March has been Prince month for me. It wraps up by doing a show here in his home state of Minnesota. And it’s a very fitting end because I can chill with the semi-permanent Prince obsession and remember why the hell I started in spoken word in the first place.

Equilibrium is a nationally-known monthly series that highlights work from artists of color, and is curated by my man Bao Phi (aka Bao Feezy aka Benvolio Eskrima aka the Joy Luck Thug). At the end of the day, Bao is one of the few true friends I really have in this spoken word scene, and that really means a lot, so we’re kinda like Snoop and Ice T. Bao, of course, is Ice T.

The co-feature tonight was the one and only Bassey Ikpi. Several years ago, Bassey was one of maybe 5 people I cared to have conversations with. We chatted almost every day, but eventually life interfered and until yesterday, I hadn’t seen her in years. But we very quickly fell back into that friendship we always had; as though we have still been in touch daily.

So a lot of things about this weekend felt like home to me, and in a lot of ways I needed it.

Opening the show tonight was local artist El Guante. Holy good god damn. After the show, Bassey and I talked about how hearing his work made us both feel like we needed to challenge ourselves more in our writing.

Bassey was amazing as usual. I had a lot of fun doing my thing too.

But for a few days I’ve been distracted thinking about how hard life is. Even for those of us who have it relatively easy compared to the rest of the world – people like me, life is still pretty hard. But tonight, being in a beautiful space with people I truly care for and want to spend time with, for a little while, life felt easy.

And I could put some time into trying to express this more eloquently, but you know, sometimes easy is more than you could have hoped for. Tomorrow I go home to the Bean, and return to the grind. But I am thankful for the time I got to spend here.

And more than that, I liked being able to talk shit about wack spoken word with my friends who feel the same way.

Oooooh.

If you read to the end, you can hear the imeem playlist of this list. Log in to imeem to hear all the songs.

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10. The Bridge is Over, Boogie Down Productions
Not to say stuff that everybody already says, but the Youtube era of beef is wack. While it can be entertaining for laughs, in general, I’d rather hear a rapper, you know, RAP. You wanna dis a rival? Do it on a track. KRS-ONE bodied MC Shan on not one but two tracks! (South South Bronx!) Looking back though, you can see it’s kind of a jerk move, and in a way it seems like KRS was making a calculated move to boost his career on the back of a lesser emcee. While that’s not very nice or considerate, you gotta respect the man’s hustle.

I still feel bad for Shan though. His contributions to the game are looked back as the developments that allowed KRS-ONE to become KRS-ONE, and not appreciated for their own merits.

9. Bombs Over Baghdad, Outkast
First of all, why did this song come out ten years ago and it still sounds futuristic? What does that say about us now? You all remember the video for this song? When it came out, Bao pointed out the contrasts in Dre’s and Big Boi’s sections, where Andre’s is very active from the beginning, where he wakes up in all these bright colors and starts running, and all these kids start running after him – Big Boi’s is kinda the opposite, its like he said “No running or kids or colors. I’m gonna climb from this car into a bus filled with girls dancing.” And the director just said OK.

As that contrast in styles became more obvious when they grew older, it made for some really interesting music, until they started to grow too far apart to be considered partners anymore. In recent years, it seems like Andre has gotten over himself and is going back to rhyming, which really is where he belongs. (I admire the experimentation with music and acting, but his best verses as an emcee are among the best verses by anyone ever, whereas the other stuff can be good, but does not bring the funk on a similar level.) I love both of their stuff, but they are even better together.

8. The Hollywood Paradox, The College Boyz
Long story short: In middle school, I began to develop opinions on sociopolitical issues and conditions, and a big part of that was exposure to hip hop artists like Public Enemy, 2Pac, N.W.A., Da Lench Mob, and even 3rd Bass. the College Boyz was another one of them. This song just deals with the idea of how hard it is for a Black artist to make it in an industry that has not treated Black artists well. And the Isley Brothers sample is just…woooo. Weird though that the lead emcee in this group had a solid voice and flow, and real dope content, yet he’s known more as the Black guy in Judd Apatow movies. I guess the lesson in this song is mad true, even for the dude who wrote it. (Yeah, Romany Malco was the dude from the College Boyz.)

BTW, the summer before 9th grade I saw them in concert at City Hall Plaza. That was the year someone pulled a gun and everyone went running – but it wasn’t during the College Boyz set! It was during that pop-rock group Mr. Big!

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Updating this blog is not my favorite thing to do. So to encourage myself to blog more often and keep my folks updated on what’s going ons with me, I’m gonna start making lists when I can’t think of anything else to write about. Look for more lists in the future! (If you have a potential topic, please e-mail me, because I run out of ideas pretty fast and I can imagine sometime pretty soon writing “Top 5 Favorite Top 5 Lists.”)

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If you know me, then you know I have an affinity for the musician Prince. It’s a little weird, because I can’t really identify what speaks to me so much about his music besides its awesome-ness. So there’s really no better topic for my first list than my favorite songs by Prince.

In descending order (scroll to the bottom for an imeem.com playlist, if you have an imeem account, you can hear every song.):

10. Musicology (2004)
For a long time, Prince’s main flaw – at least to me – was his misunderstanding of hip hop. Although he rapped in songs dating back to the 1990s, he was pretty terrible at it. This song was like his signal to the world that he was through trying to “get” hip hop, and return to what he knows best, and that’s funk. He namechecks Doug E Fresh, Chuck D and Jam Master Jay, and how they appreciate(d) the real old school like Sly, James Brown, and Earth, Wind & Fire. And that bass groove is so filthy and clean at the same time.

9. Let’s Go Crazy (1984)
I wasn’t gonna put years down, but when I noticed the first two songs on this list were released 20 years apart, I felt like I needed to acknowledge that Prince has been the man for like my entire lifetime. Everything about this song is dope, from the spoken word intro that makes no sense and the organ flourishes, then the drum machine kicks in, then that rockin guitar riff…I could describe the whole song to you, but if you get it, then you get it. And if you don’t, then you are a disgrace.

8. Cream (1991)
This was not among my favorite Prince songs until I saw him in concert a few years ago. You know, I always thought of this song with like backup dancers and him making bedroom eyes at everyone in his vicinity and stuff, but at the show, he sat on a rotating stool alone on stage and accompanied himself on acoustic guitar – and that was it. And the part in the song when he goes “You are fine” – and the audience sang along with him, he stopped and goes “I can tell you really mean that don’t you?” At that point, I felt like the radio dj that Chris Rock plays in the movie “Pootie Tang,” when he starts breaking up his studio and yelling “Pootie too good! Pootie too good!”

To make it even more g, he claims he wrote it front of a mirror, so apparently it’s about himself.

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Richard Aoki, 1938-2009

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Some of yall have made me sick these past few weeks fam.

I can’t judge, you know, one of my favorite pastimes is disparaging famous people and things – but there are certain things that are appropriate and certain things that are not.

I tried my best to avoid seeing pictures of a battered Rihanna, because I don’t need a reminder of the kind of hurt – physical, mental, emotional – partner abuse can cause. We all know what happens, and most of us would never dream of making fun of it if it was our own family who was involved. Alas, it was everywhere and I saw it tons of times, and I was both shocked and not shocked at all. We all know this happens every single day everywhere around us.

But because it’s two pop stars, people feel like their lives are public enough that they can crack a little joke here and there. And they think because they apparently are a couple again, that it must not have been that bad in the first place, and we can all chuckle about it now that it’s over. And they think she probably did something to provoke him, and that it’s her fault if she gets beat up again or worse, and she gave him an STD, and I even hear little kids saying “Chris Brown beat Rihanna with an umbrella-ella-ella” and yo, I’m just shocked fam, really?

Lost in all this is this simple fact: partner abuse is the leading cause of death for African-American women aged 15-34. Leading cause of death – not simply “more common than we’d like to imagine.”

There’s no joke in there. And regardless if you like Chris Brown’s music better than you like Rihanna’s, there’s no excuse either.

And some folks are like “man, she took him back, you’re overreacting, it couldn’t have been a big deal if she took him back.” But you don’t need me to tell you that it always seems like she takes him back, no matter who “she” and “him” is. Whether it’s celebrities or your neighbors, it’s easier to think of times when they get back together than it is to think of examples when they didn’t. Maybe that’s just me, but no I don’t think it is.

Our society loves to blame the victim. Especially when that victim is a woman, and more so when it is a woman of color. I know celebrities are easy targets for snark and disses, but honestly, I been disgusted by some of yall recently, and I hope we can get to a point in society where nobody feels alright about making light of this kind of situation.

Peace

Photo at right: From L to R: Kelly Tsai, Ed Bok Lee, myself, Bao Phi, Marlon Esguerra (Asian American Writer’s Workshop, New York, 2007)

I first met Kelly Tsai in like 2000 or 2001 in Chicago through Gina Magsombol. She came to this workshop I was part of, and when she walked in without saying a word, in my mind I was like “that must be Kelly.” We later hung out in outdoor seating at a bar and drank Goose Island IPA. For some reason, I subconsciously thought we had the same birthday, even though we’re five months apart; I still always think that too.

I first met Bao Phi around then too. I was in Minneapolis for work, and we had some things in common – we had a mutual friend (Celine), the spoken word thing, the pissed off Asian guy thing – so he swung by and we went out for Chinese food. While waiting for him out in the cold, 5 members of the Roots crew walked out of the very hotel I was staying at. Later, we stopped by his crib, which was basically the Chinatown of St. Paul. There was like 6 Asian people living together, which was close to the highest concentration of Asians in the city.

So those are my first memories of meeting these two great friends. The reason why it matters is that, even though I count them as family, we haven’t really spent that much time together. With the friends I see every day, I can’t necessarily remember when we first met. But the ones I sometimes cross paths with on the road, you know, each time you see them, it’s kind of a big deal. It’s like every time we do a show together, we have to update each other on all the grand life events – the wonderful and difficult – and cram it into a night’s worth of talking. So those moments are filled with everything, and naturally stick out in your memory. It’s not that they’re more important or anything like that – it’s just that when you only see each other for a day at a time every few months or even years, each one of those meetings is like an EVENT.

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