Negrophilia

Mid-week of comparing sounds, Mike Ladd Negrophilia: The Album (Thirsty Ear Records, 2005). Listening, I go back to the Jungle Brothers JBeez Wit the Remedy (Warner, 1993), whose final songs on that album break melody and plot for the sake of producer as improviser, direct mathematician. Numbers 13 and 14: "For the Headz at Company Z" and "Man Made Material" took similar routes to those in Ladd's CD. In those songs the purpose was to break hip-hop, change its molds and revisit specific sound eras, redone. In a prologue, Ladd writes:

"Postfuturist Paris is not a city but a collection of cerebral boroughs connected to a greater cerebral megalopolis. Geographically this (at the very least) consists of Paris , New York, London, with Dakar, Casablanca, Rabat, Abidjan, Lagos, Accra, Mumbai, Kingston and Fort de France functioning as culturally empowered suburbs, or cerebral hubs (vs. commercial hubs). Understanding these points as one cerebral city enables us to observe how old colonial powers have violently maintained their positions and more importantly how those the powers colonized have profoundly reshaped these structures culturally and spatially."

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But locked into this transcultural age the misconceptions and misreadings remain, mistranslations—like this recent one at The Nation (Christian Parenti, "Hugo Chávez and Petro Populism," 11 April 2005). While the author seems to hint at some complexities in Venezuela's political and cultural landscapes, his hip-hop gangsta fantasies in Caracas are questionable. Guerrilla tourism updated for postmodern Caracas. Violence and chaos for export, on tour, courtesy of Citgo Revolution, Inc.