I shall let you all in on the news I mentioned before. The school board voted Monday night and I’m now under a 9 month contract with a school district to be the ISS (In School Suspension) teacher. It’s one step closer to being the social studies teacher I’ve wanted to be since high school. What’s even better is I finally have full health insurance, dental, vision, and even life. On top of that, since I am certified, this year counts towards my retirement in the education system. Well, that is it. Wish me a successful school year.
I just finished reading Michael Eric Dyson’s Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop. It is a brilliant, insightful discussion on hip hop and its history, it’s problems, and how it relates to society as a whole. Anyone who is interested in what hip hop really is about and where it’s going needs to read this. My particular favorite parts of this book are the discussion of the older generation’s hatred of hip hop (just as the previous generation’s parents hated Soul, Funk, Rock, etc), and why that has hurt hip hop and caused (or at least reinforced) some of the problems found in the hip hop culture today (materialism, misogyny, violence). If hip hop was embraced by the past generation when hip hop was at it’s best, in terms of social and political statements, then it could have, in my opinion, a very different culture today. If they fostered and nurtured the creativity instead of blasting it, then maybe the hip hop youth wouldn’t have rebelled, or at least not as much. Of course, the shunning of the new by the old isn’t the only cause of the current state of hip hop, many factors are to blame, such as Reagan era economic policies, the introduction of crack into the urban centers of America (which was ignored if not helped by the CIA), and the prejudiced justice system, among other things.
In the last chapter, before the Outro written by Nas, Dyson talks about Nas’ symbolism in releasing a hip hop record that states hip hop is dead. This wasn’t to be taken literal, it was commentary on how clever rhetoric was “replaced by the mindless redundancy of themes we’re all too familiar with: women, weed, wine, cars, and jewelry. The thug persona has replaced skillful exploration of thug’s predicament: hustling in a culture where crime is the only option of the economic vulnerable.” The movement started by Nas is a response to this mass-marketed culture. So is hip hop dead? By saying so Nas proved the exact opposite (which was no doubt intentional). He brought it to the forefront of musical discussion. It made people think about what was actually being put out by record companies. Conscious rappers like Common, Kanye West, Talib Kweli, and others are heard more. People started blasting Nas for saying it was dead. Others agreed. His mission was (at least) partially successful. People were talking. Of course the consumer is the real judge. The hip hop culture will always be there. The question is, what image will be shown to the masses. On September 11th people have a choice of which hip hop they want, an album by 50 Cent or and album by Kanye. Do you want the thug persona, or someone that explores broader social issues (such as blood diamonds in Kanye’s song Diamonds from Sierra Leone) and that skillful exploration of the predicament?
Check out this funny video about comments on websites. Reminds me of Digg or Slashdot comments, or anytime someone says something criticizing Apple.
I installed Movable Type 4 on another site of mine and imported all the WordPress posts from this blog. I’m kind of tired of WordPress and the direction it’s going (It seems WordPress (as in .org) has went from being what’s best for the community to what’s best for the users of WordPress.com, the for profit version, which hey, you’re a business, that’s your job to make money, but don’t hide behind a facade of benevolence when you make decisions thinking about your profit margin instead of the community). I don’t know if MT will be any different, especially since it just became open source, but I think MT could be a suitable replacement. There’s going to be a large learning curve and I’ll lose all Google juice for a while, but I’m not a business that’s trying to make tons of money off my website. I do it for fun. I guess it all depends on whether MT will be fun to learn or frustrating. There is always Habari, but they have a long way to go before I can even consider using them.
I’m giving Ubuntu another shot. I’m not using my laptop much anymore, mostly because it sucks, so I decided to try Ubuntu again. The install was quick and painless. I think Ubuntu 7 was faster than 6 with the install process. You can tell it was updated to make install a lot easier too, and it was. The one thing that prevented me from keeping Ubuntu on my laptop last time I installed was spending four hours trying to get wireless to work. Today, out of curiosity, I decided to do a google search to see if there were any simpler methods to get my wireless to work. The result was this thread here. It worked like a charm. I do like Ubuntu. I will probably keep it. I can do anything that I would have done on this laptop using Windows with no problem. (Though, this is only a day into it, so we’ll see if I run into any major problems). The biggest issue I’ve seen is running into non-open source drivers or software that have packages for 32 bit Linux, but not 64 (such as Adobe Flash). With some searching, I found work-a-rounds for that too. We’ll see where this leads. Who knows, I may turn my old PC into a Linux box (but will still keep my Vista PC because yes, I do in fact like Vista.)