Racial Situations in the Workplace

An interesting take on how one can use racist attitudes to one’s advantage – they hit some things dead on, some they missed, entertaining nonetheless.

The Hipsters

Past and Present … Presently ….

Here is a bit of a History Lesson of where this ‘Hipster’ Fashion and culture has come from … and SHOCKINGLY, it comes from the Black Community … (that is sarcasm)

Birth of ….

1940s-1950s

“Hipster” derives from the slang “hip” or “hep,” which are derived from the earlier slang “hop” for opium. The first dictionary to list the word is the short glossary “For Characters Who Don’t Dig Jive Talk,” which was included with Harry Gibson’s 1944 album, Boogie Woogie In Blue. The entry for “hipsters” defined it as “characters who like hot jazz.” The 1959 book Jazz Scene by Eric Hobsbawm (using the pen name Francis Newton) describes hipsters using their own language, “jive-talk or hipster-talk,” he writes “is an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders.” Hipster was also used in a different context at about the same time by Jack Kerouac in describing his vision of the Beat Generation. Along with Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac described 1940s hipsters “rising and roaming America,… bumming and hitchhiking everywhere… [as] characters of a special spirituality.”

Mutation of …

1990s and 2000s
In the late 1990s, the term started to be used in new, sometimes mutually exclusive ways. In some circles it became a blanket description for middle class and upper class young people associated with alternative culture, particularly alternative music, independent rock, alternative hip-hop, independent film and a lifestyle revolving around thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, and/or vegan food, drinking local beer (or even brewing their own), listening to public radio, and riding fixed-gear bicycles.

In 2003 Robert Lanham’s satirical book The Hipster Handbook described hipsters as young people with “… mop-top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes,… strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags.” Hipsters are considered apathetic, pretentious, and self-entitled by other, often marginalized sectors of society they live amongst, including previous generations of bohemian and/or “counter-culture” artists and thinkers as well as poor neighborhoods of color.

Gavin Mueller’s article “Hipster or Not?” for Stylus Magazine (2004) wrote that “… hipster lifestyle is reduced to a pose, a pretense” which involves”…”a hipster costume, worn to appear “cool”, a liberal arts education, and so on. He claims that the term “‘Hipster’ is far too vague and broad to have any semblance of essential meaning”.

Current … Hipster Rap

In 2008, Utne Reader magazine writer Jake Mohan described “hipster rap,” “as loosely defined by the Chicago Reader, consists of the most recent crop of MCs and DJs who flout conventional hip-hop fashions, eschewing baggy clothes and gold chains for tight jeans, big sunglasses, the occasional keffiyeh, and other trappings of the hipster lifestyle.” He notes that the “old-school hip-hop website Unkut, and Jersey City rapper Mazzi” have criticized mainstream rappers who they deem to be poseurs or “… fags for copping the metrosexual appearances of hipster fashion.” Prefix Mag writer Ethan Stanislawski argues that there are racial elements to the rise of hipster rap. He claims that there “…have been a slew of angry retorts to the rise of hipster rap,” which he says can be summed up as “white kids want the funky otherness of hip-hop… without all the scary black people.”

Comment:

I don’t mind the Hipster fashions for the women, but when the Hipster fashions for the men look like the same fashions for the women; then there is a problem – loosen up the jeans fellas.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(1940s_subculture)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subculture)

Hall & Oates: Hip-Hop’s favorite source to sample

Some background if you don’t know -and if you don’t know, then you really are not up on your music game, but Hall & Oates are a pop music duo made up of Daryl Hall and John Oates.The act achieved its greatest fame in the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s. They specialized in a fusion of rock and roll and rhythm and blues styles, which they dubbed “rock and soul.” They are best known for their six #1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100: “Rich Girl”, “Kiss on My List”, “Private Eyes”, “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)”, “Maneater”, and “Out of Touch”, as well as many other songs which charted in the Top 40. They have sold 80 million albums worldwide.

They have one of the most sampled songs in hip-hop industry, here is just a list (which I think is outdated):

* 1989 – “Say No Go” – De La Soul
* 1993 – “V.S.O.P” – Above the Law
* 1996 – “My Crew Can’t Go for That” – Trigger tha Gambler
* 1996 – “So Deep” – Dan-e-o
* 1997 – “I’ll Do Anything” – Heavy D
* 1998 – “I Can’t Go for That” – 2 Live Crew
* 1999 – “Can’t let go – C-Note
* 2000 – “Can’t Go for That (Remix)” -Tamia
* 2000 – “After Party” – Koffee Brown
* 2001 – “Traffic” – Stereo MC’s
* 2002 – “4 Myself” Mac Dre ft. Devious and Dubee
* 2003 – “Sunrise” – Simply Red
* 2003 – “Take Me to Your Leader” – King Geedorah
* 2004 – “I Can’t Go For That/Happy People Remix” – Notorious B.I.G. / R. Kelly (“Happy People” samples Spandau Ballet’s “True”)
* 2005 – “Wait Til I Get Home” – C-Note
* 2006 – “Give and Go” – Girl Talk
* 2006 – “No Can Do” – Tech N9ne
* 2006 – “Can’t Go On” – Örten

and here is the track:

Get up on your music game people!

.:: LiBM ::.

Ashy to Classy
Jay-Z makes it into Vogue magazine

The August issue of Vogue magazine will feature black models and entertainers as the popular Italian magazine has came under fire in recent years for not representing black models in their magazines. Jay-Z is one of the feature articles in the magazine and it is really big that Jay-Z from the Marcy projects in Brooklyn New York can rise from the gutter to the pages of the exquisite Italian vogue magazine. Looking at the pictures, Jay-Z can be the poster child for what ‘mature hip-hop’ looks like ….

The Vogue magazine should drop sometime in July 2008 and will not only featuring Jay-Z, but Naomi Campbell, Tyson Beckford, Toccara, and other black models. Vogue gets a ‘kudos’ for at least attempting to open its doors to black models in their magazines, but lets see if they can keep it up.

.:: d.b ::.