u/Apprehensive-Tie4930

Some Gold.

Mtume spitting as usual.

Out of curiosity I snuck into theatre (not to give money to Hollywood) and watched Odyssey. The editing was tiktok-brained as every shot lasted a millisecond, cast was too white as usual with a couple tokens, neoliberal war propaganda with the “are we the baddies?” twist that only focuses on the PTSD of the soldiers and doesn’t punish the main character who is a self-admitted war criminal. Goofy ending when Odysseus pulls a “sike!! i ain’t dying”

Apparently, they filmed in occupied Sahara too.

Everything on screen looks bland and instagram-ready, botox, chic, non-stained armor, minimalist, white.

Acting choices are the modern blockbuster whispers in a low tone with occasional SCREAM out of nowhere.

After this and Oppenheimer I am convinced Nolan is a cia psyop.

The neoliberal “let’s go back to simpler times without war but honor our soldiers too” moral of the story was spoon fed to the audience because it is targeted at children and dummies.

Odysseus is your usual vet gets PTSD and becomes a hero trope — the climax is literally a scene where he looks at the child they are slaughtering, the cliche of all cliches. Dope soundtrack tho.

A film whose relevance has only sharpened with time. Makes plain how the role of women is still pushed to the margins by patriarchal understandings of sovereignty, even though much of that language bears little relation to the lived reality of Palestine and Lebanon’s liberation.

Great review from the homies.

This is the kind of discourse the culture needs to stay intellectually alive. I may not agree across the board, but it leaves me with more to wrestle with, unlike the stagnant loop of this rapper vs this rapper debates.

A must-watch.

Underrated hip-hop albums. Rec #1.

Dark City by The Paradoxical State (2011)

One of the many great urban war documents in Hip-hop. It paints New York as a predatory organism, a city that consumes and metabolizes its poor while laundering the sins of its elites. Dub-soaked echoes drift over boom bap kicks like surveillance signals bouncing between concrete walls. The whole thing sounds like a cyber-noir fever dream. It's the psyche of the ghetto where "there is no miracles." Only managed suffering. Wall Street above ground. War zones exported. Prisons imported.

Jesonheart reaches surgical sharpness on the track "A Spectacular Event." He is not asking the empire to behave better. He is narrating its violence from below, from the underside of policy, from the people who receive history as shrapnel.

"You fight for freedom, but our meaning of freedom and justice is belittled by your candlelight vigils that damn us/And banish us to Guantanamo for torture, but you can't torture the tortured souls/That weep as Scuds torch our homes in our backyards, while men in suits sit in press conference rooms/Playing chess with our lives, playing God/At the same time you send your angels in camouflage to camouflage your ungodly initiatives/And what you call God-like, we call wickedness, that's right/The only politician I ever saw coming from remotely close to the second coming of Christ/Was a dude that pulled out a cigar in the Oval Office, stuck it inside her oral orifice, and smoked the shit without thinking twice/Now, that's that type of ingenuity, like flawless ability/That could only be a product of pure genius, brainiacs, or perhaps one who possesses the divine prophetic miraculous mental device/Like how Jesus turned water into wine/That kid turned pussy into cognac, and you strange things like cigars taste better when it's studied in intern nymphomaniacs/Who turned Judas, and while scandals was televised/You sent those animals to vandalize our backyards with this state of the art machinery/Creept and crept in slowly, and fucked our holy land/Virgin Mary turned into a whore for a night/Us cats have nine lives, you, you used seven of them/We'll sacrifice one of our lives to get through customs and the other one to bring you accustomed to the fear for/Y'all niggas is always careful not to spill a drop of oil, but you spill our blood like whatever the fuck/Then you talk shit about our culture like you better than us, your mom never taught you manners?/Damn Yankees"

While Empire entertains itself with scandals like the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, it engineers devastation abroad. Moral theater at the center, material terror at the margins. That juxtaposition is the point. Bourgeois spectacle masks imperial slaughter.

"Fuck Osama, that nigga's expendable/You niggas kill him, all you'll do is give birth to ten more generals/So why bother? See, we like Gremlins and your bullets is water/Go ahead motherfucker, wet me/My minions will split in half and double, then double back and watch your infidel regime collapse/Just wait, y'all cats ain't safe, wrap your gas masks and wait/Spectacular attacks on Babylon, when dual twin jetliners aligned up in perfect square to square off against dual twin icons/In a duel to the death, and the ants die, but it inflicted enough damage to bring down the Goliath/In what you would consider as demeaning, but to us a spectacular event"

The logic of asymmetrical violence. What unsettles Western listeners is the reversal of moral vantage. This the psychology of the disposable subject. When life has already been stripped of value, it becomes weaponizable. Fear can be exported.

Dropping this around Operation Neptune Spear feels deliberate, almost taunting. This is no soft critique concerning budgetary complaints or soldier-centered grief. It's a song that speaks from the colonized, not about them. We're not asking for empathy here, we're documenting consequence. Criminally underrated project. Listen and pick up the wealth.

The Jubilee-fication of Hip-hop barbershop discourse. A spectacle of consensus-building. Take us somewhere less rehearsed.

Come join.

We must study Renoir.

Story of anarchist east asian anti-japan armed front member satoshi kirishima revealing his identity as he lay dying in hospital in 2024, where he had been admitted under a pseudonym he'd lived under for fifty years. Watchlisted. Can't wait for this one to get a wider release.