Quote of the day!

"You cannot make a powerful Afro American culture if you're going to base it on what hustlers and pimps think about the world."

-The Source 12/90 pg.39

Sexy rap videos suspected to be damaging to young girls

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Watching rap music videos that are overly sexy and violent can lead to alcohol abuse and promiscuity among young black girls, according to a study into sexual stereotypes in rap music footage.

The research was based on a survey of 522 African-American girls aged 14 to 18 who were asked how often they watched rap videos, questioned about their sex lives and asked to provide a urine sample for a marijuana screening.

U.S. researchers found young black girls who spent more time watching rap music videos were more likely to binge drink, have sex with multiple partners, test positive for marijuana and have a negative body image.

Check it out on Reuters and EVIP List

The 'ideals' of thug culture are destroying black Americans

Somewhere along the way, a cadre of young black men and women began glorifying violence, misogyny and thuggishness, accepting incarceration as inevitable, resigning themselves to lives on the margins of mainstream society. They created a thug culture that has been commodified — celebrated in music and movies, sold to poor adolescents in wretched neighborhoods as well as affluent teenagers in upscale communities.

Check out the rest in the ATL Journal

Lupe Fiasco:Hip Hop 101?

On the one hand, I sometimes find it funny how people obsess over trivial stuff like Lupe Fiasco messing up one line from Electric Relaxation in the VH1 Hip Hop Honors show honoring Tribe Called Quest.

On the other hand, I find it strange that Lupe's, who grew up listening to gangsta and dirty south rappers, became more of an artist like Tribe Called Quest and not the gangsta rappers he grew up listening to. Strange.

Hip Hop DX:"*Update* Lupe Fiasco Clears The Air On Hip Hop Honors

Happy Birthday to the Black Panther Party!



The core of the organization at its inception in 1966 were close friends Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Richard Aoki in the city of Oakland, California. The three had been witness to a radical ferment in the Bay Area and the United States, taking part in protests against the Vietnam War and having an interest in the American Civil Rights Movement.

Like many people of color of their generation, Newton and Seale had been frustrated by the doctrine of nonviolence as espoused by mainstream civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the inaction of the white-dominated radical groups. They looked instead to the black nationalism of Malcolm X as well as the discipline shown by its paramilitary organization, Fruit of Islam. They also looked to proponents of armed self-defense within the civil rights movement, such as the Deacons for Defense and Justice as well as exiled former NAACP chapter president Robert F. Williams for example, and they were particularly inspired by Williams's book Negroes with Guns.

Contemporaneous to this rise in America's domestic radicalism was an interest in Marxist-Leninist Third World liberation movements, across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Seale, Newton, and Aoki held a great interest in the philosophies and writings of Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Steve Biko.

After doing a stint in prison for assault, Huey Newton returned to the campus of Oakland City College where he had matriculated. He became fed up with the intertia of the Afro-American Association, the student group to which he and Seale belonged. Seale and Newton discussed the need for militancy in the face of an oppressive system. The two came to an agreement over the specifics, and the 10 Point Program and Platform was born. Continued on Experience Festival!