man’s victory and (flat-out) shocked that he only had to denounce two of his life-long friends to get there. Hell, even the Cripps had to murder a neighborhood homie for their stage credibility. Maybe world domination is different.

For now, I have all but exhausted my analysis with Washington and its cultural politics throughout this humorous race. However, Barack, if you are listening; if your intent is to re-energize my interest, you can start with painting the color of the White House.

NOTHING BUT NET

The NBA Championship between Los Angeles and Boston swings into action this week; and the Disney Network couldn’t be happier about this fairy tale ending to what is sure to be a TV ratings bonanza. This fact will be accentuated by the idling of American Idol. (Addition by subtraction I presume). Fear not hoop historians, while this series isn’t the art of wars like the battles between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson that mere fact won’t stop ABC’s parents, The Disney Company from selling it as such. After all, perception is everything, right Barack? On the court you’ll be so inundated with constant reminders of the NBA’s yesteryears, that you are liable to forget that not long ago, league MVP Kobe Bryant was sneaking up behind white girls and invading their sexual culture. Or, so I’m told. In all honesty, most of the players in this Boston/Los Angeles series are not old enough to understand what the NBA historical culture really exudes. And, for the ones that do understand this culture, David Stern made them “dress” accordingly.
It’s funny how Stern's dress code took the hip out of the hop, but still allowed Jay-Z to represent the (soon-to-be) Brooklyn Nets during the draft lottery. Stern was “masterful” in mandating the suit and ties, but, like most masters, Stern underestimated the core culture.

Jigga Man 1 Jewish Man 0

Bottoms Up
The other night I was on my way home, nodding to Meshell Ndegeocello’s new joint—which is simply sick, unless you don’t understand the black music culture. You knew they’d be one digression, huh?

In any event, there was a homeless guy petitioning for food on the corner of Spring St. and the eastbound I-20. About 50 yards to his right, there were a bunch of other men petitioning for the butt buffet at Magic City. Distracted by the “dance team” entering Atlanta’s cultural landmark, I almost ran into the back of the car in front of me that rolled down the window to give the homeless guy a case of bottled water. This transaction took long enough for me to miss the light. I turned down MeShell’s “Solomon” to attempt to ask the homeless guy why he was pouring the free water onto the pavement. Then I realized being homeless in America is still better than being a citizen in 70% of the rest of the world. The rest of my ride was fairly quiet, like the vocal roots of my culture.

click Culture Club blog title for video bonus

1 love,
Ray Lewis

CHANNEL ZERO

2008-04-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

Even after all my logic and my theories, I add a mutha f@!&#, so you ignorant niggas hear me. -- Lauryn Hill The Score 1996

It’s an overcast warm April day in the “A.” Most of the half black/half “other” in the poor man’s version of Chocolate City are probably out spending their direct-deposited earnings on items that underscore why we wake during the weekdays to... fight traffic, engage in water-cooler conversations about the weekend, file paperwork, attend meetings answer phones, send emails, then break for lunch. After lunch we attend more meetings, answer more phones, and send more emails only to conclude by fighting traffic to get back to our foreclosed-riddled neighborhoods. We do this only to wake on Mondays (if you are lucky) to do it all again. We do this for the better part of our weekday lives and on our ironically touted "off days" one has to wonder is this ritual going to be the symbolic meaning for the dash on the stoned headboard, once we are laid to rest? I wonder.

The clouds will probably hide the sun for most of this spring Saturday, so I plan to buy some music, thus drowning my modern day slave wages in beats and rhymes until the gridlock forms on Monday morning. I can’t really fault my southern MASTER for this one because, unlike 200 years ago when that boat docked, I agreed to these terms, for better and for worse.

When I heard Tavis Smiley was leaving the Tom Joyner Morning Show my conflicted emotions concluded with…, hmm, didn’t Tavis agree to Uncle Tom’s terms? Besides, how bad can the traffic going to and from his Los Angeles studios to conduct a 10-minute soliloquy twice a week? It can't be much worse than being strapped to a tracking device of a 9-to-5? I sometimes wonder why corporate America spends so much time and money monitoring and recording what I do at work, when I am seated in an open cube. As usual I digress.

You can record Tavis’ commentary in an open forum around 8:24am EST on Tuesdays and Thursdays (until the ink on his resignation dries in mid June). Word on the wire is, Smiley got tired of Joyner’s empty-headed audience throwing darts at his Obama theories. Smiley’s tireless efforts to get his people (my people) to start using their heads for something other than a hat rack drove him to resign from his twice weekly moral monolog, according to Joyner. Smiley's open criticism of Barack Obama’s illusive attendance at the Tavis' black agenda revivals and townhall meetings drove a wedge between Tavis and the black audience from Joyner’s jovial congregation. I imagine nothing hurts a parent more than a life-long commitment of protection only to find out your child touched the stove once your back was turned. That pain accelerates when the child grows up and questions the parents’ intent from the start. That must hurt more than slavery itself.

Brotha Tavis, I think it is important to note that your agenda goes against the very grain of the media platform on which you stand. The reason your broadcasting check has so many zeros is the financial advertising rewards from the black radio format that is sweeping the country like toxins in meat. For a minute, forget the Ringling Brothers Circus you resigned from (at least J. Anthony Brown is funny). Take for example, “The People Station” in Atlanta. This V-103 morning show staff consists of 2 chimps and an unfunny cross-dresser — the latter being slightly redundant. You can fill Phillips Arena 20 times and New Birth twice with the sub zero IQ levels in that Peachtree booth. V-103's illiterate news, the retarded rhetoric, and the poisonous music rotation makes Tom, Sybil, J, and Ms. Dupree seem like Cornell West students. I cannot tell you how many people have kicked me out of their black community forums for expressing my disdain for V-103. And, I will never resign from my commentary until black radio begins to address: real musicians, the housing crises / predatory lending, the origin behind the AIDS virus, world banks (not just the one’s that financed 911), immigration, cloned cows, chicken shacks, check cashing booths, bar coded currency, V-Chips, recording contracts, healthcare, reparations, and Hollywood---and this is just my Black History Month agenda. It'll be hard to listen to a Chingy song after that conversation, huh?

The black radio apathy doesn't stop here, my brother. Travel to any city in Black Town USA and you’ll find the same black radio ritual with a Hot so-and-so, a Quiet this-and-that, Kiss what-not, or a Smooth jazz joint that rotates Kenny G residuals.

The one commonality with all of these stations is, some rich, fat white guy named Bob reclined in a long-back, leather swivel seat setting the black agendas and ignoring my black history demands. This man reaches WAY more black people than you or I combined. Furthermore, he pays some of these hot air personalities 10 times what Uncle Tom pays you. How else can you get a conscious black person to play a song like "The Hoe Is Mine" 30 times and never play a joint by Pharoahe Monch or Mos Def or Donnie or..

The fact of the matter is Mr. Charlie autographs the bottom of the checks and is controlling the strings on the top of this Universal Soul Circus called black radio. Mr. Charlie is kind enough to beep-out the “N” word from most of the Hoe songs.., ‘cause, he wouldn’t want to offend you. Naturally, Tavis, if you come to the black radio meetings on Tuesday and Thursday questioning or upsetting the white man’s agenda (which includes Barack), well you are going to face some hurdles. Not from the white man, but from the black man.. like the one who pulled the trigger on Malcolm. (see why I am not invited to cookouts anymore?).

Tavis, if you are listening black people love Barack and there is nothing you can say to change that fact. Those minds are made up. Period. The only time you will see any progress is when the burn from the hot stove fries their flesh. Just imagine the pain when our people find out that a parent's hug or kiss and a handful of coco butter won’t make that four-year ailment disappear.

And, now a word from our sponsors.

(click blog title for bonus track)

1 love,

Ray Lewis

W.W.O.D.?

2008-03-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

“The most essential ingredient in politics is sincerity and the sooner you learn to fake it, the more successful you’ll be.”

DEAR BARACK:
What’s going on man, this is Ray Lewis. Nah, not that one, but that’s funny though. I am far from the Ravens’ Ray, in fact, the last time I was in a limo (of any kind) was to bury my Aunt Vicky who raised me like one of her own sons. You see, Barack that’s how black folks are doing it in these parts. You may want to mention that to the bias media jockin’ you and Tiger, while clutching their purse when I get in the elevator. Oddly, this floral love fest with you is not just the media.

If my Aunt Vic was still here I am sure she would love you too. She would be no different than the slave ships of black folks that “pledge their allegiance” to you as well. Barack can you believe that one brotha told me that you were The Chosen One. Yep, just like Gandhi, Martin or well, you know Who. For the life of me Barack, I cannot figure out why my people feel so strongly about a man they hardly know, yet half of these same people don’t even speak to their neighbors. I am really puzzled by that, hence this letter to you. Barack, I simply want to know What Will Obama Do? I hope you don’t mind me calling you Barack.., after all, I hear your name mentioned so much in my circles I should probably call you dad.

When I am done I hope that you have the "audacity" to answer some burning questions that I have and (questions) your rock star-like fan base have a difficult time articulating (at least to my satisfaction). Sometimes, Barack these community forum debates— that border on civil disturbances—get so ugly that I have to walk away.

For example, one day I was in the barbershop and asked this hypothetical question:

What if Obama is a sly product of Karl Rove’s twisted, yet extremely effective, political strategy to keep “their man” (who just happens to look like one of us) in the Oval Office? I thought it was a fair question—one that I’d be curious to hear about your retort. Nevertheless, the barber I posed the question to called me Willie Lynch!! Can you believe that? Between you and me I knew he read about Willie Lynch from a car flyer the week before, but I was still almost offended. I was happy that he used his prior week’s street knowledge to mount his weak defense. After all, Barack, for some of us flyers are the only true form of education we have. I hope you address that on your road to the riches.

BACK AT THE SHOP

At this point it didn’t even matter that the barber didn’t know who Karl Rove was. But that’s what I am trying to tell you, Barack; I haven’t seen this much defense since the O.J. trial. In this barbershop it is now harder to find an O.J. supporter than it is to find a monogamous governor. Did you ever think that the annual Freaknik Fest would’ve moved from the Atlanta city streets to mayor and governor’s offices in New York? This CHANGE you speak about has many subplots, huh? As I digress.

Barack, how’s the wife doing? I ask because (at times) it seems like this campaigning is really getting to her.

I know she is strong and no matter what happens she's already elevated the First Lady's dress code. But take a minute and find out for me how she’s doing. Never mind us, Barack take care of her. Michelle seems cool to me.

Anyway, man I know you are are busy so I am going to wrap it up soon, but I have a few more really important questions to ask. Is that okay with you?

After you announced that you were officially running for office… how did you get the security detail from the alphabet bureau – headed by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff? Are you telling me the same Michael Chertoff (who was then Head of FEMA) and stood idle as black folks were washed ashore during hurricane Katrina is now in the business of protecting black folk’s lives? Come Barack, talk to me. If you don't want to answer that one, please tell me how Chertoff got a promotion after the genocide in Katrina? This change is really confusing me, man.

I also want to know, why you keep telling people that you are going to pull the troops out of Iraq and America still occupies every single war region that was fought by our military. Every one. If you win the nomination, please don’t play that card with McCain. He only looks stupid. I know he is a republican, but you may want to two-way Colin should that debate arise.

Can you please tell me what is going to happen to the people (like me) that simply refuse to put the V-Chip in their arm?

I am curious why do we need new borders in Mexico and not Canada? I know it has to be way more complicated than Mexicans look like you and Canadians look more like the Kennedy’s? Talk to me man, becuase secretly, Barack I am rooting for you. Just don't tell my people in the shop, becuase debating with them about you means more CNN and less BET and I can't thank you enough for that. FYI: Bob Johnson is an ass isn't he? You know, if you look real close at Chelsea Clinton's kinky hair...

Seriously though, I hear that banks are gearing up for the market collapse. Did you hear that? Once the currency fails, the government will institute the long-awaited Point System, so they can LITERARILY track every financial move made in the country. So, if you are not in the system you are done. And, if you are in the “system” you are really finished. Talk to me, man cause the people in the shop are voting because you are black and articulate. Personally, that offends me more than the Willie Lynch comment.

Finally, man, if Karl’s Klan is not behind you and you win the nomination, I will be the second to congratulate you after Michelle. However, if the market collapses, the troops stay in Iraq, and gas hits $6 dollars a gallon – all on your watch in the Oval Office, do you think many black or white people will remember your DNC speech?
I know the staff at the Cash N’ Carry barbershops won’t remember, because with this pending Points System implementation cash-only businesses will be the first to go.
On your trip to the White House., you may want to holla at them...

They'll need a change.

'Assalamu Alaikum

please click on (WWOD) blog title to view video

1 love,

Ray Lewis

Disclaim HER

2008-02-29T08:26:00.001-08:00

Who wants to be well-adjusted to injustice? -- Cornell West

The eagerly awaited, long anticipated new joint from the Princess of peace, Erykah Badu officially dropped in an unrehearsed 37th birthday gift to herself. This CD,... in a word is BANGIN’. But, before you cash in your Bush swindled refund check to add the new Erykah to your collection... We must do a little housekeeping first.

We are going to blow-up all the conflicting CDs in your collection. Now then, you will need some lighter fluid, a ski mask, gloves, goggles and roughly 1/16 of an acre... which is significantly less than Spike’s 40. Ready? Walk outside and start your large bonfire – be extra careful if you have a perm. Once the fire hits 2-story proportions, empty any (and all) of the following casually-termed music from your collection. Let’s start with: Destiny’s Children (even the ones with Michele), next up, P-Don’t He, Jermaine Dupri(hold on to the flicks of Janet), Ashanti, Clingy, the Ding Dong Twins, Keisha Cole, Akon, J. "I wish his birth were a" Holiday, Mario, Rhianna, Trey Songz, Robin Thicke (put his wife's pictures in that pile with Janet's). Okay, we are almost there. Toss in Chris Brown, Chrisette Michele, and Chris Cringle..., wait… we need something really flammable!! Ah, toss-in Tyler Perry….. ah, the soundtrack. Now that's a fire!! Now that the flame is really hot, go back inside and insert Erykah. Common & Andre use your discretion.

The new millennium musical mix of Nina Simone/ Billie Holiday/ and the early Ms. Hill is back with her fourth show-stopper entitled,
New Amerykah (Pt. 1: 4th World War).

If you haven’t bought a book in a while, skip this purchase (why break the cycle), just rent some rims. For me the true mark of a great artist is their continued growth, the artist’s non-conforming fear of radio asylum and the ability to preach and teach and deliver a head-nodding outreach. Badu may be underrated by those standards. Badu says her motivation for this one is quite simple: “It’s hard to enjoy the fruits of my labor when so many people are suffering.” So this CD is an attempt to address both issues. You can spend an hour on the artwork and the rest of the day digesting the lyrics. The sublets are numerous…, for example, the "radio friendly" single, “Honey” isn’t even listed on the CD cover. And, I thought I hated commercial radio.

The roof rattling, rebel-rousing street anthem “Soldier” is my absolute favorite joint on this 11 track dynamo (12 if you count Honey). Badu says she doesn’t write solutions because she is not qualified. But, she continued, let’s at least get organized and say… “How many people want to change?” That was the philosophical approach and premise of Soldier. Mission accomplished.

In a year where pacifist are torn between the hand-plucked choices of Barack and Hilary, Badu unleashes a gem that underscores that it not enough to have choices – but more important to create them.

please click on blog title for bonus track

1 love,
Ray Lewis

BLACK BY POPULAR DEMAND

2008-01-16T15:54:00.001-08:00

“When elephants and donkeys fight, it’s the grass that suffers.”

It's official this year, Iowans have officially elected more Black presidential candidates than they have lynched — but it is only January. Nevertheless, the Barack bandwagon is getting fairly crowded and unlike most, I have some reservations. It’s nothing personal; in fact, I like the brother with the big- bootied wife. My concerns have varied layers.

A) I am always leery of Black folks that white people tote: O.J., Tiger, BET’s Bob “The Hoe is Mine” Johnson, and Al “This Neck of the Woods” Roker... just to name a few.

B) I would love to know who is in charge of the PR machine that is pulling the strings on B-Diddy’s puppet show. I won’t even mention where his money is being laundered. Now I could be just suffering from political paranoia—but that doesn’t mean someone is trying to get US to drink the Kool-Aid. For the sake of argument, let’s assume Barack is in fact who he claims to be — I’d be the first to help him pick his White House team. You may want to close your door for this one.

Press Secretary, Tavis Smiley

What Tavis lacks in cool points he more than makes up for with his credible insight. He is the only chit-chat host on TV that has interviewed T.I., (former) Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Mos Def and Babyface with the greatest of ease.

Vice President, Colin Powell.

This move can only be surmised as addition by subtraction. Aside from his (still) very credible military experience — imagine the faces at the Bush dinner table when this news hits the Vodka cabinet?

U.S. Secretary of Education, Cornell West.

The baggy pants fad will take a back seat (so to speak) to this educational wonder's low maintenance hair style. West’s approach to religion, humanitarian studies and sociological and economic empowerment will be refreshing no matter who is in the Oval chair — Barack just underscores this Black movement that has been idle long enough. A portion of West’s responsibility is to overhaul the arts & sciences taught from pre-school 'til the tassells sway in high school. I have added Bradford Marsalis and Spike Lee to round-out this all-star trio. And now, for once in our lifetime our school daze will be on pace to do the right thing.

Federal Communication Commission, Londell McMillan.

Entertainment extraordinaire is the Brooklyn-bred brother that gave Prince his creative freedom (back) just in time to sell his music via the internet long before the birth of an ipod or MAC-10. McMillan’s Spook Who Sat By the Door approach to the music industry could make author William C. Cooper (Behold a Pale Horse) shiver. His checkmate foresight includes an artist coalition campaign to start a 401k and health and benefit plans for artists who typically live rich and die broke. His humble industry moves speak louder than the voices that he represents. When it’s all said and done Londell will be the Nelson Mandela of this crack game neatly disguised as commercial radio.

Add AOL/Time Warner/Turner CEO Richard Parsons to Londell’s camp. Parsons can finally end his Turner reign with a quote from Ice Cube: “How can you be a Nigga for life crew/ with a white Jew/ telling you what to do?”

Secretary of Commerce, Earl Graves.

After the assassination of former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, I am not so sure the Black Enterprise founder will welcome this challenge without a vest. But, like most great leaders sometimes you are not asked to lead — but your exemplary skills make the choice that much easier.

Fifty years ago one would think that the above-mentioned team is just a fictional tale from the crypt. Well, today this very black author is writing this piece from the heart of Stone Mountain.

Thanks Dr. King - I know you are listening. Have a happy birthday.

[click on the Black By Popular Demand] title for bonus track.
1 love,
Ray Lewis

PASTIME PARADISE

2007-12-21T14:35:00.000-08:00

There are two kinds of man; the ones who make history and the ones who endure it. Camilo Jose Cela

Brace yourself, this is the time of the year where most news outlets reflect on the year that was. How original. After all, who couldn’t stand to fumble through another ESPN 24-hour B-scroll of Mick Vick pawing his way to infamy? Mike may not have his falcon family to "kick" around anymore, but he’ll have enough prison pals to play with in 2008, should infamous icons like O.J. and R.K. defenses ever rest. For R. Kelly, it is important to note: “Double Up” takes on a whole new meaning in prison.

If Barry Bonds didn’t know what that clear gel he was rubbing was, Kelly may have some insight at least until the Feds readies Bonds' bunk too.

Some folks say the Feds are just picking on our black elite and their profiling knows no boundaries. I'll buy that. In fact, the alphabet boys have now crossed the clergy lines, picking on hometown homies: Eddie L. Long, and Creflo A. Dollar. My first thought is; names like Long & Dollar sure make IRS profiling slightly easier—almost like spotting a furry chinchilla hat at a prize fight. Realistically, profiling is just getting its second wind—-just wait until the government starts the housing market bail out, news of Creflo and Long will be out like Queen Latifah.

I tend to worry about the rich and famous as much as they worry about me. My focus is this presidential election. I thought it was mighty white of Barack to add Oprah to his meal ticket (no pun intended, of course). You will be hard-pressed to find a more essential election than the upcoming 2008 race to destroy what’s left of this so-called superpower. The term superpower is considerably humorous when you stop and think... the only essential commodity the rest of the world relies on the USA for is wheat and Tyler Perry—and one has WAY too much sugar.

If you listen to the loud whispers from China, they feel rice is a more than an adequate substitute to wheat. So, while the American media is distracted by “tainted” toys—China is preparing a global takeover that will change the world’s landscape forever. It is almost knee-slapping funny to think of America as a superpower, yet something as simply as the classic American car is a Bug made in Germany. Or, one of the nation’s leading cuisines is Italian pizza. Even sports attendance is becoming more and more irrelevant. As a matter for fact, there are more NBA fans in China than there are people in the entire U.S.!!! On the homeland front, the United States military, the U.S. currency and the once-touted American commercialism are all fading faster than a Bush Twin’s high. While China is shifting its mighty gears and waging a not-so-stubble war with the U.S., our ballrooms, boarding schools and barbershops are still wagering bets on who has the best butt, J-Lo or Beyonce?

I am not sure who wins that battle, but I am willing to bet, both of their assets are wrapped in jeans that were made in China.

Until ’08, Bottoms Up!!!

(click on blog title for bonus track)

1 love,
Ray Lewis

NOW WHAT?

2007-11-08T17:49:00.000-08:00

“Art imitates life, unless you live long enough to understand that the converse is true.”

What Now?

If you look real close you can almost see the (not so imaginary) first down marker being drawn right down the middle of America. On one side, you have the 8% of America’s wealth. They are the ones that wake up every morning, get Chad and Little Johnny off to school. Kiss the wife, send flowers to the mistress and page the male page. They arrive in the office between 8 and 9, sipping on a cup of over-priced coffee then open their tax-deducted laptop to make sure that their off-shore accounts are available when the America dollar collapses. The other 90% of Americans attend their churches, vote for the senate seats and use their discretionary income to support their movies, attend ballgames, and TVO their talk shows. The latter 2% of the population are in prison — some without bars. So what now?

Well, I heard some Radio One broadcasters tried to organize a blackout day. A day where a group of conscious black people take a “well earned” day off from their typical misguided spending binges. I liked the idea, in fact I participated — unlike most of the targeted audience. It’s hard to measure the success of such a day, but watching black people come together to do anything positive is never a negative. Personally, I would have used the Friday after Thanksgiving as my blackout day — and still will. I found it somewhat ironic that the Radio One air personalities, who rely heavily on their advertisers to support the 40 song play list and Steve Harvey suits, would call for an African-American economic boycott. At best, this blackout was a conflict of interest. Luckily for Radio One their advertisers don’t listen to their stations. They were probably up counting the money in their off-shore accounts. The blackout irony continued as I watched some black participants passing by Wal-Mart in an SUV. Clearly that blackout will only last for 200 more miles.

What Now? Well, I understand that we have a black candidate in the presidential race and his wife looks like she would’ve participated in the blackout — after she got her nails done. I like Michelle Obama, but if her husband wins the nomination she may experience a blackout of a totally different kind. The Obamas might want to add Frank Lucas to their payroll.

What now? The Hollywood writers are on a blackout [Who knew it was contagious?]. The writers are fighting for DVD, video / iPod streams, and Youtube points to be added to their 4% residuals. It’ll be interesting to see who is going to write those brilliant Flava Flav lines.

What now?
Sorry, Obamas... prayer gets my vote!

(click on the blog title for bonus track)

1 love,
Ray Lewis

INTEREST ONLY

2007-10-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

"Just because a person is paranoid, doesn't mean that someone isn't watching them."
--Season 3: The Wire, HBO

I must say it was rejoicing to see my people come together for such a relevant cause like the Jena 6. My joy jolted when I swallowed the fact that for one day (at least), we put aside the community’s typical engulfment with the Jackson Five, the Fantastic Four, the Treacherous Three, 2 Pac or KRS-1. Although who could be mad at the latter?

In any event, as great a day as it was in Jena, Louisiana, I had an interesting passing thought about this (and other) large, predominantly black gatherings. I would love to see a crowd of that capacity pick a particular time of the protest, line the news media lenses up and all AT ONCE, pull out a major credit card and cut it in half. We can dump the depleted cards in a barrel marked INTEREST ONLY! By the way, that noise you just heard was some black republican who just shitted on himself. No worries his white wife will clean it up.... bet she can’t do the electric slide though.

You see the only thing that divides this country more than race, religion, or region is revenue. And, the foundation of revenue—or the lack there-of is credit. Credit card companies are making a KILLING, killing what is left of the middle class. And, whoever is left over, predatory lenders, public schools, and Pubic Hair Thomas will spend the rest of their life time appointments destroying.

Do you have any idea what Visa, MasterCard and Macy's call their cardholders that pay their bills on time? Dead Beats! Yep Dead Beats! Major credit card companies make the majority of your money (excuse me, their money) off the interest and to them Dead Beats (in their world) don't pay any interest. But, you probably already knew that, right?

So, humor me for a minute. Let’s say you get a (loosely-termed) "offer" in the mail to transfer your credit card balance from Card A to Card B. Card B has a 0% interest rate for 9 months. Hell, let’s make it an even year. So you take your $3,000.00 balance (with 15% interest, if you are lucky) from Card A and transfer it to Card B... as the gangsta mail offer suggested. Side note: black republicans think rap artists are the real gangstas! Yeah, watch your back, people!!! I think that’s Nelly and T.I. in the Bushes!

Now back to your 3-grand loss. If this balance is older than a year, it is safe to assume another year won't make much of a difference, right? Which is probably why you got the hostile offer in the mail to begin with.

[I wonder if Colin Powell is delivering mail these days?]

For the record, if you were going to pay this balance off within the 12-month, drug free zone (yet another excerpt from The Wire) that’s cool. Congratulations. But, for the other 99% of the Jena 6 Movement this applies to you... and you may want to get out the Vaseline for this one.

Once that 0% interest rate expires, your new rate(which could be anything) will INCLUDE all the interest that accrued during the 12-month “drug-free offer” plus 10-12% of the national average—which is what "variable rate" really means. So your original 15% interest rate (from Card A with the $3,000.00 balance) is now 25-30% or an additional $900.00 Well, at least your neighbor still has the house-warming toaster that you purchased on the card.

I remember after the second plane hit the towers on 9-11, one of the first things George Bush said (after the Floridian kindergarten class stop reading to him) was: “America will be fine. Americans should act natural and don’t change a thing, in fact.... go shopping.” I wonder if that was Bush's idea of a white sale?

click on INTEREST ONLY title for bonus track.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

FRUIT OF THE LOONS

2007-09-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana

There is an Atlanta city councilman named C.T. Martin that is spearheading a law to ban baggy pants that showcase the undergarments worn by a large segment of our youth culture. The banned ordinance falls under the indecent exposure law that is already on the Georgia law books. Wow! Just think we are experiencing record highs in unemployment; violent hand-to-hand crime making a comeback (in Martin’s community no less), home envisions taking place at noon and black kids (with their saggy pants)are still getting shot in the back by the police. Yet with this level of chaos in full bloom, in Martin’s backyard, you just have to wonder how he finds the free time to double as the Fashion Police? Why not just pass a law on being a better father?

For the record, I think the baggy pants fashion is one step below retardation, which by the way is not illegal. If I had a son [and… Lauryn Hill if you are listening that offer is still on the table] who attempted to wear his clothes below his ass, I would kick him in his buttocks so hard that the swelling in his trousers would fit snug on his now inflated rectum. See no laws, just size 13 Timberlands, a field goal attempt and a Father-of-the-Year speech.

My California coastal brother recently passed through Atlanta and got wind of the proposed law and agreed with the Councilman. See, this is what I come to expect from 6-7 break-dancer that used to wear Dashikis to family functions. Dwayne, Ike Turner called, he wants his mushroom belt back. There a lot of things wrong with today’s youth culture, but attire is not even in the top 10. After all, we all went through a stupid dress phase.

Recently I saw one half of the Atlanta-based rap group Kris Kross at a car wash. (I’m not sure if it was Kris or Kross) but who ever it was, he had his clothes turned the right way and he once got paid to wear it backwards. Like most kids, they will grow out of the silly closet statements…. It’s the actual closet I am worried about.

Man, I remember paying a lady on my block $2.00 to sew my name on a Puma suit. LL used to roll up one pant leg whenever he did Rock The Bells. Kool Moe Dee’s name was Kool Moe Dee. My high school teacher drove a Pinto. I saw a Muslim at KFC. Quincy Jones, James Earl Jones and Sidney Poitier hand their black revolutionary checks to white women. Snoop has a perm.

Oprah had a show about Hip Hop. I heard the Pope drove a bullet-proof car, where the hell was his faith? Certainly not with the youth. Sorry for the digression.
Do you think clothes really make the man? Well, Bill Clinton got head in the Oval Office and his pants had to be below his ass… and C.T. Martin probably voted for him. Now he wants to vote to fine or lock kids up for wearing baggy pants? I know this fashion came out of the prison culture, but so did the furniture that you are sitting on reading this article.

as always, click on title for bonus clip

1 love,
Ray Lewis

No Rhythm, Just Blues

2007-08-21T15:49:00.000-07:00

You will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
John Quincy Adams

Since the beginning of mankind black music has been the harmonious link that joins the beat of two or more hearts. I am quite sure the beginning of black life can be traced to a drum or bass. Since slavery,(possibly before) Africans have used music to connect the souls of each other, while skillfully steering clear of the white man's interference. Now today’s black music is mostly played on American radio frequencies owned by white males. Talk about your Shakespearean tragedies.

The Beginning of the End
If you ever wondered what killed the 12-bar rhythm and blues.., well the conspirators are plentiful.
You could start with inception of the disco era and end with misguidance of Teddy Riley and more recently, P. Silly. Oddly, you can also credit Puff The Magic Sampler with keeping some of R&B music alive, since the majority of his gimmicky re-takes started on the wax of an R&B record. However, history remembers black music the end of R&B will be a significant benchmark. Personally, I miss that era.

One of the things that I simply really hate about America is it's crafty intent to put a label on everything. But, like slavery, if it’s to be packaged and sold, it would first need a label… don’t forget the bar code! Rhythm and Blues is really a marketing term birthed in the late 40’s to package black music that was scattered between jazz (remember that?), soul and gospel. Donnie is living proof of black music’s historically blended success—yet no major record company would dare label his music gospel. Hence his contractual independence.

In the 60’s, America got a whiff of the rebellious West Indian vibes from Jamaica, called Reggae.

Who knew it would become the unintended foundation to hip hop music—which is why major radio stations in this country play neither real Reggae nor real Hip Hop. Because (together), like the brave slaves before us, we would probably rebel.

Nile Rogers [the bass player from the R&B group Chic] and the unapologetic soul of James Brown punctuated the stamp of Hip Hop music. And, I think if someone sat down and told the story of black music to 50 Cent and the GED Unit, they would never have polluted this beautiful genre. With any luck they would have just shot each other instead of poising our kids. Although I miss R&B, I know it’s still out there… all you have to do is check the label.

Click on blog title for your throwback bonus track

1 love,
Ray Lewis

DON'T HATE THE PLAYA

2007-07-29T16:18:00.000-07:00

One of the few differences between the corner drug dealer and a corporate CEO is the way they filed their taxes.

If you ever had any doubt that professional sports is a simple microcosm of the society at large, this week’s sports pages will remove all your doubts.. In my lifetime, there has never been a more tempered sports climate—or (ironically) a better time to sit your child down and explain a few of life's lessons that far exceed any parental handbook.

Page 1: San Francisco slugger, Barry Bonds
Barry is the superstar son of baseball Hall of Fame outfielder, Bobby Bonds. The senior Bonds hated the media more than junior. And, six years ago the prodigal son was a shoe-in to join his (now deceased) dad in the game's exclusive shrine. However, in light of a so-called “mountain” of suspicious steroid evidence, Barry’s once red carpet ride into The Hall is now very questionable (not to mention, personal). His fate rests in the hands of a mostly white press, who have a mutual disdain for him and his dad. If you were an NBA referee, how would you like Bonds' odds? For the record, Barry has never tested positive for the drug. Nor has he ever admitted to such use (unlike some of his former peers). Most significantly, at the height of the alleged steroids era, baseball NEVER tested its players for the cheating substance. Yet, baseball commissioner, Bud Selig who conflictingly doubles as a team owner, has all but convicted Bonds in the court of public opinion. These suited drug dealers ain't bull-shitting! Historically, baseball has never been kind to black ball players; so consequently some black ballas have never forgiven or forgotten that racist fact. And, in this case, those embedded memories are shared by two men who happen to have more than a family bond.

Page 2: Suspended Falcon Phenom Michael Vick.
The sad truth here is if Vick decided to kill his wife, have involuntarily sex with an under age stranger or shoot an ordinary citizen—all with the same eyewitness that are accusing him of this federal crime, his chances of freedom would be a lot less compromised. So murder, rape and domestic violence all take a back seat to fighting dogs. Only in America. In essence you have people like Kobe Bryant and OJ Simpson whispering, damn, I'm sure glad I am not that Nigga. Vick says he is innocent, his “friends” say he is guilty, the Monday after Thanksgiving only one of them will be truly grateful. The other will be sleeping with his back to the wall.

Page 3: Rouge NBA referee, Tim Donaghy
Iron fist hoop Commissioner, David Stern is simply sick at the possible fall-out behind this indictment. All of Stern's foolish, league-mandated attempts to make his sport more yuppie friendly and less new jack swing may be flushed down a crap table by a league official. Stern says he felt betrayed by one of his hand-picked, $260,000-per employees. You'd think with all of Dave's alphabet boys on this case, they would've noticed the diamond in the back of Tim's white Cadillac. Now the only thing white collar about this crime is the perpetrator. And the worst is rumored to be on the horizon, especially if Donaghy gets on the stand and sings like Neno Brown. Stern can take some comfort in knowing that while Donaghy was shaving points, at least he adhered to the NBA's dress code.

click title for bonus track

1 love,

Ray Lewis

VICKstory

2007-07-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

The quality of decision is like the well-timed swoop of a falcon which enables it to strike & destroy its victim -Sun Tzu

For a variety of reasons I really try to refrain from mainstream stories — mostly due to the saturation of it all, and partly due to a lack of a unique perspectives. In the Michael Vick case, I decided to make an exception - although I am really not sure why. In this country being indicted of a crime (still) means innocent until proven guilty, unless of course the Federal Government is doing the indicting. Then it means, pack lots of Vaseline and always sleep with your back to the wall.

I have never been a huge fan of football and I am probably less of a Falcon fan. However, like most Georgia residents, I could not help but watch and marvel at the once-in-a-lifetime skills of the Falcon Wonder. I remember one Sunday while I was sitting in church I could have sworn that I heard the pastor speed up the ceremony as the kick-off clock crept closer to 1pm—and that pastor was a female! The following Sunday, I witnessed a traditional white family (mother, father, sister, brother)—all with their faces painted black and sporting Michael Vick's home jersey. I wonder what color dad’s face would've been if Michael Vick actually came by to pick up his J-Lo hipped daughter?

I read most of the dog fighting indictment, which incidentally, is extremely suspect of any CREDIBLE evidence as far as placing Vick at the actual scene of the horrific—and I mean—horrific crimes. I am not sure a jury of his peers will be as objective; especially since this will not be a jury of his peers. His peers will be fighting for a Super Bowl, while Vick will be battling for a bowl, but there will be nothing super about it.

Innocent or guilty, I truly believe Vick has thrown his last pass as a Falcon. If Vick is guilty, he has thrown his last pass as an NFL player... if the latter is true it will truly be difficult to find this man’s best friend.

(click on title above for bonus track)

1 love,
Ray Lewis

R.I.P.

2007-07-14T14:11:00.000-07:00

“We probably wouldn't worry about what people think of us if we could know how seldom they do.” Olin Miller

So its official… The NAACP has buried the “N” word. Am I alone in the ironic fact that the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People took the time out of their archaic schedule to bury the “N” word, yet still (proudly) call themselves Colored people? Stop it, y'all are killing me!

I imagine Mark Fuhrman woke up this morning from his hooded linen rest to ask; where were these Niggas during the O.J. trial? I wonder how many neighborhood liquor stores the N-Word funeral procession skated passed on the way to the Detroit graveyard? The
-AACP (remember there are no more “N” words), may want to swing the funeral procession pass the University of Michigan and get an update on the Affirmative Action ban that those crackers buried.

This Motown comedy act got a lot less funnier when you consider the fact that Ward Connerly is the mastermind behind this ridiculous ritual. And, I waited very patiently wondering (aloud)when the N-Word eulogist was going to mention that Ward Connerly was also the right wing creator of the Proposition 209 Bill, which was lawfully designed to outlaw all race and gender preferences in state hiring and state university admissions. Or, quite simply, a bill to eliminate Affirmative Action. If you listen carefully, you can still hear the faint giggle from Donald Goings’ grave.

Honestly, I applaud all great intentions, no matter how silly. But there are so many other things going down in the motor city that I think would take precedence like:

 How much of the city’s building fund is going towards the 24” rims on Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick’s Cadillac Escalade?
 Why wasn’t Eminem at the “N” Word funeral?
 How do the Detroit pimps get purple gators from a green alligator?
 Why didn’t Chris Webber call a time out before the AACP got started?

Click link or blog title for Motown Bonus clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii6ujiw9sdE

1 love,

Ray Lewis

SOUL FOOD

2007-06-27T17:50:00.000-07:00

I was watching Tavis Smiley one day and his guest was the one and only Denzel Washington. Usually when Denzel makes his movie premiere talk show rounds he is donned in a NY fitted, jeans or an occasional collared shirt. When Washington sat down to chat with Tavis; he chilled in a dark tailored two piece that could make the most heterosexual man, mutter damn!! Smiley, not missing the obvious opportunity, asked: Man, why the suit? And, Denzel in an effortless manner that only he could script simply replied: “I wore this suit to show you how much I appreciate what you do.” Silence.

Well, as many of you know I am a HUGE music fan and in honor of this spectacular CD, this will be one of the few times where I check my dry-witted sarcasm at the door.

After a four-year lay-off singer/ songwriter extraordinaire, Donnie unleashes his second LP called The Daily News and (honestly) my simple review will never do it justice. In spite of that fact, here it goes. Wait, before I get started, there are a couple of things you have to absorb.

a) Don’t for a minute think that you are going to drop the top or swing your hips to this one--it is simply not that type of party. Donnie is much too complex for that. 9-1-1 will be the closest track to a toe-tapping single that you will get from Marvin Gaye’s nephew; and believe me, his legendary uncle will be extremely proud of this one. Add Donnie Hathaway to that (would-be) proud list, who Marvin’s nephew is named after.

b) You will also notice the inability to categorize this CD, hence the Independent distribution from SoulThought Records—I can only imagine the faces in the recording studio as these lyrics were being recited.

Not so ironically, The Daily News tackles subjects like sexism, racism, drug abuse, homophobia, child molestation, the Atlanta Child Murders, suicide and even the prescription drug companies. Yeah, it is hard to snap your finger to that one—although the brilliant TRUE gospel-like music arrangements actually attempts to do just that.

If you didn’t like the debut LP The Colored Section, don’t waste your time with this one. Just turn on your urban contemporary radio and watch your soul get washed down the sewer. Who knows, maybe one day it’ll make the daily news.

Bonus Tracks:

  Clips for The Daily News http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2bFsa-KFIc

The Colored Sections http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-330HiPgSw

1 love,
Ray Lewis

Ya Don't Say

2007-06-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

“The only real controversy behind saying the word nigger is…, for the first time in America history, a black man told a white man that there is something he cannot do.”---Chris Rock

Okay, where were we? Ah, yes, Imus. He got fired for saying something stupid. Imagine that. Now here’s a little known Black History fact, Imus has been riding this short school bus skit for 30 years. Now the corporate suits concluded that he’s too over-the-top? Wow, white people are so strange. Personally, I don’t believe in censorship of any kind. For one, it goes against the very principal of a democracy. Secondly, it’ll open a pandora's box that America will never fairly or adequately “police.” Furthermore, how can anyone south of Jesus legislate morals?

Is Imus an ass? Certainly. But, last I checked that’s not against the law. If it was Charles Barkley would be doing life—plus ten. As far as the girls’ hoop team from Rutgers goes, it is important to remember it’s not what you are called; it’s what you answer to. So, if I had a vote [which I am positive most black people are elated that I don’t] I would’ve voted NOT to fire Imus. No one asked me, but I also would’ve never hired him—which I think is where the discussion should start.

My cube-mate asked me why is the good Reverend Sharpton and his podium pal Jesse involved in every racial situation in America? I rhetorically answered... maybe because someone disassembled the Klan? I thought that would’ve ended the conversation, but noooooo. So, once that awkward silence ended, I asked: Would you rather digest the racial opinions of Louis Farrakhan, Belafonte, or Hugo Chavez? I sure do. I told my naïve neighbor that media loves Jesse and Al because they inject a certain emotion (oddly within black and white people) every time their face hits the flat screen. And, the media is about steroid ratings, not substance—which is why Hugo will NEVER be invited to speak at the United Nations again. Jesse and Al may have a picnic there. You can now add my name to the list of Black people that my noisy neighbor would rather not hear from. I wonder if he realizes how mutual the feeling.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

DIVIDED WE STAND

2007-05-18T05:30:00.001-07:00

"One of the most segregated times in America is the hour of worship."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

These are some of the most mystifying moments of my life and honestly I am a tad bit worried. Just think, technology is advancing at warped speeds and common sense is decreasing at a similar (yet unfortunate) rate. The defined class where one resides will probably determine the economic success. (Editior's note) the middle-class will no longer be an option.

Ride with me for a minute.

I was at a gas station the other day and some Alec Baldwin-looking cat steps to the counter, drops a pound in front of the cashier and says: Excuse me, can I get $100 on pump three. Every head in the store turned to see what was parked at pump three, I on the other hand, had this certain urge to pee. At the urinal I just wondered when is this liberation thing in Iraq going to manifest. Or will I have to get gas with a ski mask and a gat. Then, the more realistic thought manifested... which is just how silly I'm going to look in my new Acura Hybrid... with a subwoofer. Once the daydreaming stopped, I dropped $11 on pump four and I headed to my business appointment at the office of The 100 Black Men of America.

The lady who runs the Atlanta-based 100 Black Men's office told me "We don’t do business with white vendors." I guess she had a bad experience with the Tiger Woods Negro Foundation. I told her that approach was noble and I cannot help but respect that. In fact I wish more people had that option. The one hiccup in their plan is, black people don’t make copiers, printers, or fax machines (which was the reason for my visit), so even if the person that sold the equipment was black, (in this case me) the manufacturer won't be... so what would really be the point? As she contemplated whether or not she should have ever opened the door (never mind calling me back), I gathered my pictured presentation, zipped my gear and made my exit through the ironically colored white doors.

Once I returned to my lily-white office to discuss my unproductive field experience with my manager, he stopped me (mid sentence) and asked: "What kind of people only does business based on race? I was eager to remind him that he voted for Regan, Nixon and Bush... twice. But the words couldn't get pass my silly smirk or twitching tongue. Instead, I asked him: Have you ever heard of this organization called the Augusta National, home to The Master’s Golf Tournament? I probably should have waited for option three.

I did however, update my resume.

The downward spiral to the day peaked when I heard a shout from an adjoined cube-mate that bellowed, "Ray, can you believe this SHIT, MSNBC just fired Imus...
stay tuned

1 love,

Ray Lewis

SONGS IN THE KIA OF LIFE

2007-03-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

"Music is love in search of the right words." --Sidney Lanier

About a month ago I was on my way home from a Jamaican restaurant, when a young lady, who probably won her driver’s license at a Ray Charles dart tossing contest, ran into the driver’s side door of my (now two-door) Acura Legend. Upon impact, my Omar CD skipped uncontrollably, while the Jerk Chicken (with extra gravy) hit the windshield. Lady Charles had three kids in the car (and one on the way). Her Boo seated next to her,jumped out the car--and I'm thinking he wants to add some beef. Instead he looked at the accident, then gave me the head nod, and went into I-HOP and never returned. And, I thought I was the one that wanted to choke her. Man marriage must be rough in these parts. Anyway, Sister Charles (thankfully) had State Farm insurance. And, in two days (on of them being a Sunday) they set me up in a fully loaded, KIA Sportage. Did I mention this was a KIA?

I asked the Enterprise Rental attendant, is a KIA all that you have? He said, yep, you'll love it. Okay, so now I am really pissed. In desperate need of a level-headed thinker to calm things down, I called my cousin Stephanie, who lives in Athens. Hell if you are black and live in Athens, Ga. you have to own a level head right? Besides, I figured I should inform a close relative of this pending beat down at the rent-a-car spot. And, I know Steph is the one relative that would bail me out with minimal questions. But, before I finished the story, (I got to the part about the KIA Sportage) Stephanie starts laughing louder than the AM radio. After three days of sporting the Sportage; I couldn’t take it anymore. I went back to Enterprise and said.., come on man, a Sportage? This time I had a brotha, who said I understand (you had an Ac), so I am going to give you an upgrade (as if you could be down graded from a KIA). I said cool. What’s the upgrade? He said a KIA Amanti. Any minute I was expecting the PUNKED cameras to put an end to this foolishness, then I remembered that I am a celebrity in name only.

When the attendant came back with the “upgrade.” He jumped out the new whip and says (with a straight face): this is KIA’s answer to the E-Class Mercedes. I said; my man, if this is the answer, what the hell was the question? In all fairness, the KIA headlights were the mirror image of the old Benz’ headlamps. So much so, that I pulled into a gas station and this dude pushing a stone-cold S-Class was right next to me. He was parking a black-on-black, cromed-up, 5 double O.. it was SICK. Anyway, he slid out the whip with his hand extended, ready to dap me up on my new Benz-looking whip. But as he walked closer, he caught a glance at the now visible KIA logo and withdrew the dap. He kept walking... I think he even smirked! Punk.
Too tired to put up with much more of this insanity, I simply turned up the heat on the KIA seats, then loaded five of the dopest CDs I own. This five (I feel) should be in everyone s collection: Listen Up:

Jewels – The Self Outside Project
If you like The Roots, then climb on board and ride with this independent label sensation. The virbrant lyrics and live music is simply sick. This is the ultimate driving vibe--no matter what your pushing. Jewels is bred from the VA and the CD made sitting in a KIA seem cool--the tinted windows helped too. One listen and you’ll search their archives for prior releases like: Sunz of Soul; The Situation, Anonanas and Truth Thru Fiction. One of the best kept secrets from the Commonwealth; along with my girl Joye B. Moore who will be a household name one day.

Esthero - Wikked Lil' Grrrls
You really cannot go wrong with any of Esthero's joints, but this one is pure hotness. This yet another one of Toronto's finest kept secrets, with timeless music and endless energy. She has a UK feel, an urban sound, and a Hip Hop groove. If you don’t like this joint, you should probably lease a KIA.... with 22's.

Omar – For Pleasure
There are three things I leave my house with: My keys, an alibi and an Omar disc. If I'm heading to Athens, you can add the 9mm glock to that list. In case you just met me, this is BY FAR my favorite artist. I played this For Pleasure CD at a cosmetology school in Decatur, Ga., and one of the students asked me what language was he speaking. If you are ever in south side of Decatur, Ga., keep driving.

Bob Marley & The Wailers – Rastaman Vibration
I believe this CD was Hip Hop before Hip Hop ever had a name. Classic in every literal sense of the word. This is the best of the Marley collection…even the Decatur students vibed to this one--and I know they had no idea of Marley's vibration. Every Jamaican household has this joint (on some format or the other), along with a picture of the Last Supper and a calendar with the wrong date showing.

Zaki Ibrahim – Once Black America understands that female soul extends far beyond the likes of Alicia, Mary, Faith, and Kelly they'll embrace the world vibes of this eclectic wonder. I could not think of a better place to start my trip than right here with another Roots inspired sister (she, like Esthero, is actually white from Canada too). The Toronto-bred Zaki has a down-tempo, acid soul style that strokes the essence of the heart.. Just close your eyes and picture a funky version of SADE.

T-Mobile wish they had a "five" like this. Now that I've turned in the KIA and got the Ac back..., the Legend continues.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

THE B SIDE

2007-03-09T15:24:00.000-08:00

The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be
a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with.
--Talib Kweli

One night while channel searching, I stopped on CNN. I was frozen stiff when I witnessed Paula Zahn asking a Baptist preacher: “What's wrong with Hip Hop music?” And, to think, all this time I thought TBS was Turner’s comedy network. Watching Zahn analyze Hip Hop music is sort of like asking Ron Isley to do your taxes, while R. Kelly is watching the kids. Zahn wouldn’t know Kurtis Blow from a Clinton escapade. The industry word on the street (okay, my friend in New York) says: Zahn gained her Hip Hop credibility from the fact that Russell Simmons watches her show. Well, I sometimes watch HGTV; does that mean I want to date Tim Hardaway? Someone has to put an end to this foolishness—naturally, I volunteered.

I may be the only person on the post side of 40 that simply refuses to watch Hip Hop music get pilfered by the masses like Jazz, Reggae, and Rhythm and Blues. Sometimes I feel like a one gun army and I am ready to fight to the end. Man, my kids are in trouble. Let’s face it, my kids may never learn to solve for X, but they will certainly know who Big Bank Hank is. Maybe I’ll adopt.

Believe it or not I like Paula Zahn; in fact some of my best friends are white. You’d think one of my friends at CNN would tap Zahn on the ass like a Tip Drill Video or (more realistically) whisper in her earpiece: Zahn if you want to know what’s up with Hip Hop music, why don’t you ask: Chuck, Mos, Talib, Kris or Esco? Mos would probably point you in the direction of his latest joint “True Magic”. Now I would not expect Paula Zahn to flip that in her changer, but the fact that most black people couldn’t do that either is probably the root cause of TRUE Hip Hop music becoming a resident on a respirator.

Forget no ass Zahn, one day I was listening to The Tom Joyner Morning Show (what can I tell you traffic in Atlanta is just that bad). In any event, Joyner and New York-based Jackie Reid were having a similar debate about the decline of Hip Hop music (thank God for Black History Month). Reid attributed the decline to degrading lyrics (how deep); while Joyner blamed the 21% decline to pirating and bootlegging. Oddly neither thought to scan Uncle Thomas’ play list. Maybe HBCU's is where the fighting on that show ends—I just wish Hip Hop music wasn’t the formatted sacrifice.

And now for the featured presentation:

Reasonable Doubt June 1996, Jay-Z
Roc-A-Fella Records / Priority Records

Iconic is probably the best adjective to describe this Hip Hop classic. If you ever wondered why Jay gets a pass for all the commercial corniness from here to the first Blueprint—look no further than Reasonable Doubt. The Black Album the world’s first rap artist retirement party underscores this fact.

Right from the start, Mistress of Hip Hop, Mary J. stamps her Queen of Soul hook on “Can’t Knock The Hustle.” One track later Brooklyn Buddy Biggie rips a few verses—fresh from his two-year "Ready To Die" debut. Biggie's tag team with Jigga on Brooklyn’s Finest is about as close as you’ll ever come to a neighborhood anthem. The rest of this Hip Hop masterpiece depicts a rags to riches victory second only to that of John F. Kennedy’s White House run. Hip Hop enthusiast will argue that this time America killed the wrong president.

1 love,

Ray Lewis

MEET THE PRESS

2007-02-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

"The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people."

-Alexis de Tocqueville

It sure seems like the media has an unusually cool, calm and un-clamoring relationship with Barack Obama. Could it be that the most powerful, yet tainted and unsavory news and entertainment outlet has finally come to terms with its iniquitous ways? Or, is Barack such a breath of fresh air (their words), that he gets a media pass—in the truest sense of the word? Before we begin to whip out the book of baby names, searching for what "Obama" really means; let's examine a few brothas the media dubbed "safe":

Cuba Gooden Jr.
Let’s face it, the media skipped right pass the Boyz In Da Hood section of his resume. In fact, when the media mentions this good Negro's accolades they tipically start his infamous “fetchin’ line from Jerry McGuire. Sadly, John Singleton gets the same amount of credit for jump-starting Gooden’s career as Keenon Ivory Wayans receives for propelling Jim Carrey’s career on In Living Color.

Tiger Woods
I guess you see where this list is going, huh? Wal-Mart pulled all of the Fuzzy Zeller promotions when Zeller suggested (after Tiger won his first Masters tournament); “Just don’t bring any of that Collared Greens and Chicken up in here.” Who the hell does Fuzzy think he is, Michael Richards? I heard Tim Hardaway called Tiger and said "damn, I cannot believe that fruit said that. I think Zeller is nuts!!" (no pun intended).

Clarence Thomas
Conservative news and talk could not get enough of this Supreme Negero nominee. Blacks are certain to be happy with this selection, the media touted. Then, the press turned on Pimp Thomas when Anita Hill (reluctantly) emerged with can of Coke and an upside down smile. Thomas claimed this hairy situation was nothing short of a "high-tech lynching." Thomas leaped pass the more cliché race card and reached straight for the slave slogan.. one that would make David Duke uncomfortable. You may not be able toargue with Thomas' merits, but you sure can question his motatives. At least he still has his wife.

Michael Jordan
What can I say, if you are a good Negro that is usually enough for the media... Add running and jumping to the mix… well, the press is likely to give you a key to their teen daughter's tree house. Jordan’s press pass doesn't even have an expiration date. Mike Nice can gamble on NBA time, plant a black seed in a white woman (think Juanita's lawyer knew that?), trade marriage secrets with Amad Rashaad or dunk on Bugs Bunny. This is all possible just as long as that Wall Street NIKE swosh at the bottom of the CNBC ticker doesn’t show a negative, he'll be as positive as a Strong Thurman DNA sample. I remember Jordan was once asked: "why don't he speak out against the slave labor/ Third World “employees” that are handcrafting his NIKE Airs... The same ones that black kids are killing each other for in Chicago?" Jordan said, ah, what can I say.., Republicans wear sneakers too. Great. I wonder if those same Republicans are still searching for the REAL perpetrators that murdered his dad? I think Kobe is more like Mike than he realizes.

I know Taye Diggs, Halle Berry and Oprah Winfrey assumed I forgot about them. Hey, don’t worry your day is coming.. Today, however, Obama is the focus. I have to admit Barack will be a formidable opponent—mainly because he is focused and (seemingly) fearless. I sometimes wonder, though.. if you are smart enough to be president, you should be wise enough not to run. Right Colin?

I find it funny how the most conservative right-wingers delicately handle Barack… come on you've heard them: "He is so clean," "he speaks so well," "he is so credible." Do you think Barack will ever tell those ass-less conservatories that, unless you are Flavor Flav or the governor of California those attributes are not compliments? Obama may find out really soon that black people are more likely to vote along the party lines versus the racial ones (ask Sharpton). Who knows, Barack may know that... After all, I don’t really know much about him… of course, I am not pressed.

1 love,

Ray Lewis

Any Given Sunday

2007-02-13T14:54:00.000-08:00

A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive. Having been alive, it won't be so hard in the end to lie down and rest. --Pearl Bailey

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the world ended on a weekday? Wait, don’t answer that yet. We’ll come back to that. I've noticed that many city streets in Anytown, USA are fairly empty from 7am-1pm on Sundays. There are probably several reasons for that fact. Here are a few non-litmus reasons that I observed:

A) The club-hoppers are pooped and are sleeping off the alcoholic reminisce of the night before.

B) Most criminals—because Saturdays are such busy days for them—are sleeping late on Sundays, probably plotting next week’s strategy sessions.

C) The rest of the nation, particularly the Christian congregation is posted up, repenting in a mega-plex near you. And, this is where life gets real quizzical.

At this point I want to suggest… if your pastor drives an automobile named after a white character on the Jefferson’s, you may want to exit this page now. Go on, I’ll wait. For those still reading....…

The church, ah, the Church…, the worship hall for the flawed and mortal…, the temple to avoid the doom. The sin-less social scene where the congregation gathers to be seen. The Holy Land for the Heavenly band. Just think, if only 144,000 are slated to make it Home, that means three-quarters of the people attending TD Jakes’ annual Mega Fest will be left holding T-shirts that say: … "My friends went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

On many given Sundays I've sat (window-stationed) at a neighboring eatery and watched Officer Friendly direct thousands of congregational cars, steering them into the secular world that they just spent two hours cleansing themselves from. It is truly an interesting sight. One day a lady stopped in this eatery for a snack and she still had last night’s armband on from Club Underground. I wonder if she’ll “get in" the eternal Home or will she be left with the “in” crowd here on earth? I went to Lithonia, Georgia's Club New Birth once and an actual service broke out!! A good service too, unfortunately most of the so-called “regulars” missed a good word because they saw The Bishop was not preaching that day, so they ran the Ushers over heading for the exits. I don’t think they’ll "get in" with that attitude.

I am sure Martin Luther King Jr. is "in," although he may want to come back and break up the fights that are going down on the mean city streets bearing his name. I know my mom is "in", despite the fact that her son is writing this. One thing I know for sure is, if I don’t make it, it will not be her fault. I hope Mike Tyson makes it "in", he really seems like a nice guy (hardly the criteria)—but his life on earth seems almost JOB-like. Tyson's entire boxing career just seems to be trapped in that on-going church traffic. You see, if just one of the mega-members pulled Iron Mike aside, and told him how much God loves him, instead of feeding him the conditional love the world feeds on, he’d probably "get in." In fact, he still might. How cool would Heaven be if Denzel is there? I’d train for that day. One day, on Meet The Press, Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life), said: “It’s not a sin to be rich, the real sin is to die rich.” that quote cannot make the Hilton sisters comfortable. If George Bush "gets in," that simply means that someone adjusted that 144,000 number. I’d love to be on line after him.

I have been studying the difference between "being religious" and "being spiritual." And, from what you've observed above, you can plainly see that I don’t have many good answers—just interesting questions. This only makes my life that much more purposeful. My mission on earth (which is condensed and captured here) is to show how ignorance bubbles when you pass judgment.

Let’s all make a pack today; a pack to help each other make it to Judgment Day, even if it falls on a Wednesday.

1 love,

Ray Lewis

Who Will You Be Rooting For?

2007-01-22T08:24:00.000-08:00

“America always does what’s right, once it exhausts all other options”

---Winston Churchill

I imagine it would be hard to capture any one of the world’s cultures and neatly package it into 28 days of history. And, as absurd as the possibility, the reality is, in just 250-plus hours you will start to learn all over again and over again who invented the traffic light—the stories will probably fall short of who is disproportionably pulled-over and most often shot at those lights, but remember this is history, not his story.

During the warm & fuzzy Black February Winter Fest, you’ll read that for the first time in history, there will be two black candidates running for the highest office in the land. No, not the Super Bowl—that’s an event where someone HAS to win. These two candidates will be running for president. Pretty anticlimactic, huh? One of the candidates has absolutely no chance of winning, (Al Sharpton) and the other has a white girl at the Apollo chance, (Barack Obama). Obama’s chances would increase if he married that white girl at the Apollo, but not by much. I believe the black candidate with the best chance of winning is Colin Powell and the fact that he’ll never run is the despondency of American history. Nevertheless, in both cases, Sharpton and Obama’s, merits won’t be the determining factor, as 80% of the Americans have made their decision on those two and the race doesn’t officially begin for another 10 months.

History always gave me an uneasy feeling… mainly because right after you witness the beauty, you are too often reminded of it’s ugly past. Watching Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith re-write the NFL white pages just makes you wonder how much sooner this historical football moment would’ve happened if blatant racism didn’t deny them of the opportunity to begin with.

With all due respect, I could care less who wins the Super Bowl, because once the game is over, neither coach will be asked: “What happened to the middle class?” Or, "Why is it that black people keep getting shot on the same land their forefather’s paved? I imagine Sharpton or Obama would have a better perspective than someone who coaches the Bears or Colts, but (as I stated earlier) 80% of the population will be plugging in their earphones when that answer is revealed.

On Super Bowl Sunday, while Tony and Lovie are battling to see who goes to Disneyland, I will be rooting for someone black to change the landscape of this land. I hope it happens soon because before you know it February will be over and the traffic light will be red again.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

When It's Your Time

2007-01-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

"If I had two minutes to live, I'd spend it choking a white man."

--Miles Davis

I have seen some remarkable things in my life, some of them even I find hard to believe.

For example, I went to high school with this really tall, skinny, quiet kid named Ed. Every third period I used to watch the 6’9” Ed walk into math class, duck his head through the door and head straight for the back of the class. The morning ritual usually woke me from a sound sleep. The whole year Ed probably spoke three times—and two of those times were to answer questions about the weather. Kids can be so unoriginal at times.

Four years later--On April Fools Day, in 1985—with Vegas odds at 33-to-1, Ed’s Villanova hoop team beat the famed Georgetown Hoyas in what still stands as one of the greatest upsets in college basketball history. Skinny Ed Pinckney, who had swollen-up by then, was voted the Most Valuable Player. That game ended the college career of sure-fire Hall of Fame inductee, Patrick Ewing. The forecast that day was partly cloudy and, as usual, the weatherman was wrong too—unless of course you were a Georgetown fan.

One day a friend and I was hanging in this night spot on 68street and Broadway, called Sweet Waters. Neither of us had any money, nor apparently did the dozen or so patrons who sat quietly, drink-less. The REALLY REALLY fine vocalist on stage was literally walking around trying to get a rise out of the (loosely termed) crowd. My homie leaned over to me and said; “ If she walks by again, I’m going to get her number.” She did, and he did. They hung out for about a month or so and a couple of years later I moved to Atlanta and fell out of touch. One night, my boy Chris called me devastated as he read the infamous “I’m Tired” note that Phyllis Hyman wrote right before she overdosed on Vodka and sleeping pills. Every time I hear a song by Phyllis I think of that night.

In the early 70’s, this bigheaded English kid used to get beat-up on the mean Bronx streets of New York—mainly because of his British accent. He used to come outside and innocently asked, “Does anyone out here want to ramble?? (which is British for play). The Bronx kids thought he meant rumble and jumped on that free-for-all opportunity. Years later in an Atlanta hotel room Johnnie Cochran conducted one of his last face-to-face print media interviews, which to-date is the highlight of my (loosely termed) journalist career.

In every one of the abovementioned scenarios, the commonality is ordinary people who were given an opportunity… an opportunity to become extraordinary.

This week Oprah Winfrey opened the doors to a theme school in South Africa, affectingly dubbed Dream Girls. From birth, these girls did not have a fraction of the opportunity that we have in America, which simply means their stories are going to be much better than the ones outlined above.

Since you are reading this, it means you are one of the fortunate people on earth whose clock is still ticking.

What will you do with your 60 Minutes?

1 love,
Ray Lewis

GOD REST THE SOUL

2006-12-26T13:58:00.000-08:00

"A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul."

--Goethe, Johann Wolfgang

They say more times than not, change is for the better. I guess when you think about computers versus typewriters; iPods versus 8-Tracks; remote controls versus the closest sibling to the TV; Wal-Mart versus the corner Bodega; NIKE versus Chuck Taylor or flat screens versus wooden floor models that you may be able to make the case for technological advancement.

My family used to own a floor model. The wide wooden one we had featured: a record player (with the center piece for the 45’s), a 20” black and white TV, an Am/FM radio and a six-ring wine rack all in one. We had to move all of the family photos, slide the top back just to play a new album. Man, those 12” albums… I remember taking the thumb tacks off the wall, pulling the record out of the jacket sleeve and dropping the needle (with the dime on it) on the likes of: Crown Heights Affair, The Temptations, Phyllis Hyman, Marvin Gaye, The Salsoul Orchestra, Billy Ocean, The Bar-Kays, Parliament, Jimmy Cliff, Kool and the Gang, Shalamar, George Benson, Prince, Freddie Jackson, Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, and the reason for this article... yep the late, legendary James Brown. Do you think they’ll ever be another James Brown? I'll bet everyone that has only owned an iPod thinks there will be (although I cannot image who). And, those who’ve owned the floor model stereo probably feels differently. Sadly, neither of the two truly appreciated him. I’ll let the soon-to-be-unleashed VH-1 bio pics chronicle his life’s work, the only thing that I’ll say is a portion of today’s record companies will never see the amount of hit records with James Brown’s fingerprints. I’d also be willing to bet, 5% of all rap music recorded from 1978-1988 had some sample of Brown's "Funky Drummer" in it. And, the other 80-95% probably pilfered some other portion of Brown’s beats. I miss him already.

I remember the first party that I ever attended, the disc jockey played "Sex Machine" for a good part of 25 minutes. I said, wow this deejay is off the chain!! Little did I know that the deejay went to the bathroom one minute after the record started, James did the rest. I remember there was a time when driving up or down I-95 meant you’d hear some underground rap leaving New York and when that signal faded, House and Go-Go music guided you through D.C. Of course the Sounds of Philadelphia hugged you in-between rest stops. Once the needle in the Impala was gassed up to F the soothing gospel rotations echoed through the winding road in Virginia right until Archie Bell and the Drells drove you through the south. No matter where your radio dial landed you were sure to hear some James Brown along the way. Now you will never see him live or alive again...

I'd say technology lost this round.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

HOVA'S HOME

2006-11-22T11:01:00.000-08:00

"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosphy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents."- Ludwig van Beethoven

I was (and still am) a HUGE Darryl Strawberry fan. My brother Al and I used to sit in his Queens Village home leaning towards the TV when the NY Mets’ lean lefty stepped-up to the plate. If he singled, advanced the base runner, walked, stole a base or had a successful sacrifice—all positives in baseball speak—we looked at each other deflated that the larger than life Straw Man didn’t hit one over the Whitestone Bridge. Unrealistic, perhaps, but that didn’t change our anticipation. My brother is married now, so rap music is regulated to an un-repairable irrelevance in his house.

Personally, I thought the Black Album was Jay-Z’s walk off home run. Uncharacteristic and irrelevant as a formally announced rap retirement seems, the three-year anticipation had me fending like a Simpson verdict for Jigga’s Joint to drop—and oh did it drop!! Kingdom Come is here, a 14-track jewel; and judging from all of the red light head nods in the jeeps and coupes, not to mention million-plus swiped barcodes, BEYONCE can safely anticipate a present-filled holiday season. I wouldn’t invite Free to any egg nog celebration, if I was her… And, as usual, I digress.

Right from the start, track one “The Prelude” will have you adjusting the EQ. The extremely sick Rick James sampled, “Kingdom Come” will rattle the clubs for months. My neighbors are going to hate me for that one. They’ll move by the 14th track, “Beach Chair,” which is my favorite. Carter’s collection clearly has something for everyone—including a lyrical tribute to his mom, which truly illustrates his unique, two-fold position between pop (music) and popular (culture). He may be both, which is simply unheard of.

Severed friendships, gut-wrenching relationships, mourning the lost of a loved one, yeah, Kingdom Come poetically strokes it all. The self-dubbed mythical metaphoric, yet sometimes misogynistic man even has a wack duet with Princess Pop; probably just to keep peace at the house. Who knows, I may stuff my brother’s holiday stockings with this one and shake things up in his “Queen’s” home. Or is that what NAS came to do?

1 love,
Ray Lewis

A Legend In His Time

2006-11-01T09:17:00.000-08:00

In this country, America means white. Everyone else has to hyphenate.
--Toni Morrison

One of the varied reasons that I am so critical of black culture is the fact that we allow this rich history to be exploited by ill-valued, inane, and immoral members of the spin-wheeling press. The media’s monolithic goal is to tightly seal our treasured music tradition into a bunch of gun-tooting, pants sagging, video-jiggling; jewelry blinging retired drug-dealers. But enough about Puffy, his Press Eject CD actually speaks for itself. Refreshingly, John Legend’s latest album takes the lid off America’s conventional and convenient wisdom jar and ventures through our historically paved rock and roll path. A road that is now perfected by the Justine’s and Brittany’s better known to most as the poster children of pop culture. Is it any “wonder” why Stevie abandoned the life of Sound Scan’s sinking ship for the more appreciated music scene abroad?

IN THE STATES
Nowhere is the versatility of our music history displayed more than on John Legend’s new LP, Once Again. Legend’s 90 beats-per-minute, Motown throwback track, “Slow Dance” is by far my favorite. This roll-your-window-down, two-steppin’ blue light in the basement joint is a candlelit dinner delight. Just add the wine. One eyes-closed journey through this single and you’ll feel that Marvin and Mavis are somewhere swaying to this one.

Legend chose to abandon the trunk-thumpin’ bass lines of his first classic to unleash a 13-track, pianist’s delight. Somewhat risky, in this day and age, but something true music enthusiasts should appreciate. You’ll be equally thankful that you cannot even sniff the label mate production from track master, Kayne West. Which, I imagine is a small victory for humility. In fairness, the more modest side of West is certainly showcased on “Heaven,” a head-nodding single, probably better suited for Legend’s first LP, but a treat, nonetheless.

Being Jamaican-bred from the Boogie Down, I actually prefer that bass bumpin’, lyrical-laced, drums and loops of reggae and hip hop. However, I also love the jazzy strings, piano taps of blues too. For me, it is that duality that makes black life worth living—yet regrettably absent from pop culture’s stained windows. I really thrive on the versatility of a culture that can add the fresh flavor of a Barack Obama to politics and the channel blocking of The Flavor of Love to reality television. It certainly takes all types, shades and voices to make this black culture go ‘round. And, if you give John Legend’s new one a spin I think you’ll enjoy this culture too. Who knows, you may even learn something.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

PREMADONNA

2006-10-26T18:20:00.000-07:00

“No person who examines & reflects, can avoid seeing that there is but one race of people on earth, who differ from each other only according to the soil and climate in which they live.”
– John Gabriel Stedman

The year was 1981, and I was laying in bed, listening to Mr. Magic’s “Rap Attack” show. I was ready to hit record, as Mr. Magic was spinning the wee-hour sounds of some neighborhood locals—headlined by my neighbor, Melvin Glover. You may recognize Melvin and his crew as Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. I was not even five minutes into a deep sleep when the world’s tallest break-dancer, my 6’-7” brother, Dwayne, wakes me up to go to a club—on a school night. Arguing with Dwayne (about anything) was pointless, so I took my braids down, grabbed my green and white Puma suit, slipped on my Members Only jacket and we headed for the downtown 6 Train to Bleeker Street.

The club was called The Paradise Garage, which, not-so-coincidently, doubled as a parking garage during the Wall Street business day. You had to be a member to get through the doors which opened at Midnight. Dwayne and I got there an hour before the 2am show. Did I mention it was a school night? The line outside of the garage circled the block and the crowd seemed unfazed by the earthquake-like bass sound that was vibrating concrete, where D.J. Larry La Van mixed the best house music/up-tempo disco NYC has ever experienced. There was no bar in The Paradise Garage, because there is no age limit to get in and the bathrooms are marked only by the persons who are occupying it at the time. The only rule in the Garage was…. before you hailed the cab to take home that “special someone,” you’d better double check that the person you’re leaving with is of the “right” gender.

At 2pm, the lights came up and the show was about to start. On stage was this skinny, very, very light-skinned looking Valley Girl. Larry La Van started spinning this crazy beat and this slim chick started singing this cool hook, “Everybody / dance and sing, get up and do your thing / Everybody, dance and sing, get up and do your thing…..” Hey, in 1981, lyrics were a lot easier to digest. After 90-minutes of straight disco, this chick was pouring down sweat and so was the extremely energized and satisfied crowd. I had a ball. That summer that white chick dropped her debut album called… (you guessed it), Everybody. And, for Madonna the rest as they say is history.

Since 1981, Madonna, without apology, has always weaved her unique style into the fabric of popular culture. She has always played by her own rules. That night at The Garage, her band, which was really dope, featured this short, dark sista whose bass guitar towered over her shaved head. Back in 1981, I had never heard of Me’Shell N’deg’eOcello. Today, I own every CD that bass player has ever released.

I remember when Madonna sampled “Security of the First World” an instrumental joint from Public Enemy; which was the music for her pop single, “Justify My Love.” Imagine this lily-white girl, at the soon-to-be peak of her career, sampled a track from an all black, media- dubbed, militant rap group, with no air play, when she had so many other (safe) options. By the way, Jay-Z’s new single “Show Me What You Got,” is a sample from the same Public Enemy album, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.

You didn’t ask me, but it didn’t surprise me that Madonna adopted a dying black kid from Africa. What surprises me is how little African-Americans know about their own dying history.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

Can Anyone Beat The Heat?

2006-08-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

"I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures."
Chief Justice Earl Warren

For the past month, the shaded temperature at 10pm in Anytown, USA is on the positive side of 90 degrees—and the sporting life in the new “Rome” is on fire. The baseball season has turned the heat up—and that’s not just the grand jury gangsters sniffing Barry Bonds’ 5-year-old pee samples. The NFL season, which doesn’t officially start for another month is really heating up. This is 2006, and NFL just inducted the first black Quarterback. Once in a blue “moon” even the most racist establishments will give you something to smile about. Wait!! Don’t break out in a Tootsie Roll Dance yet.., the NFL (which doesn’t really stand for… Nappy-haired Folks Leave quietly) just named its new league commissioner, Roger Goodell. Those of you dreaming of a black league commissioner to step to the podium and officially takeover the reins of the predominately black end zone dancers, must be smoking the same dust found in Maurice Clarett’s urine sample. Do you think Ohio State will retire Maurice’s bulletproof vest?

Do you ever wonder why superstar black athletes don’t negotiate front office jobs or team partnerships on the front-end of their contracts, instead of begging for illusive head coaching jobs when their careers are much less relevant? I guess those million-dollar babies can suck on the notion that ESPN is always hiring earsplitting buffoons to out-fetch Steven A. Smith. Make sure you save that loud “Playmakers” suit for the interview. Personally, I am most fond of the NBA ball-ers. After all, they are treated much better by their commanding commissioner, David Stern. Sure, there is an iceless, anti-hip hop dress code courtesy of king David. Yeah, I know that no one under 20 years-old is allowed to enter the league anymore—which simply means (two years ago) LeBron James’ feet would’ve been hanging off a Blue Devil bunk bed instead of having a Kobe accuser fluff his NBA road game pillows. Do you think she ever found the answer to “the myth?”

I really liked George Bush better when he was running baseball’s Texas Rangers. But, you know the old saying in Texas, “if you follow a stupid kid home, a dumb parent will open the door.” Nevertheless, now Walker, Texas Ranger—who wasn’t happy enough ruining a .500 baseball team—he now teamed with Condoleezza “Just Ice” Rice to foul-up the rest of the world’s unity. On that team it is hard to figure out whose bushes are more deadly! Now that Condi’s dream NFL commission’s job is filled, we can only hope that she finds a gig with less casualties. Of course the Bush administration is still hoping to find weapons of mass destruction in the new NFL commissioner’s office. If that happens, things will really start to heat up.

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

Where's The Beef?

2006-08-02T18:25:00.000-07:00

“I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace or peace an interlude during war.”

One day I was riding on Memorial Drive (a suburban strip in Decatur, Georgia) when I witnessed two guys beefing over which one got to the gas pump first. I, with too much time on my hand, and in no real rush to drop $55.00 in a V-6, pulled closer to the conflict. One guy was in a ’77 Chevrolet Impala and the other was in a Ford Expedition. The brother in the Impala was not moving even though it seemed that he arrived at the pump last. I couldn’t help but wonder if his TI bumping disc, subconsciously contributed to his no-nonsense stance. The brother in the Expo, who looked as if he played a down or two in college, was equally determined not to move. He didn’t seem moved by the music either. So there they stood two brothas at war! From where I stood, I just couldn’t imagine two men fighting over something so petty. My angle may be different from their perspective. However, being physically helpless and sadly stumped, I went to an unoccupied pump. As I pulled off—a half a hundred lighter—I noticed the beef got louder, and I couldn’t help but speculate if some witness was going to make a call to a home explaining why a brother or father is not coming home today. I wonder.

Can you imagine the calls to the fatherless homes being made in the Middle East? There are alot of brothers fighting over there too. Most of them are probably too young to understand why Israel is dropping bombs and Hezbollah is aimlessly firing back. Israel believes that beef started with Hezbollah’s lack of diplomacy or hostage management style. Hezbollah feels that Israelites (and their meddlesome US buddies) are territorial bullies, who swears they are entitled to all the land there forefathers told them about. The Bible probably has a more accurate account.

Condoleezza Pay-Per-View Rice is racking up frequent flyer miles traveling back and forth to the Middle East in hopes of stabilizing the situation. Now, that’s about as funny as the fight in the gas station. During one of Rice’s photo shoots she had her people (all pimps have people) dropping food and trail mix in Hezbollah; and handing artillery off in Israel. It must be really be Hard Out Here For A Pimp. When Rice landed in the US, she seemed mystified that her ceasefire speech didn’t work. Maybe the speech didn’t work because the Lebanese weren’t invited to Rice’s after party at the Israeli Prime Minister’s crib. In the end I wish Rice had taken my approach and filled up her transportation and just kept it moving. It has to be cheaper to fill up in the Middle East than it is on Memorial Drive.

1 love
Ray Lewis

Border Line??

2006-05-22T10:45:00.000-07:00

“He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.”
-- Abraham Lincoln

I hear time and time again (unwitting, I might add), that in American politics, Mexicans are becoming the new “blacks.” I imagine the person that started that absurd analogy is probably the same culprit to suggest forwarding electronic chain letters to 10 people is good luck. Do you think they realize that one’s good fortune ran amuck with the receipt of that chain letter?

Are Spanish people gaining some traction in America? Yep!! And, to my knowledge, I (nor any other black person) has yet to receive a thank you card from one of them. And, to think I almost bought Ricky Martin’s CD. The Mexican impact is so visible that one day while vacationing in Miami, I noticed that there were more Spanish speaking (non-cable) networks than English speaking over-the-air broadcasts. In Florida. In fact, two of those networks had an all-day Jerry Springer-like show on the air. It’s great to see the our homegrown UPN impact has now reached bi-lingual lofty levels. Later that day, I walked into a Subway and the menu was in Spanish. When I asked the cashier for one in English, she said Buenos Días!! I had to tell that fake J-Lo (which is redundant when you think about it) that if she didn’t start speaking English that I was going to call immigration. She was fine though.

Back to this immigration act that is sweeping the nation. I really think that curious George’s State of the Spanish Union Address just goes to show that this Black apathy approach to life in America is really pathetic. Furthermore, we are slowly regulating ourselves to the back sports pages and Oprah’s charitable givings. Last Sunday, Meet The Press’ Tim Russert, said that the Mexican unskilled labor strike would’ve crippled the economy if Bush continued to ignore their demands. My question is.. how can you make demands when you broke into the country in the first place? Isn’t that like someone breaking in your home and demanding that you rearranged your furniture? Bush’s solution?? Call the National Guard and to build a privacy fence around Texas. Does anyone know where Bush got his GED?

This whole conversation can be summed up in one word. Unity! Something my people seem to have totally forgotten. And, as far as I am concerned, that’s the real tragedy. That fact notwithstanding , I’m going to slap the next dumb bastard who tells me that Mexicans are gaining political clout because they do the work that no one else wants to do. Anyone echoing those sentiments, should note, black people built the entire country with NO LUNCH BREAK. To date, I have yet to find a chained volunteer to do that. We built the streets that Mexican and other ILLEGAL immigrants march on, while we were we got hosed on those same streets. It was the Civil Rights Act that stops the National Guard from hanging Mexicans from those soon-to-be-finished bording fences.

For the record, I’m not mad at the Mexicans (or anyone else) for that matter. I’m just disheartened that my people, who I love so dearly, seem to be less concerned with this issue and more concerned with why Kobe is switching jersey numbers. Didn’t he grow up in Paris?

1 love,
Ray Lewis

THE BIRTH OF A NATION

2006-05-19T09:26:00.000-07:00

Today is one of those birthday celebrations that will go virtually unnoticed. After all, May 19th doesn’t readily come to mind when you think about America’s so-called heroes. To the good ole US of A, May 19th is just another day in the life or death.

You see, this is a country that is foundered on freedom of expression, as long as that expression doesn’t clash with the slave trading course. Today, those messages are much more subtle now.

There are no more tree lynching, corporate America adopted that role. There are no more cross burning on black lawns, the liquor stores are where you go to see those neighborhoods rot. There are no more hoses to spray the children, the urban radio stations are taking care of that.

Nah, this is just your typical May 19th… and if it weren’t for Minister Malcolm X you probably wouldn’t be reading this now.

Rest in peace my brotha.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

The Dukes of Hazard

2006-04-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

The highly-touted Duke University Lacrosse Team season is now officially over. But for 40-plus of their players a new season is just beginning. A season where they’ll be no winners. By now, we are all aware that a black exotic dancer was “hired” to perform for the Duke White Devils Lacrosse Team. The dancer has alleged that she was raped--or at the very least--sexually assaulted and the recipient of a caravan of racial slurs during the ordeal. If those facts didn’t strike a chord.... chew on this..

The Duke University team is comprised of 46 white males, and one brotha. The team ranked in the top ten in the country and were highly favored to win the NCAA Championship before the season was cancelled by the school’s president and some time before a single player was (officially) charged with a crime.

Put Up Your Dukes

Unleash the mini cars, clowns and bearded ladies, as the circus officially began once media model, Jesse Jackson volunteered his services. Once Jackson climbed on board, the-not-so simmering racial component boiled to an ugly head (no pun intended). (Side note) I wondered why Jackson chose not to challenge the NCAA committee about the fact that there is only one black person on the Men’s Lacrosse Team? Maybe he feels that nigga is crazy. I imagine that brotha echoes similar sentiments about Jackson. As I digress.

If this were your “normal” stripper versus student sexual assault case, the customary “smoking gun” (in this case) negative DNA tests results would’ve all but “acquitted” all of the accused. But, this is not a typical case. This is Duke University. This is a black stripper. And, I told you Jesse Jackson was on the scene. Jackson is so committed that he didn’t even answer Cynthia McKinney on line 2.

Because I’m liberal on sex and ultra conservative on crime, I’m on the fence on this one. Is this dancer an opportunist seeking vengeance? Or were the Duke boys exercising their embedded, sexually explicit violence acted out of their inherited master’s mentality? In the truth lies the hazard.

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

McKinney Madness

2006-04-07T10:50:00.000-07:00

So Cynthia McKinney thinks the congressional police are racist, huh? I know the brothers and sisters on the streets in Cincinnati, Ohio and the corners of Jasper, Texas are saying "no shit?" For the record, I like Ms. McKinney. But, I probably like her more because she’s black and less because she so politically astute. Sometimes I get the feeling that Cynthia thinks being black is more important than being effective. I can just picture Tiger Woods on The Masters' Green this weekend whispering.., see that's what I'm talking about?

In truth, McKinney stood a better chance of winning an Angie Stone look-a-like contest than entering the congressional floor without proper identification. The part that confuses me about Sin Cynthia is how do you go from suing the cop for an in proper search/ sexual haharassment mishap, to apologizing for slapping him? When keeping it real goes wrong.

You see the one thing I know about my people is, we rarely apologize when we are wronged. I cannot imagine Desire Washington apologizing to Mike Tyson for slapping the rap charge on him, and her case was EXTREMELY questionable.

In the end, I hope Cynthia finds peace, hopefully in a reality series... after all, she already has the hair style.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

The Good Book

2006-03-02T09:23:00.000-08:00

I have finally stumbled across a top-rated list that didn’t include rump-shaking, pole sliding music, Air Jordan sneakers, or black spending power. [Side note] I am still waiting for someone to show me a list of black saving power.

This week, Covenant With Black America, a book aimed directly at politicians soliciting the black vote, ranked #1 on Amazon’s and Border’s top-selling book list. That’s right burglars & home invaders a book! You know, that thing you walked passed that was stuffed with $100 dollar bills while you were unplugging the DVD player. That’s right parents a book. You know, that thing that is keeping your coffee table level during your kids’ X-Box-athon. That’s right, Bobby & Whitney, a book. You know that thing that rested under your pastor’s arms when you promised to love, honor and obey each other. I pray that you are not using that SAME BOOK as a table for your candy-laced expeditions.

Covenant With Black America is a Tavis Smiley initiative used to outline a blueprinted agenda that will make presidential hopefuls take Black America more serious. You may argue the merits or the contents, but the one thing you cannot argue is... this week it is the #1 book in the country and he didn’t have to shake his ass (whew) to do it. To read more about The Covenant check out: www.covenantwithblackamerica.com

Naturally, this top-ranking propelled me to name my top ten books of all time: And, in no particular order....

1. Dakota Grand - Kenji Jasper
By far, my favorite book of all time. He does great commentaries on NPR. If you go to www.npr.org and do a search on his name, I think you’ll see why.

2. Faces At The Bottom Of The Well -Derrick Bell
One of the more thought-provoking fiction tales I have ever read.

3. Loose Balls - Jayson Williams
Probably the funniest encounters in any NBA life. Sadly, and unbeknown to Williams, this book was a non intended preface that led to the limousine shooting. The irony is tragic.

4. The Autobiography of Miles Davis - Quincy Troupe
A music lover’s dream, while candidly looking at how all black American males weren’t all from improvised beginnings. One of the most memorable Miles Davis quotes is: “If I had two minutes to live, I’d spend it choking a white man.”

5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley
The single most influential book in most black males lives (Makes Me Wanna Holla is a close second.) No black teenage home should be without this book.

6. Days of Grace - The Arthur Ashe Story by Ashe and Aronld Rampersad
The last chapter is his eulogy to his (then) 6-year-old daughter. Probably the most gut-wrenching chapter that I ever read. The rest of the book will teach most of us the true meaning of integrity. Next o loosing my virginity, this is the most memorable gift I’ve ever received.

7. Disappearing Acts - Terry McMillian
She is not one of my favorite authors, but this book is a relationship masterpiece. It’s really funny and it gives you a referee’s view of a black-on-black relationships. A must read for those contemplating marriage.

8. Pryor Convictions -The Richard Pryor Story
A classic in every sense of the word. Like the Jayson Williams story, you just knew a tragedy was inevitable. The only time you’ll stop laughing will be to wipe the tears.

9. Outrageous - The Charles Barkley Story by Roy S. Johnson
Another knee-slapper from Sir Charles. [I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It is funny too]. The quotes in this one are hilarious and surprisingly interesting. Not too surprising is how well written this book is. The insight on the 1984 Olympic Dream Team is worth the price alone.

10. The Souls of Black Folks - W.E.B. Du Bois You will probably understand The Covenant with Black America better once you finish this one.

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

A Tribute Fit For A King

2006-02-08T12:09:00.000-08:00

I think the world has finally got a glimpse of modern day, American royalty. I also think for six hours at least, the world will be better for it. We can now fittingly, literarily and figuratively put to rest who the real backbone of God’s community is. It is hard to get four presidents to agree on lunch, never mind attending a Negro funeral, in a Baptist church in a southern region, during Black History Month. Only the backbone of the world community could bring that many differences under one roof in honor of one seemingly endless goal of World Peace. I am not sure I’ll ever see anything like that in my life again.

THE SPOKEN
The speakers (nearly 3 dozen) were plentiful, and for me, the most memorable were Ms. Shabaaz (Malcolm’s daughter), Charles Rachael (formerly of the Crips) and Joseph Lowery, who predictably and poetically reminded us of the really big picture. Bernice did what most children dread, eulogizing a parent. She was good. Kudos too to Bishop Eddie Long. He was exceptional, which simply means my low-expectations were far exceeded. Bush Jr. spoke well, which is something you won’t read every day, while his daddy’s new-found humility is living proof of Mrs. King’s greatness. Not enough for Harry Belafonte's comfort, and subsequent absence, which speaks volumes.

THE UNSPOKEN
For those of you that don’t know Dekalb County, Georgia has a black CEO. The (stone’s throw) neighboring Lithonia community has a black mayor. The majority of the South Dekalb residents are black. And, according to Bill Clintion’s speech and (the more credible) the U.S. Census, Dekalb County is the second richest black county in the nation (Prince George’s D.C. County is first). Despite those futile figures, I’ve always kept this historically, racial divisive, racially segregated Klan headquartered town in which I reside in the forefront of my mind. Well, for the first time since I lived here, I see the leafless winter tree branches as a sign of season’s change and not just the equipment used to hang black men.

Thanks Coretta, I'll miss you.

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

Waking The Souls of Black Folk

2006-02-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-----Douglas Adams

I have to admit there was a time when seeing a black lady hugged up with a white man really unnerved me. Now, while I don’t celebrate their union with an “O.J. got off dance,” I am starting to understand that type of union more and more. No-so-subtlety, life in black America is changing at an alarming rate. Sadly, most black people are either unsure, unaware, or unconcerned. I wish someone in black America yanked the string on Spike Lee’s WAKE UP! Bell.

Too many times I hear black folks singing where are our black leaders? If in 2006, you are still asking that archaic question apparently that Wake Up bell has fallen and cracked your skull. Should you come out of the comma this century, understand this mystical Black leader’s theory:

a) Malcolm, Martin and Marcus are dead.
b) They left you with a blueprint, so the only other leader you would need is in the mirror.

While you are pondering that reality check, please ask yourself this.., who is the Mexican leader? Who is the Spanish leader? Who is the Asian leader? My people, please Wake Up!! Do you realize that by 2018, there will be shuttles taking ordinary Americans to the moon, while some dumb niggers are still putting 30” spinning wheels on an Impala, blasting nursery rhymes like Laffy Taffy.

Just think, Bush and Condi (that's what her pimps call her) were golfing and shopping (respectively), while hundreds of black people were drowning in an American city…. a city with a median household income is $12,752. Wake up!

Rosa Parks died late last year, yet every time a bus driver opens his doors 10 niggas fight to get a seat in the back of the bus. Wake Up.

Conservative politician and Trinity Broadcasting owner and Pastor, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of the president of Venezuela and the White House says nothing. Entertainer / Activist Harry Belafonte says Bush is responsible for more deaths than any living person on earth and the White House wants to revoke his passport.

Terrell Owens does sit-ups in his driveway, while my neighbor parks his car on the lawn. A twenty-six year-old, Barney-sounding vocalist named Ashanti received lifetime achievement award. For singing! Songs! In public! There is an all-gay high school in New York City. Bush is trying to spread democracy in a Muslim State and he sacrificing Christians to do it.

I had a nightmare that Dr. King's Family was fighting... In Atlanta!! I woke to find that at least their mom won't have to witness the outcome. R.I.P. CSK. If you are the benchmark, we're all losers.

At any give time, eight out of the top 10 songs on Urban Contemporary Radio are performed by an artist with a GED or a police record.

For those banking on the white conspiracies to aid in the never-to-be-seen reparations, chew on this… Two different, lily-white professional team owners paid two very black ball players (Terrell Owens and Ron Artest) to stay the hell away from the rest of the team. That is about as close as we’ll ever get to white people, paying black people to go away.

Maybe if some black “would-be” leader took the time to build a mega-school instead of (yet) another mega-church, we’d learn Monday-Friday, just what we missed on Sunday. That’s assuming we ever Wake Up!

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

Last Laugh

2005-12-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

I was recently speaking with a friend one day and I said, it is important to tape some of the things that come on television. Not necessarily because anything on television is worth archiving (in fact, quite the contrary is true). But, I believe you should tape some things because one day it’ll be gone and you may never witness it again. For example, one day I set my VCR to tape a late night NY Knick battle with the Los Angeles Lakers. It was a regular season game, nothing special. Then without warning, Magic Johnson holds a press conference that would forever change his life--some even thought it would end it. Needless to say, that was his last game at Madison Square Garden. Hmm.
There was this late night show in New York called Hot Tracks. It was a video show co-hosted by Debbie Morgan (All My Children). Nothing special, but a few months later BET launched a cable network channel that only showed black music videos. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Nevertheless, I still have VCR tapes of Hot Tracks' interviews with Al B. Sure, Cornel Abrams, Sylvester, The Tramps, Heavy D., Gloria Gayner, Elelyn “Champaign” King Hall & Oats and Marvin Gaye.

On Saturday, I heard Richard Pryor died. After a brief, but very emotional pause, I reached into my VCR archive and I found an old Saturday Night Live episode starring Richard Pryor. Pryor was the show’s host and he and Chevy Chase had a skit that YOU WILL NEVER SEE ON TELEVISION AGAIN. Any further description would not do it any justice. I normally don’t throw the word genius around, but that is the only way to describe Mr. Pryor. His book Pryor Convictions is a MUST read. There is not a black comedian alive that don’t have some Richard Pryor influence in him or her. Oddly, Pryor’s most famous writer, Paul Mooney, may be just as talented and equally discredited.

I grew up in a close-knit family, I owe my life to them. I remember sitting in a Bronx basement circled by Mike, Dwayne, and Al listening to Richard Pryor albums (That Nigger’s Crazy, Live on Sunset Strip, Here and Now), all the things that my mom would TOTALLY disapprove of me digesting. Ironically, it was his over-the-top, no holds barred, thirst for reality, unyielding and unapologetic community truths that shaped my contentious presence in this industry today. And, believe me, I AM NO Richard Pryor. I wish I had a tape for all the times people told me that I’m funny. I would send it to the Pryor family, with a note that said. Thanks for being a part of my circle.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

WHEN REALITY HITS THE ROAD

2005-11-28T11:01:00.000-08:00

There are so many things going on in the world today that I just wanted to touch base with the masses that are out of touch.

In The White House
Republican and Democrats are in a heated (media) feud about whether the War In Iraq was a good or bad idea. The GOP wants to “stay the course” at all cost, and those Republicans that don’t necessarily feel that way will never openly admit it because the president may cut them out of Bush’s living Will. Democrats want the U.S. troops in Iraq to come back home and that is a simple, can’t miss campaign strategy. After all, losing another election to a Bush family member would be like losing a Spelling Bee to Magic Johnson, Mike Tyson, and Bobby Brown.

Here is the reality: oil is the most precious, treasured and valued commodity in the world. For those keeping score at home coffee (grains) is #2. So, whether you are a Republican or Democrat, if you live in the Super Powered, United States and you don’t control the oil… how long do you think it would take the rest of world to draw the conclusion that you are not really a Super Power? Maybe the rest of the world will start to feel that the USA just has the loudest bark. Hmm. Like it or not, taking over Iraq was necessary to keep the world’s perception of the U.S.

The New South
I recently visited the renovated Atlantic Station in Midtown Atlanta. It is a welcomed alternative to the trendy, overcrowded Buckhead section of the ATL. Atlantic Station is a gumbo mix of all of Atlanta Urban lifestyle (Little Five Points, Lenox, Midtown, with a slight hint of NY’s So-Ho). There is a Fox TV Sports Bar & Grill (ala the ESPN Zone), there is a 16-screen movie theatre with premium seating. There is a host of trendy shopping options, with a neatly planted Washington Mutual Bank seated adjacent to the walking distance plaza. There is a Publix supermarket in the center of the quadrangle everything a young, hip, mover or shaker could ever want.

Here’s the reality: The Lofts in Atlanta Station start at $450k and they are 80% filled and the first model won’t be ready until April 2006. The income range on the application starts at $125,000 and up. If you make less than that, you need to take your broke ass back to Decatur, with the rest of your Honda Civic driving residents.
You need a check for $17,000 to reserve more than a five minute consultation and the funds have to be available or that will be the most expensive conversation you ever have. Unless you are R. Kelly’s attorney. But I digress.

Music
The heartbeat of the soul. The few times I’m trapped in a car and forced to listen to radio (black radio in particular), I want to slit my wrist. I was listening to D4’s Laffy Taffy, which had to be birthed by a child predator. This might be the most ignorant, incompetent, insidious and insane song wax has ever produced. The seemingly innocent (albeit stupid) lyrics is laced with subtle contradictions that most parents will overlook or are too tired to figure out. Yet, your 12-18 is probably sliding on some pole, dancing in clear heels to this beat.

Here’s the reality: If something isn’t done about urban contemporary music, white people won’t have to waste their time, energy or ink thinking of a conspiracy to control the black youth’s mind. What am I saying this is already a reality.

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

Hip Hop History

2005-11-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

The New York City streets and entertainment wires are a blaze, with the (all but official) word that Queens Bridge’s NAS is inking a deal that will team him with the Brooklyn’s beast, Jay-Z. Wow!!

From all the not-so published reports, it seems that New York’s lyrical foes have put an end to the stage wars and have teamed-up for a greater purpose. The industry and consumers will truly benefit from this one. This might sound odd, but I enjoyed the lyrical beef between Hov and Esco; just as long as it stayed in the studio -- which thankfully they were able to do.

However, when these two legends of the game battled on the mic it tended to ignite low-level, studio thugs, like: .50, The Game, DMX, Young Geezy and some of today’s GED rap artists to take their matters (whatever those are) to the streets. When that approach is taken, the beef usually escalates into an all-out blood bath or real life wars. Sometimes I wish .50 Cent would just learn to rap or simply shoot himself. Fifty can certainly bank on the fact that they’ll never be an educational statue bearing his resemblance.

The union between NAS and Jay has inspired me to start a war (of sorts). I am going to attempt to do the impossible and list the top ten Hip Hop artists of all time. My criterion is substance; staying power (or shelve life), originality, wit, content, relevance, charm, flow, music, versatility, and of course, execution.

I have excluded groups... and I want to give an honorable mention to Lauryn Hill for a variety of reasons [most of which I could never admit aloud).
Here it goes:

10. Eminem
If he were black from the Brooklyn, you probably would only be scratching your head because his not higher on this list – and he should be. Additionally, just ask anyone on the list below would they dare step in the booth with him – we now know Jay shouldn’t have.

9. Lupe Fiasco
He is the only glimmer of hope if the youth has any incentive to carry the Hip Hop torch. Unfortunately (for him) the clock started ticking while he was in elementary school – now he’s tasked to school the elementary.

8. Chuck D
The Hip Hop version of CNN before it ever was. I’m not sure where I’d be without his vital vinyl lessons.

7. Common
I’m willing to overlook his last frisbee and pray his career is not taking him towards his stage name – and he starts representing what made his name on the stage.

6. Talib Kweli
While he heralds for Cincinnati his inner city blues and incredible IQ swag reminds one of a mix of Miles Davis and Cornel West – and that’s a real treat no matter where you reside.

5. Black Thought
The wordplay King and the official voice of the legendary Hip Hop band The Roots – his name probably says it all.

4. Mos Def
The epitome of culture and his debut LP Black on Both Sides is a lesson in Black History, which is the birthplace of all others.

3. KRS-One
The prince of the projects and probably the most politically astute emcee they'll ever be. The teacher the school system hates to love.

2. NAS
The ultimate compliment is the fact that he reminds you of #1. Nas is the only rap artist to spit a flow backwards and still have you press rewind. His only downfall is there is no competition for him to slay.

1. Rakim
The undisputed King of the mic. If you made a similar list and didn't start here there is a good chance that you have a Kenny G CD in your collection.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

Bennett"s Crashed Course

2005-10-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

So, the former U.S. Education Secretary, turned conservative talk radio host, has inconsiderately linked crime with black babies, huh? Hmm. There are so many ironic twists to those sentiments that it is hard to grasp a retort. The first form of irony comes with the fact that Bill Cosby, a black man [for those still wondering] shares those same Bennett sentiments. And, while many black folks were vexed with Cosby‘s comments, the comedic entertainer, turned part-time activist still commands a nice five-figure speaking tab--most of which are done in front of predominantly black audiences. Only in America. The second form of irony is this..., One would think that an Education Secretary would have enough “discipline” to use their platform more discretely. For example, one day I was dancing with a white female co-worker at a CNN Retreat, when I kept my composure long enough to NOT tell her that she smelled like a wet alley cat, rolled in damp loose-leaf paper on a urine-filled New York City backyard street. I, instead, used my platform more wisely. When we finished dancing, I used her to hail a cab going to Harlem. He would never stopped for my Freddie Jackson looking ass, I don’t care how good I looked in my K&G suit. As I digress.

I really did not find Bennett’s comments offensive at all; probably because he really felt that way--and this is America. You know, the home of the free.., which includes speech. What I did find offensive is the fact that no one was willing to openly ask William Bennett why he, and his alley cat smelling colleagues, feel the way the do about black babies or black people in general. Are you ready for more irony? If someone intellectually, challenged Bennett’s thought process, they would probably find that some black people [not just Cosby] feel the same way as Bennett. Then, once all the hated emotions are set off and exchanged; some real conversations could take place. We would be able to actually move the country forward--racially speaking, of course. After all, capitalism would still come with a price tag--usually poverty. We nstead, brushed this issue aside or chalked it up to a drunken stupor with a slow radio delay and everyone goes back to their not-so-neutral, but very prejudice corners of the globe.

Ready for more irony? If I had a national platform and stated that if we killed all of the white babies, we would wipe out corporate crime (Enron, World Com, etc..) would I be wrong? Would you be mad at me? What about if stated that if we killed all the white babies, world peace would no longer be an impossible dream. If we killed all the white babies, women would never have to settle for small penises anymore. Hmm. Just think, no one would ever twist their ankle doing the electric slide. There would be no more 3-point lines in the NBA. Vanilla Ice would only be an option at Baskin & Robbins. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would still be alive and John F. Kennedy would still be dead--remember we are killing all the white babies (even the so-called friends of the black babies). Just think, they’d actually be a Black person on Meet the Press every Sunday morning. Jazz would still be Jazz and Kenny G would be dead. Now come on, even some white people would celebrate that one.

In the end, we are all here, for better or worse. So we should put all of our differences on the table and move the country forward. If not, rent Crash and go back to your neutral corners.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

Katrina The Aftermath

2005-09-15T05:03:00.000-07:00

For the first time in quite some time I have been totally lost for words. I have been simply searching for the right terminology to express my very deep feelings about this natural disaster. There is so much hurt, pain and anger to go around that most days I simply sit and listen to Kayne's latest just to escape the madness. For the record, it's bananas!!!

One can spend a great deal of time pointing the proverbial fingers at the local officials, the State Government, or The Federal Government for not being adequately prepared. But, in the end, it is always the people that suffer. Some political pundits are pointing the finger at race, when economics is probably closer to the real truth. After all, many black people hopped in their Escalades, Hummers, and Jeeps headed north and have not returned since--some never will.

Nevertheless, as one's heart tries to find the strength to aid the victims, their families and the overall lives that have been lost in this disaster; you then have the misfortune of reading that a lady, born and raised (and who still resides) in Stone Mountain Ga., who tried to scam the Red Cross out of $1,200--falsely claiming that she too was a victim of the hurricane. I believe Satin has her reservations ready.

You read stories of Bush babbling that: "We never thought the Levees would fail in our lifetime." Honestly, that sounds like something I would've said. But, in my defense, I think I deserve a pass for two reasons:

A) Three weeks ago I had no idea what a Levee was... And,
B) I am not the president.

I did, however, know that New Orleans is a city surrounded by water from Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, and the nearby Gulf of Mexico. So, at the very least, I would have concluded that a city surrounded by water, built below sea level, with a Category 4 storm (looming); which happens to be named after a woman, reeks of an emergency evacuation. Hell, every 28 days most married men I know evacuate their homes until "that" storm clears.

Man, sometimes I really wish Bush had applied himself and became a devoted UPS Driver. Usually, the UPS Driver delivers good news, like the time they dropped off my Kanye West CD.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

Not Too Common

2005-09-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

If you believe (like I do) that music is the heartbeat of the soul, then do yourself a favor---PLEASE get Common’s latest joint, “BE!” Most people didn’t like his last joint Electric Circus—further proving my point that most people are mediocre, at best. But I digress.

I think Common internalized the reviews of his last one and took it rather personally. Well that may underscore why he came out in such a Brian Nichols blaze. Hip Hop fans, this is an instant classic. Stack it near Ready To Die, The Chronic, Black on Both Sides, and prayerfully, any Omar in your collection. Non-hip hop fans, this will make you understand why the rest of us are fans. Kanye West is slowly becoming the Quincy Jones of hip hop; and he put his foot (and elbow) in this one. Timberland, Pete Rock, The Neptunes, Dallas Austin, Dre, Organized Noise, Premiere, Rick Ruben, are second-tier and the gap just became a river. Producers, grab your oars! The title track, Be! is the epitome of an intro. Simple guitar riffs, uncomplicated keyboards, and spit-fire lyrics. This track sets a very realistic tone for what history will prove to be the foundation of a hip hop masterpiece. I don’t know who pissed Common off, but I imagine they are awake now and drafting an apology. Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to Kayne West, who slays club dwellers with "Go!" As the weather gets warm outside, the clubs, cars and cribs will sweat to this one throughout the summer. The music is so original and Common’s tone punctuates a solid “radio-friendly” (not necessarily a compliment), hit.
FAITHFUL is A tearful anthem that every rap classic should have [Tupac's "Dear Mama" first comes to mind.] The squeaky background sample detracts from very serious, straight-forward lyrics. John Legend’s chorus at the end more than makes up for that hook factoid and will convert the most unhappy hip hop fan.

Speaking of John (Legend), along with The Last Poets, and Bilal all make a welcomed guest appearances that are truly frosting on a carefully layered cake. Eleven solid tracks of hip hop, soul and deep inspiration that words will never fully describe. Do yourself a favor, start your holiday weekend right, pick this up, as nothing in your changer will have anything in Common.

1 Love,

Ray Lewis

Standing Pat

2005-08-25T07:36:00.000-07:00

I have said this before, and as a preface, it is worth repeating. I would rather be homeless in America than a citizen of 75% of the rest of the world’s countries.

Now that we have established that fact, the apathy the U.S. Government, Congress and the Federal Communications Committee has exuded in regard to Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson’s comment [the USA should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez] further underscores the overt racism and blatant double-standards that continue to divide and plague this country. I can recall the time when Sony Music forced Michael Jackson to re-release the History LP when he made what “they” considered anti-Semitic remarks about the Jewish Community. One would have thought that Sony would've listened to the LP before the originally released date. Today, The Jackson/Sony relationship seems to have hit a record (no pun intended) low.

I also remember Jesse Jackson making an off-the-cuff remark about the Jewish Community when he labeled their community Hymie Town. Since then, Jackson's illegitimate child and misplaced marches have further solidified his place in infamy with the non-black community. We black folks, for some mysterious reason, still pledge our allegiance to Mr. Jackson. It is no secret that White Community is still at a gasp every time Minister Louis Farrakhan’s name is uttered -- I believe some of them have pressed their black suits and rehearsed his eulogy in their sleep.

We have not heard a peep out of this easily offended white community in regard to Mr. Robertson in fact Pat Robertson has since denied saying that he wanted the Venezuelan President assassinated. Naturally, when shown his own video-taped clip, he finally apologized. On last Wednesday's edition of The 700 Club, taped in the morning, Robertson said: "I didn't say "assassination.' I said our special forces should, quote, "take him out,” and "take him out' can be a number of things including kidnapping. There are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted; but that happens all the time. So what have we learned?

Pat Roberson is not only a two-faced liar, reluctantly apologetic, but he’s also a punk.

But at least he has his health.
And, people wonder why more Christians listen to Kanye West, than so-called religious leaders.

Speaking of West, his new joint “Late Registration” drops next Tuesday, August 30, 2005. I, like Chris Rock, am finding it more and more difficult to defend hip hop music, but Kanye West’s latest makes that defense a tad bit easier. In an arena that has lost its creativity and most of its originality, West brings the heat to a slightly chilled medium. Pick up this month’s very credible Time Magazine article on West and read all about him.

After all it's about Time to stop standing Pat.

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

Reality Bites

2005-07-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

Bravo to Bravo-TV for landing their new hit series Being Bobby Brown. So far, the crack headed cast is the highest-rated show in Bravo television history. No small feat when you consider that Being Bobby Brown had to outperform such award-winning series like Celebrity Poker, Queer Eye, Blow Out and 16 nail-biting, chillin' hours of West Wing repeats. Now Whitney can get those illusive drug-dealing receipts she so often mentions.

I was in an Atlanta grocery store when two white women were expressing how bad the Bobby Brown reality series is. They started whispering when they saw me. I guess they thought I was going to tell Bobby that they didn’t like his show. Maybe they thought I was Johnny Gill. White people can be so foolish at times. Actually, my first thought was….., is there such a thing as a good reality series? What were they expecting, The Bodyguard? Waiting To Exhale? Or some of Whitney's other stellar performances? I must admit, I watched Being Bobby Brown; if for no other reason than to thank the good Lord for Being Ray Lewis. Bravo’s ratings would have been even higher had I had a Nielsen Box or paid for cable. It should be noted that I offered BET $100.00 per month if they took BET off of my cable system. My frequent calls to Bob Johnson/ Viacom went unanswered. Bob can be so sensetive when one is not appaulding his Tip Drill Video rotation. What an ass.

For the record, I think reality shows are great for the network executives. After all, they pay an untrained staff a few hundred thousand to “act” like straight idiots (or themselves, which ever is more foolish) and advertisers pay real money to be sponsors. I wish I’d thought of that brilliant scheme. But, not to be out done, I did think of a few reality series that I’d push to some NET Heads.

When a Man loves a Woman, then Becomes One: The Star Jones/ Terry McMillan Story.

Back Street Boys: The Michael Jackson Story

Pimp My Thighs: The Oprah Winfrey Story

Pimp My Ride: The Eddie Long Story

Is He Really Coming Back Here: The Frank Ski Story

Without Beyonce, are we just hoes: The Destiny’s Child Story

Baby Got Back: The Matthew Knowles Story

Is That My Soap: The Lil Kim Story

Where’s my Dictionary: The Magic Johnson Story

Cutting Up: The O.J. Simpson Story

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

Ghetto Proverbs

Black Like This

2005-05-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to be black in America?

Wow, the sanguine side of me wants to answer that question with the opportunistic, sky-is-the-limit, financial freedom endorsement that is echoed throughout this 9-11 pep rally. Now then, what can black people grumble about? The richest basketball player in the country, Kevin Garnett, he is black. The richest football player in the country is Michael Vick, he is Black. The richest baseball player is damn-near black, Alex Rodriquez. The most powerful woman in the world, Condoleezza Rice is damn-near black.., wait, is that her hair? Yep, she’s black. One of the richest women in the country is Oprah, she is black. One of the largest entertainment companies in the world, is Time-Warner-AOL-Turner and that chairman, Richard Parsons, is black. Three of top ten grossing persons in the critically-coveted Hollywood A-list are black (Will, Denzel, and Halle). Tinsel Town’s executives would have to reach deep in their accounting ashtrays for the “second tier,” big screen services of Cuba, Whoopi or Morgan too. Man, I already miss you, Ozzie. May you rest in peace. One of the biggest small-screen entertainers in the world is, Bill Cosby, and to his distain, he’s black. The U.N. Secretary, Kofi Anna, is (thankfully) black. For all of their steppin’ & fetchin’ primpin’ ain’t easy, that hoe is mine video; the rap music Mongols Sean & Shawn (Combs & Carter) are both black. Michael Jackson, for now is still black. And, should he go to prison, like trail of the yellow brick road seems to be leading, he’ll find out what many white women uncover---It’s not just a myth. But, I digress.

As you can plainly see, in this capitalist society, African Americans have strongly represented sports, politics (domestic and international), and the world of entertainment. So why am I so damn appalled?

Well, for starters, the mere fact that I can count the number of so-called influential black people (without the aid of the now white-owned Essence magazine) is sad enough. The fact that the Rothschild family and the Rockefeller family members far out-number the members on this “black list” is distressing. Speaking of depressed, does your TV get UPN?

The fact that we celebrate hollow victories like: “Will Jammie Foxx win an Oscar?” is simply miserable. Add the fact that there is not one single black person on this list or in Hollywood that could green light a commercially released film is disgusting. The tears get heavier when you swallow the fact that the only black NBA (majority owner) is Bob Johnson. And, that dumb mother------- thought BET was such a good idea that he sold it to the bastards that own UPN. Condoleezza thought it was such a good idea to take over Iraq that Bush gave her a promotion. I heard that Supreme Court House Negro, Clarence Thomas sent her roses. He’s black too. When Condoleezza’s term is over and she is done playing with her bushes (I have a countdown calendar Xing off the days) she wants to run the NFL—and you see how many happy black owners are in that club. Finally, I don’t care how much money Tiger’s bitch-ass has in the Rockefeller-owned banks, let him try to catch a cab heading to Harlem after dusk.

Taxi.

1 love,

Ray Lewis

Better Days: "The Brian Nichols Story"

2005-04-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

The influx of people packing U-Hauls and pointing them to the ATL may have subsided—at least for one weekend. The only winners in this weekend’s free-for-all at the Fulton County shoot-in are the people that are in the process of securing this soon-to-be-released made-for-TV movie deal.

First, and foremost my heart goes out to the slain victim’s family, friends and colleagues. No one, this side of a Shakespearian tragedy should have to end a work day in this manner. Not even Enron exces.

Now that being said, there is plenty of blame to dish out, so let's get started. Can we start with the brain surgeon that let a 50-year-old, over weight female deputy walk a linebacker through the now-fatal halls of justice. I use the word justice very loosely. Allegedly, (well, it is all alleged) the deputy fought with Brian Nichols for five minutes and managed to call for back-up during the melee, to which no one showed up. No one! Clearly, that sounds like a tag team of people that would have the whole southeast region searching for a vehicle that is neatly parked one level below it's original stolen space. Trust me; there are no Nobel Prize recipients on this staff. More on the Keystone Cops in a minute.

This brother (and I use that term loosely too) was on trial for raping a woman that he dated for seven years. Do you smell something fishy? Please excuse the pun. Now, I am no Taye Diggs (although I did own a white dog once); I am no Morris Chestnut, either. I have very little game and I am 20 pounds over my football playing days. That not withstanding, if I dated a woman for seven years, I think I can talk my way into the bloomers without taking ‘em. Let’s face it, I’m no Diggs or Chestnut, but I am no Kobe Bryant either.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Mr. Nichols did not rape the woman that he was accused of…., and he subsequently thought that he was getting a “raw deal.” A brother in court getting a raw deal. Hmm, that is not so far fetched. However, I find it really hard to imagine that shooting a judge to death; shooting two deputies (one to death), killing a court reporter, and then carjacking and pistol-whipping an AJC reporter (although he should be slapped just for writing for that toiletry); and killing a U.S. Customs Agent would somehow make his situation better. As it stands now, he may not have raped his former girlfriend, but the only sex that he’ll RECEIVE now—should he live long enough to get it—will be from another linebacker.

A few last thoughts, why would a man accused of rape, go on a four-person killing spree, abduct a non-ugly white women, yet be kind and gentle enough to her to put a towel over her head while he took (what will amount to be his last) unassisted shower? Do you smell that? His well-to-do parents—who I’m sure received CNN in Africa—thought so much of full-fledge manhunt for their son that they would not cut short or cancel their retreat from the Mother Land. At least they called Larry King. Why has no one shot him?

In end a brother searching for justice, instead unleashed death and destruction. I'm not sure how God will feel about this--sadly Nichols may never get a chance to explain this to Him.

1 Love,

Ray Lewis

Jay-Z Or NAS

2005-04-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

Typically, this is a discussion designated for those hot air personalities that gauge music authenticity, credibility and overall success of an artist by record sales. This very sad fact further illustrates why most radio booths have no sharp objects (other than the sound scan barcodes.

Further punctuating this painful proof is that fact that Jay-Z’ Reasonable Doubt [released Jan ‘99] and NAS’ Illmatic [released Apr ‘94] are the best pieces of work by either artists’ admittance even though neither was their top-seller.

Now, it doesn’t matter whether you are riding with Marcy’s Man child or Queens Bridge’s Qur’an quotable — both are boiling at the top of their game. Jay says he’s done, but he said that before NAS dropped his last one — which may be his best yet, and the inspiration behind this post.
Should Jigga hold onto his vow and hang up the mic for good, there will be little “doubt” that these feuding foes fight ended in a NAS victory. Of course I thought the battle track “Ether” [released from the highly underrated Stillmatic] sealed that debate. However, some die-hard JZ fans were just unconvinced. NAS’ "double disc Street Disciples" should put another nail in that coffin reasonable doubt.

It is so ironic that both Jay-Z and NAS spent a great deal of time and energy defending ‘Pac and Big — and in some many ways are just like the slain rap icons.

Big had a (well) big street presence that transformed into the business of show (just like Jay-Z).

While 2Pac was destined for showbiz but his music lit up the streets -- just like Esco.

In general, emcee battles are what most Hip Hop fans prefer. It’s a simple choice between poetic genius vs. commercial corniness — and, in my opinion, Jay-Z spent too much of his career trying to justify both.

For the record, I think "The Black Album," along with "Reasonable Doubt" are classics--everything in-between underscores my point. Conversely, NAS spits reverberating lyrics which challenge the spirit, regardless of the target. He attacks the soul and expects the knowledgeable to understand. For the unawake, weak and wack…, well they can simply call their local morning shows.

Advantage NAS

1 Love,
Ray Lewis

The Artest formely Known As

2005-04-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

These are some very perplexing times in the USA. For example, when was the last time CNN, NBC, ESPN and the local barbershop had the same lead story? (OJ, perhaps?) Well, this weekend the Indiana Pacer’s puzzling forward, Ron Artest was the headliner on all of the 24-hour news sources. The outcome.. in a word, troubling! Artest, like most professional athletes are simply a microcosm of society—a society whose moral beliefs are obviously spiraling out of control.

On Friday, a Detroit Piston fan threw a beverage in a cup (filled with ice) and hits Artest in the face. Artest was literally lounging, (or as Fat Joe would flow) “leaning back” on the scorer’s table, waiting for the referees to restore order from an on-court melee that happened minutes earlier. That fight was ignited earlier by a technical foul that was called on (you guessed it) Ron Artest. Ron Artest jumped over the scorer’s table and into the stands [followed closely by the low IQ-ed Stephen Jackson] and they both started swinging at the first guilty looking person. That retaliation started a riot and was extremely costly. And, like OJ, has a nation divided among the usual social barriers: race, money, and politics. What perplexing times to live in this US of A.

Artest was suspended without pay for the rest of the 73-game season—a penalty that will cost him several million dollars; (most likely) his team’s chances of winning an NBA title, and a bookmark in NBA infamy. Jackson's "contribution" is not worth mentioning. I hope for Artest it was worth it. That is a hell of a price to pay for a freedom that still does not exist.

For the record, I agreed with the NBA’s commissioner, David Stern’s decision. I don’t agree with much else that Stern does—but this one was clear. NBA Players cannot jump in the stands. That’s in the player's handbook (which Artest will have plenty of time to review) and there are no exceptions. During his "down time," he'll also find out that playing ball is more lucrative that his soon-to-be released CD and if that lesson is not clear this one will be: the name on the front of his jerseys is more important than the name on the back. Was Artest's wrong? Yep. Was the fan wrong? Yep. Was Artest defending himself? Perhaps. The real question you have to ask is: who’s the professional?

David Stern’s not so clear message is: You Niggers make millions off the sweaty earned paychecks of the working-class backs—most of which are white male attendees. You dumb jocks cannot and will not jump in the stands and whip their asses—no matter what they say or do to you. We pay you enough money to refrain from that. So if you rim-spinning, cornrow wearing, jewelry & gun tooting, tattoo having, VIBE Award acting fools don't refrain from attacking our cooperate sponsors we’ll take all the money back and you can go back to your 'hood and keep it real there. I’ll let George Bush take care of the rest of you. Drive home safely.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

I'll Take Popes for 1,000

2005-04-26T16:19:00.000-07:00

Contrary to the views shared by some atheists or agnostics , the cloud of white smoke surrounding the Vatican City today did not come out of a peace pipe at a reggae street festival. The white smoke signaled the new reign of Pope Joseph Ratzinger or, as his robe-mate hommies like to call him, Pope Benedict XVI.

If you never thought organized religion was (at the very least) divisive--just think about this bizarre ritual. The Popes-to-be are hidden behind closed doors, sequestered like a Michael Jackson jury, and stripped of all cellphones, beepers, and two-ways. All votes are to be written and placed in a Golden Bowl (of sorts), and the Popes have to disguise their handwriting too. The cellphone strip tease is to make sure that they are relieved of all outside communications. Hmm... One would assume that if you simply asked the Popes not to make any outside communication, that they would honor that request. This is religion, right? Instead, we of the free world chose to Pat down the Pats like they were entering a 50 Cent concert. Secondly, don't Popes have the "ultimate" communication? If they don't have that Heavenly communication, all those people missing days and days of work to analyze smoke signals are not only having smoke blown up in the air.....

Pope Benedict XVI, who looks like a cross between Billy Graham and Chevy Chase, is 78 years-old, so if you could not attend this mornings "inauguration" festivities, you may want to fax your Hail Mary's to him, because Lord only knows when he'll make it to Harlem. Those of you dreaming of a Black Pope must have seen White smoke too... wrapped around a green leaf.

1 love,
Ray Lewis

A Mad Dash

2005-04-26T16:13:00.000-07:00

The word on the streets (okay, the NY Post) is that president and CEO of Roc-a-fella Records, Damon Dash, is planning on running for president.... of the United States. Yep, the United States of America. Wow, where do you begin to respond? My first response was, Damon Dash was really not that great of a record label president. Yeah, I know Roc-a-fella grossed a 8 trillion dollars, or some VERY exaggerated figure like that. But, the truth is, Roc-a-fella Records is Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter and a bunch of Fat Albert band members. [Although, Beanie Sigel's latest joint is hot].

The street cred, urban-bred Dash, does get the occasional Wall Street blip, as he's dabbled in some movie scores, clothing lines (imagine that?), and energy drinks. However, to most political pundits, he's simply Shawn's boy,with good timing. As usual, the truth probably resides somewhere in the middle. Nevertheless, it is not too uncommon for an admitted drug-dealer or street hustler to become president. Take John F. Kennedy for example. Bootlegging was illegal when the Kennedy's ran their cartel. And, the golden boy, turned First Man was just (get this!) in the right place at the right time. When Kennedy tried to put the Susan B. Anthony silver behind the treasured U.S. (papered) dollar bill, things got hairy and Kennedy's fate was met with the same brutal ending to that of a rap star who pisses on the wrong man. Isn't life funny?

Ironically, I think the president's office only serves one purpose... and that is to instill HOPE; the rest is just politics at it's worst. Remember Jesse Jackson ran with that "Keep Hope Alive" platform, because that is the only thing you can sell to the youth of America... HOPE. It didn't work for the same reason Dash's dash to the front office won't work, but they had the right idea. When you really think about it, the oxymoronic truth is, the White House is not even in the United States, so the laws created and overturned are not applicable to the man who signs the bill. Nevertheless, I admire Dash's Outhouse aspirations because some young kid in the projects, who sees the riches of hustling on the streets, will also look at Damon's run and it'll give him hope that some day he too can become president.... Of what is what makes life in America worth living.
Unfortunately, I have never lived to witness a good president. Sure most of my peeps thought Bill Clinton was a good one. I view Bill as the strongest man in an all-girls prison. He passed the three strikes rule. He sold the .com dream that imploded. He did meet with some counterproductive black caucuses, I'm not sure what ever came out of that, but it instilled hope at the time. Jimmy Carter wasn't bad, at least if he was invited to pay his last respects to the Pope, John Paul II would not have been passed around like a Jamaican joint for 12 days. I actually like Nixon. He was clever for a Republican and honest (as much as that chair will allow one to be).

Should Dash actually run, I hope that he lives long enough to lose.

1 love,

Ray Lewis