Not Every Artist is An Artist..Some Are Lapdogs & Spokespeople For Oppression

In response to Beyonce telling women they are B–tches and to bow down and Rick Ross rapping about date raping someone, there are some who tried to explain that we should leave such artists alone and that they have FREEDOM of SPEECH.. Lets get a couple of things clear..

If you are pushing oppression and have multinational corporations with million dollar budgets and vast resources, promoting destructive messages then YOU ARE NOT an artist.. What you are is a worker…You are a lackey for corporate interests and should be seen as such.. You are no different then Ronald Reagan when he used his acting skills to be a spokesman for General Electric..In this case you are a spokesperson for oppression. Your creativity and artistic talent is being pimped out for repression not liberation..

Spokespeople and workers for oppression look for huge paychecks, cheap fame and an ostentatious lifestyle so they can bury their shame, ease their guilt and distract us from the fact that their souls were sold and their principles forever compromised. A corporate lap-dog will make excuses for having their talent and art be marketed for young minds and used destructively. They’ll tell you about the importance of ‘sales’ and ‘staying relevant’ or how parents should raise their kids.. These are corporate talking points all designed to avoid responsibility.. It doesn’t change their wrong doings of spreading corporate poison and using ‘art’ as the validating vehicle

This is not about telling artists they don’t have freedom of speech or there is one particular party line they gotta adhere to..This is about waking up folks and making it very clear who’s imperialistic interests some who call themselves artists are furthering..It’s about shining a bright light on the deep pocketed nefarious forces behind the work being hawked to the masses..

Are you in the business of saving souls or selling souls? Are you leading us on to the plantation or off? Time will tell the side you choose to represent…

Davey D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwFN9f8q5g0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHnUFpCeGxQ

Earlier when I posted this.. I got an insightful response from former BLA (Black Liberation Army) leader and former political prisoner Dhoruba Bin Wahad..Here’s what he added to my remarks..

I think maybe we should understand how the status of “Race Music” has been transformed in America by a combination of technology, social change, and the corporate globalization of culture. Once “Black” music, R&B, Jazz Gospel, Blues etc, were separate and apart from white corporate and popular music personified by “Tin-Pan Alley” top song listing.

In the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s Our music was patronized and confined (segregated) to our community therefore it reflected our communal reality (faults and all). But after the upheavals of sixties, the rise of the white Hippie “Love Generation” , the urbanization of white supremacist power to control inner city Blacks, mainstream White culture subsumed it’s Black sub-cultural counterpart. This process at once depoliticized Black music, dummed it down to nursery rhyme like songs (almost every popular Rap track, gangster, or “Dirty South” song sound like nursery rhymes appealing instantly to the adolescence generation that was never really taught what growing up means- but more importantly changed the nature of community musical introspection into gross expressions of sex, violence, money, and the values of misogyny.

Hence acting and behaving as backwards Niggers is acceptable.. authentic, the “Hood”. What we used to call “country” (Gold grillwork dressing like a clown in a bad circus act, is now glorified in videos and on stage) because the money corporate America can generate from ghettoized entertainment serves not just they’re bottom-line, but also the promotion of American values, mystique and material wealth – and most importantly the place of the Black man/woman in the overall scheme of things, we have the artists we do today making millions.

I may be wrong, but the last time I looked, white youth were the major consumers of Hip-Hop music and related paraphernalia. White girls don’t consider themselves “Bitches” in the street sense of that odious term – so what Beyonce says in this respect doesn’t resonate with them – what resonates is her outfits and style, so its not unusually for folks to admire stylish assholes, or that an entire generation of young Black women in the “Hood” have raised and are raising a generation of Shanniqa’s and children named after their Moma’s favorite perfume or club drink or luxury car. What does it say about one’s class status and values when waking up in a new Bugatti is a dream come true?

Khan: 10 Years After the War in Iraq, The Anti-War Movement is Virtually Dead

Freelance Journalist Nida Khan

Last week marked the official 10-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Leading up to the commemoration of this bloody and costly engagement, major networks, newspapers and online outlets acknowledged the decade milestone with extensive coverage. They parsed the many ways in which the Bush administration misled everyone and orchestrated a brazen attack on a sovereign nation. And they criticized the media’s own fallacy in helping to sell the war to the American people. But out of all of the supposed lessons learned and promises to rectify our ways going forward, it’s amazing just how little we have changed. In some sort of twisted irony, many of the most vocal opponents of the Iraq war are virtually silent at this very moment when we are actively entrenched and engaged in more areas of the world than possibly ever before. An estimated 6 million people demonstrated against the war in Iraq (according to Al Jazeera). Viewing old footage of these protests, one thing became vividly evident: 10 years later, any semblance of an anti-war movement has been all but crushed.

“As Americans, now whenever we’re told anything, somebody comes on and says there’s reports that maybe this and maybe that, we have to have the most skeptical, critical eye and ear to what we’re being told,” said filmmaker Michael Moore last Tuesday on ‘Piers Morgan Tonight’. Responding to reports of alleged chemical weapons use in Syria, and Ahmadinejad’s potential nuclear capabilities in Iran, Moore emphatically stated that our government – ‘the real government’ as he put it (Wall St., banks, the military) – hasn’t earned a right to be trusted. He went so far as to say that unless Ahmadinejad walks in the room with a bomb in his hand and shows it to him, he won’t believe anything he’s told about Iran. Watching Moore call out our rush to judgment (and subsequent action) around the world, it became blatantly obvious how rare his dissent actually is. In all the hoopla of ‘how could we let this happen’ in regards to Iraq 10 years ago, hardly anyone had the backbone to say that we’re still falling for the same playbook today save for one Michael Moore and a few others that have just been pushed to the margins.

Regardless of what your own personal views may be on Qaddafi (Gaddafi), Ahmadinejad, Abbas or the latest ‘bad guy’ on our list, the fact remains that we are still projecting them through a specific lens that gets drummed up in our mass media without appropriate context or complete information from all angles. And what follows is our involvement in yet another foreign independent country without adequate debate back home. Just because we may now align ourselves with a few other allies when doing so, does that make our actions really any less different than what happened with Iraq? And let’s put aside the notion of dictators that
need to be toppled for a moment and examine the use of weaponry in a host of other nations. Actively utilizing the predator drone program in Somalia, Yemen,

Mali, Afghanistan, Pakistan and numerous other countries, we are still dropping bombs that undoubtedly kill innocent civilians in the process. And yet, where’s the
objection from those that demonstrated against Iraq?

Whenever the concept of drones is addressed in our common discourse, a majority almost instantaneously defend its use because it requires less forces on the ground, and less loss of American lives. Pressing buttons, dropping bombs and watching explosions on a screen as if it were some sort of video game, the individuals operating drones in Nevada or elsewhere are not only further desensitized to the notion of taking lives, but so are the rest of us. No longer do we have to protest the lack of images of coffins with dead U.S. soldiers – we don’t even consider the use of drones an act of war. Under the same open-ended guise of ‘fighting terrorism’, the drone program is fundamentally unchecked from independent entities, and functions pretty much without accountability because it remains a covert process (though there’s talk to move it from CIA control, but we have yet to see). It wasn’t until Congressman Rand Paul’s recent filibuster of Brennan’s confirmation that many Americans likely heard about drones for the first time – and many probably still haven’t. The silence, from all sides, has been quite deafening.

Rallies and marches against the war in Vietnam played an intricate role in the larger struggle for civil rights in this country. While we may be losing less troops today of course (which is a plus), modern warfare still results in the murder of innocents. Every time a supposed target is hit by a drone, civilians – often times women and children – are killed simultaneously and many others permanently wounded. And that goes for every bomb dropped, every time, in every town, in every village, in every city, in every country. But when was the last time we saw 6 million protest that? Or even a million? For that matter, when was the last time we saw any sort of massive anti-war protest anywhere? Have we become such a complacent society that out of sight really has translated into out of mind? Or have we become neutralized because the dynamics of warfare have changed? Any which way you look at it, it’s pretty shocking.

With the exception of a few journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill that have been discussing drones at length for some time now, the vast majority of our press has been silent (minus recent Rand Paul coverage). Instead, we have media that continues to tell us that the drone program is effective in defeating terrorism and getting the bad guys. Rather than questioning a policy as journalists should do, they have been selling it for years – much in the same fashion that the Iraq war was sold to us 10 years ago. In all the focus on the anniversary of the invasion, never once did pundits and journos from either side of the aisle highlight the fact that we are repeating the same mishaps again, right now, in the present. And in discussions of the media’s complacency in selling the war, how often did we hear an acknowledgment of its current complacency in selling any of our present conflicts?

Guess people will wait to talk about today’s failures another 10 years from now.

written by Nida Khan follow her on twitter at

twitter.com/NidaKhanNY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPqpV9olIlw