So much of rap is stupid, unbearably so. Rock 'n roll was better, not by much but it was making something new of older Black music (blues, guitar driven gospel, jazz). But we're coming around to this rap thingy after a half century. For all the boisterous bluster, some really has kick (umph), the right beat. We're finally seeing it.
What four young Black men formed and called themselves "Gho$tmane," incorporating death and Black metal into their sound? Here they are:
(Yeah, that guy, Sunny McCalifornia. How could a boy with buckteeth get so groovy he not only develops a distinctive sound but a unique aesthetic from the 1920s?) We have to guess that it's because we mainly hear pop-rap (the cr-p rap the radio plays to death) that rap seems boring and anything but phresh.
But with radio removed, one is now exposed to all the other ways of listening (peer-to-peer sharing, TikTok, underground shows, networks, influencers, curation, recommendations, luck, and social media.
With the censors out and the "filters" on, there's some really good stuff out there. Some recent Buddhist articles we produced got a tremendous response with what looks like hundreds of thousands of views. It's just rap. Rap is old. Hasn't all the hoopla about rap died down already. It might have about the old stuff, but there is much more vital NEW stuff. Who even knew this was rap.
We thought it would be good to hear rap songs done in another genre thanks to the GREAT Richard Cheese (longtime fans since he appearances on the Kevin & Bean Show decades ago). So just tapping in something like death metal rap got an unexpectedly good response on YouTube. What, it's a thing? We thought, what are these suggestions? So clicking on a few of them, not bad. It was just Slipknot when Corey spits bars. We knew about that. We didn't know some of these songs got videos made for them.
Then, skipping down, we tapped the White Album looking suggestion, just to see, and the song that came up was really good or not what we expected. It was rap, not death metal. We were looking for death metal. But then it was metal as rap. Who were these guys? Are there bands of Black youths who listen to black metal (which is called "black" not because of the race of the artists or fans but due to the dark arts discussed by the music, such as Venom, Mercyful Fate, Deicide) and rap about it? No. Who knows? (There's that horrorcore freakshow stuff, but that seems very niche). Everyone listens to everything nowadays. There's no reason to stay in a compartment and limit yourself.
Rock rap with Wes and Limp Bizkit
This was someone smart enough to rap but very dark, but still actual rap, not a parody or imitation. Hey, there's something here. You see, a few months ago, we surfed through a video of Limp Bizkit live in the Netherlands, and before the show, they are getting the crowd amped up and start playing a rap song.
All of the 100% Caucasian audience loves it, starts moving, singing along. "They do know this is not a Limp Bizkit song, right?" was the question that crossed our minds. But it was a rap song, and that was the amazing thing--one that Limp Bizkit knew it, and two that the audience loved it so much. Oh yeah, duh, they are there to see rap-rock. It turns out it wasn't Limp Bizkit but Limp's DJ spinning Ludacris as Wes is standing, holding his guitar, in his briefs, about to noodle.
That's how The Heart Sutra (RAP version) article got written. Real rap is what Ludacris was doing, that old skool yellin and cars and women and other featured rappers on a track.
Who's ever heard of Gho$temane? Apparently, everybody but us because he's already played Coachella, though not with the reception he might have been expecting (during the day, under the desert sun, on the lawn, in the heat, to a smaller audience.
How is this guy not in all our faces or in the manifesto of the teen who takes a shot at Eminem in the future? Didn't Megan Fox's boytoy diss Marshal Mathers in a rap only to have it blow up in his face? Who ever heard about MGK? Or Riff Raff featured on Far East Movement's "Illest," Vanilla Ice (aka Rob Van Winkle) or the way mad white rappers The Bloodhound Gang feature him as Robby Winkle, that Australian one-hit-wonder Masked Wolf, where drill (gangsta rap is breaking out) as well as biker gangs.
Eminem said the N word with style in rap battle. - And he managed to finally rhyme with "orange"
The rap trap is some fake cr-p
Seth Auberon, Pfc. Sandoval, Dhr. Seven, Sheldon S., Wisdom Quarterly COMMENTARY, The Future of Musick
Blame it on "Barbie" (actor Margot Robbie) - Why's your metal music so depressing, Bro?
Heavy metal or mental illness?
You call yourself a meditator with that racket?
(Wyatt's Metal) It's 2025, and there is one kind of music that is not going away. Rather than fading, it spreads. Why? The fanbase. Misfits like metal? Mental patients are moved? Animals like the beat and melody of music? Let's take a deep dive into the effects heavy metal (with all its genres like death metal, symphonic metal, extreme metal, speed metal, black metal, etc.) music can have on mental health.
(Charlotte de Witte) Charlotte de Witte, spring at Ultra 2023 (main stage), would probably answer, "Why ask why? Get out of your heads and [into your bodies] dance." It's true. What is time? What is reason? What is "why"?
Ah, those were the days, my friend.
In the future, music won't be so much about art as pumping that jam, moving with a beat, tripping on drugs that cause one to move, giving an experience like being at a Phish or Dead concert, a happening, more than a show for entertainment. (The future is now). Community will matter a great deal, even if one knows nobody and is known by nobody. When everyone is high, what does it matter? Illusion and perception become more important than reality and consensus. Dance, Monkey, dance! DJ, press the button on your laptop and get this party going!
Drakeo the Ruler, Kendrick Lamar, DJ Quik and N.W.A Collage by Jackie Lay/NPR (Walik Goshorn/Bennett Raglin/Michael Loccisano/Theo Wargo/Getty Images/AP
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How LA proved hip-hop could go global — by staying thoroughly local
As hip-hop celebrates its 50th birthday, NPR is mapping its story on a local level, with more than a dozen city-specific histories of the music and culture. See the entire list. Look what this music has done to 50-year-olds. We must stop this menace and save our youth.
(big block) N.W.A "F*ck Tha Police" (Let's get real in high quality video)
If one grew up in Los Angeles during the '90s, one could teleport to the dawn of West Coast hip-hop through a simple twist of the dial.
In the years before the 1996 Telecommunications Act deregulated and degraded regional radio, the "urban contemporary" FM stations (Power 106 and 92.3 The Beat) still regularly mixed the old-school car wash classics rumbling right before the Big Bang.
It was like staring into the Hubble telescope — except no NASA project could compete with the supersonic levitation of Zapp's "More Bounce to the Ounce."
Understanding the foundational component of LA hip-hop meant understanding The Funk. This was intuitive to the Raiders-hatted and Kings-jacketed masses mesmerized by productions from Dr. Dre and DJ Quik, Daz and Battlecat, Sir Jinx and Warren G, DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill, and Hutch of Above the Law.
(NPR Music) July 20, 2023. The first thing I noticed as Cypress Hill strolled into NPR headquarters was Sen Dog cradling his signature bucket hat. I asked him if my assumptions were correct; it was indeed the original hat seen in all the videos from the early '90s. Before I could process that confirmation, B Real asked me, "Yo, is your greenroom a green [mota] room?" We got everything we expected and more from Cypress Hill at the Tiny Desk. While the term "pioneer" is used loosely in hip-hop and pop culture today, few terms describe Cypress Hill's impact over the past three decades more adequately. They are the first Latino hip-hop group to achieve platinum and multi-platinum status. B Real, Sen Dog, and producer DJ Muggs crafted a sound in the '90s that stretched beyond regional boundaries. It was dark, psychedelic, and at times directly addressed mental health before the topic was commonplace. Many dismissed the group as "stoner rappers," yet the members were fervent advocates for the legalization of weed long before it came to fruition. Touring members Eric Bobo and DJ Lord joined the duo along with Money Mark from Beastie Boys fame. The band summoned a horn section to fill out this rare minimalist approach to five, funky Cypress Hill things. Between each song, B Real took his time to shed some historic light on the group's journey thus far. #tinydesk#cypresshill#nprmusic
SET LIST: "When the S*** Goes Down" "Hand On the Pump" "How I Could Just Kill a Man" "(Rap) Superstar" "Insane in the Brain"
After all, it was "the G-funk era." Dre and 2Pac recruited Roger Troutman to sing the hook on what became the de facto California state anthem. Ice Cube remade "One Nation Under a Groove" with George Clinton sitting on a throne in the video.
Defying commercial logic, Snoop Dogg released singles with a grown-and-sexy Charlie Wilson. Even "Pistol Grip Pump," the biggest crossover from the subterranean hip-hop tabernacle Project Blowed, was unreconstructed militant funk.
Funk was the primordial essence in the collective DNA. Several years before Kool Herc's South Bronx "Back to School Jam," a B-boy tidal wave crested out of a South Central community college cafeteria.
That's where commercial art student Don Campbell invented "locking" by hybridizing the "funky chicken" and the "robot." The locomotion's genius lay in its open-source design.
After Soul Train relocated from Chicago to Hollywood in 1971, Campbell became a featured dancer and his interlocking joint freezes and rapid-twitch movements were soon expanded upon by polyester Baryshnikovs across syndicated America.
Wild style mutated.
In Southern California, locking merged with popping, a spastic hiccup of jerky arm, leg, and chest pops from the Bay and Fresno.
By the late '70s, both coasts simultaneously codified the four elements. In LA County, Central California transplants teamed with Long Beach natives to form the iconic crew the Electric Boogaloos.
With gymnastic ground-floor innovations imported from New York, breakin' swept the inner city.
DJs and B-boys dominated. During the last days of disco, the founders of the pioneering World Class Wreckin' Cru and Uncle Jamm's Army — Alonzo Williams and Rodger Clayton — spun funk, R&B and soul in foggily remembered nightclubs.
In '79, Williams consecrated Eve After Dark in Compton, the future Eden for the Wreckin' Cru's teen breakout star, Dr. Dre. But the West Coast remained a step behind. Park jams required expensive permits.
Best rapper of all time: Eminem?
Considered a fad, LA hip-hop lacked its own Sugar Hill Records.
In 1981, two Air Force veterans, Disco Daddy and Captain Rapp, released LA's first official rap record after meeting at a club night welcoming Magic Johnson to the Lakers.
"The Gigolo Rapp" was a brazen imitation of "Rappers Delight," right down to the label (Rappers Rapp) being owned an ex-Sugar Hill record salesman. Beyond the skill disparity, a key difference stood out:
While The Sugarhill Gang interpolated the sleek disco-soul of Chic's "Good Times," the self-described "terrible two" from LA rhymed over the orgiastic sleaze of Rick James' "Super Freak."
Sorry, Drake, this form of music will never be commercially viable and will never catch on!
James Brown invented funk. Most of its second-wave geniuses emerged from the rusting factory towns of the Midwest. But LA is where they eventually hung their sequins and Lycra.
Motown's arrival in 1972 augured the city's arrival as a world capital of Black music.
By decade's end, Casablanca Records, the disco locus behind Parliament-Funkadelic, relocated to the Sunset Strip. Soul Train spawned SOLAR (Sound of Los Angeles Records), which discovered The Whispers, Shalamar, Lakeside, and Midnight Star.
To make the bridge between eras more explicit, SOLAR co-founder Dick Griffey eventually co-founded Death Row with Suge Knight.
If synth-funk supplied the vulcanized spine of LA hip-hop, it's because that's what its rappers, producers, and DJs absorbed during their adolescence.
Unity in the Black Eyed Peas
As late as Bill Clinton's second term, terrestrial radio taught the sound of '82 alongside Tha Dogg Pound and Suga Free. What followed cannot be extricated from what informed it: Parliament's "Flashlight" and "Atomic Dog," Frankie Smith's "Double Dutch Bus" (where Snoop discovered his "izzle" slang), The Dazz Band's "Let It Whip," The Gap Band's "You Dropped a Bomb on Me," One Way's "Cutie Pie," Ronnie Hudson's "West Coast Poplock," anything remotely in the purple shade of Prince and every moment that Roger Troutman touched a talk box.
Funk animated the spirit of Los Angeles because it encapsulated the light-noir dialectic. Sparkling sheen and champagne excess clashed with pornographic rawness and grimy realities.
It was hard enough for Bloods and Crips to boogie to, but smooth and bespoke enough to appear on Soul Train and American Bandstand.
It is propulsive driving music made for perilous freeway chases and Sunday Crenshaw cruises. In the City of Quartz fractured by racial and class conflict, internecine gang wars, the barbarism of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the debilitating effects of the crack epidemic, funk was both brick and mortar.
Parliament "Flashlight"
High George Clinton brought the funk to funkadelic ("psychedelic funk")
Fault lines rupturing
It was fitting that the first region to shatter the monopoly of the five boroughs would reflect its diametrical opposite.
Dense claustrophobia, cold weather, and arthritic subway cars made little sense in a horizontal land of abundant sunshine and Alpine subwoofers. If East Coast producers dug in the crates for rare soul and jazz samples, '80s LA gravitated toward the hardcore (punk and funk).
Why does it have to be so sexual?
If New York was an island, the rest of the nation appeared closer to the strip mall sprawl of LA. Whether it was gangsta rap or bass music, Latin hip-hop, or the triple-time chop technique incubated at the Good Life, this natural point of opposition only spurred its originality.
California has always represented America's frontier, its future.
The fault lines ruptured in 1983. The low-budget documentary Breakin' 'N' Enterin' chronicled fluorescent MC and B-boy battles waged at the city's first iconic hip-hop club, Radio.
KDAY hired Dr. Dre as "mixmaster" and Greg Mack as its musical director, setting 1580 AM on its path to become the world's first all hip-hop radio station. More
Trees hold a special place in our hearts, as they possess a longevity that surpasses most other creatures.
These remarkable organisms can live for thousands upon thousands of years. In fact, the oldest recorded tree boasted an incredible age of over 5,000 years!
Its roots reached back to a time when Rome stood at the peak of its glory -- an inspiring testament to the longevity of trees, making them some of the oldest living beings on our planet.
We acknowledge that trees are alive, for they harness energy to sustain their existence [and ours]. Though they lack the organs found in mammals like us, trees possess their own unique set of structures that enable their survival.
But being alive, do they possess a heartbeat?
Mystery of the Heartbeat
While trees do not possess a heart in the same way humans do, the idea of them having their own rhythm and pulsation is not as far-fetched as it might seem.
A recent study conducted by András Zlinszky, Bence Molnár, and Anders S. Barfod from Hungary and Denmark has shed light on an extraordinary aspect of trees: They possess a special type of pulsation akin to a heartbeat. More
The Dharma Bumis a feature-length, partially animated documentary film telling the tantalizing true story of Dubliner Laurence Carroll.
Any relation to Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland? Of course not, for "Lewis Carroll" is the nom de plume for Irish-connected Dodgson.
Carroll was born in Dublin in 1856 and spent his early life as an alcoholic hobo drifter bumming his way across the USA.
I'm glad I became a Burmese Buddhist monk.
This un-Catholic, un-Christian atheist activist worked the shipping route from San Francisco to Japan.
Then he found himself on the beach, hungover and homeless, after being kicked off the vessel for drunk and disorderly conduct.
He eventually made his way to Theravada BuddhistBurma, where he was helped by local Buddhist monks.
After five years as an apprentice, he became the first white man to ever don the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk.
Ven. U Dhammaloka: First Westerner to be ordained as a Buddhist monk
(Belfast Buddhist, 4/1/16) Venerable Dhammaloka was ordained in Theravada Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) prior to 1900, making him one of the very earliest attested Western Buddhist monks. He was a celebrity preacher, vigorous polemicist, free thinker, and prolific editor in Burma and Singapore between 1900 and his conviction for sedition and appeal in 1910–1911. Drawing on Western atheist writings, he publicly challenged the role of imperial Christian missionaries and by implication the British Empire. His Irish name was Laurence Carroll or Larry O'Rourke or Willam Colvin from Cork and Munster.
UK-occupied Northern Ireland
They gave him the new Buddhist name U Dhammaloka.* And that is just the beginning of the story!
[*In Burmese U (pronounced "oo") signifies "sir," Dhamma is the Pali spelling of "Dharma," loka means "world," and aloka means "light" or "bright whiteness" -- so maybe his name signifies or with a long a suggests "Light or White Dharma."]
U Dhammaloka was erased from history. His existence lay dormant for over 100 years. Why? The reasons are explored in the film.
Teach those Brits not to mess with the Celts
This man caused quite a stir in his life, as he singlehandedly took on the might of the Christian British Empire in colonial Burma.
[George Orwellwas also decrying British colonial crimes against humanityin Burma and England for which he wrote 1984].
In the film we discover why he was under constant police surveillance and ultimately faked his own death as he transformed himself from an alcoholic bum to the original Dharma Bum.More
COMMENT to the comments section: Sunny, what ChatGPT AI wrote this comment? Human don't speak this way. But have you heard of any Nepali Buddhas for sale in the Netherlands? When in Amsterdam, we like to visit nepal-tibet-buddhas.com.
In the film we discover why he was under constant police surveillance and ultimately faked his own death as he transformed himself from an alcoholic bum to the original Dharma Bum.More
TheFineBros, Skrillex, the Elderly; Amber Dorrian and Bela, Wisdom Quarterly
It's the beat, the beat, the beat! That's what's wrong with rock 'n roll. And not just rock. It's wrong with jazz, R&B, gospel, punk, industrial, rap, death metal, drum 'n bass, house, electronica, techno, trance, screamo, dubstep, and now the latest shaman grunting gagadoo hardcore. It's always the beat. So who'se afraid of Skrillex? Other than Ellie Goulding.Not these parents. Of course, what parents don't know is that it isn't so much the music as the show.
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