for mire? more fire.

greg tate keeps the critique coming, reminding readers where it's really at: the axis of alienation and militancy, the crossroads where 50 eats and sleeps, and the place where politics gets lost in all the sensual shine. seems like few heads really appreciated the thrust of his last piece--that hip-hop's vertical insertion into hypercapitalism means a lot of folks will continue to get screwed--so i guess he's gonna hammer on. bang the world into shape, g.

murdahtone reminds me that mike davis's piece on the global urban massive provides a well-needed socio-economic/geopolitical perspective for the ongoing shanty-house conversation.

guillermo e. brown, another of the fine fellows i got to build with last week at NYU, points with musical fingers to new directions for all sorts of conversations, the above included. at the conference, he made sure to make sure that i wasn't leaving slick rick or leaders of the new school out of my study, and i assured him that they're definitely in there. (space limitations can produce some strange omissions; fortunately, the dissertation can be the beast it has to be.) guillermo blessed me with a copy of his new self-produced CD, black dreams. it wasn't until after i returned home that i realized that dude is the drummer responsible for some seriously warped beats on spooky's optometry. in thirsty ear tradition, black dreams is on some dubjazz-freefunk-spacerock-crunk shit. really layered stuff, with in'n'out-of-sync slinky syncopations, originAL timbres, and forms that ebb and flow like a david s. ware groove. brown is a onemanband on this project and his technical and technological skills really shine here. he channels his inner tubby, sun ra, bombsquad, and some other shit that i can't recognize yet. in the end, the voices one hears are all guillermo's, though--his is a coherent heteroglossia, and it seems to say: dream at the crossroads, but don't sleep.