connecting*the*dots

Molly McGinn has a wonderful story of song and struggle that ties closely to this interesting quilt.

I tag like a 15 year-old kid in the South Bronx with a box full of Krylons and a yard full of freshly sandblasted cars.

I tag like I just got jumped by a handful of punks who made the mistake of letting me follow them to their trailer park homes adorned with freshly cleaned aluminum siding.

I tag like I get told who I am, what I’m supposed to believe and how I’m supposed to act on a daily basis.

I go all city, hoping that one day, the vehicles I’ve touched get stitched together to form a complete sentence.

I tag because I saw you leave your mark and it was dope.

I tag because I know how to freeze, watch TV and (kinda) avoid the kissing bugs.

I tag because the words I drop in time will find a way to form a cohesive rhyme.

I tag because the world may be getting smaller, but it’s damn sure not coming together.

I tag your name, your spot, your position, your mood, your frame of mind when it’s too hard for you to see it for yourself.

I tag the expected terms of modern constructs.

I tag the post-modern undercurrents of miscellaneous descriptors.

I tag my tags so that when structure is forged out of chaos, you’ll know how to find me.

I tag so that it’s me you won’t be looking for.

When I tag, I’m regurgitating the meal I’ve caught for the chicks in my roost.

When I tag, I feel one with the universe of the collective unconscious.

When I tag, I can see the pillars of control quaking in their foundation.

When I tag, I experience therefore I understand.

When we tag, anything is possible.

————

Tag! We’re It! Part II
Tag! We’re It!

It’s officially ON.

The master of framing the moment within a gut-felt emotion is back, providing clarity beyond the crystal clear. Take a listen to Chuck’s response to the natural and federal disaster of Katrina, the Children of Eris remix, “Hell No We Ain’t All Right”

Chuck D’s rhymes flow so natural and powerful they take form within your psyche while you latch onto his beat. That’s because Chuck doesn’t twist to the beat of a loop; Chuck’s direct, unflinching words twist a beat of their own.

Can’t you feel him in this latest drop?

I follow his words, like “the new world is upside down and out of order” as a flip from the past, as back then he was taken aghast, as the polar opposites were set-up, the Axis of Evil corrupt…

Man…

I often wonder if the 17 to 23 year-old crowd nowadays gets the same dose of reality in the Hip hop nation.

Sure, the crew of Common, Talib Kweli, Mos Def and The Roots bring consciousness to each of their narratives on multiple levels. Underground hip-hop, like Head-Roc, sticks to the grimy reality, and J-Live lives and keeps it real as a teacher in Brooklyn, but where is the channeled anger of this generation?

Maybe he/she/they are out there and the gray in my chin is talking all of this junk — if so, feel free to let me know. To the extent that Chuck D and Public Enemy pumped out perspective and knowledge in the late 80’s to the mid-90’s (along with KRS-One and Brand Nubian), I just don’t hear the same form of consistent passion in these modern day cats.

Yes, Mos Def was crazy conscious with his tabulations in Mathematics, and has kept ‘em coming leading right up to the in-the-moment response and drop of Katrina Klap. Artists such as Kanye West have proven to have a conscious, yet even Kanye still goes back and forth with club songs chock full of faux diamond dissing, gold-digging lyrics.

Chuck D earned the lead Public Enemy #1 tag with his straight up, hardcore responses to social issues of the time; I’m talking about consistent responses to real-time events, like:

• dropping “By the Time I Get To Arizona” when Arizona refused to honor Martin Luther King’s birthday
• or when Chuck tried to shut down the malt-liquor industry in “1 Million Bottlebags” for targeting young black males with their poison
• even in their twilight, in 2002 Public Enemy dropped “Son of a Bush” at a time when political commentary in hip-hop was ripe for the picking, but rare due to the climate of blind patriotism. Only Eminem made any Bush accountability waves, but he waited until a safer year of 2004 to drop his Mosh video, pre and post 2004 elections.

Enough.

Like that dude on Enter the 36 Chambers said, “Ah yeah, again and again!”

Bring the noise, Chuck.

UPDATE: Here’s the original Public Enemy release of “Hell No We Ain’t Alright“

A few months back, I finally stepped out of my dead bolted existence within Ameritrade and began to digest the current state of this Web 2.0 explosion, and as soon as I did, the Semantic Web seemed so much closer to fruition than it did just a few years prior.

Much of the renewed push and entrepreneurial spirit that has driven this industry-wide rebirth seems to have been driven simply by our economic recovery from the dot-com crash. On the surface, that answer is sufficient, but something deeper is at at play. So, with my newly created free-time, I headed down a 2.0 rabbit hole to take me on a journey for clarity.

What I’ve come to realize isn’t anything particularly shocking (unless you’ve been a corporate slave for the past three years).

We’re living in tumultuous times. The air we breathe is being compromised more and more every day. Poverty around the world is increasing exponentially. Our country is knee deep in another Vietnam, another occupation, another struggle for gaining natural resources at any cost. People are becoming polarized by important and moral, personal and social issues, seemingly on a daily basis. All of this is occurring during the reign of an administration that has even the staunchest of conservatives questioning whether we, the people, are living within the midst of a dictatorial democracy, rather than a thriving Republic, built on the principles of political discourse, government checks and balances, fiscal responsibility, the separation of church and state and the power of the individual voter.

So where does this leave us as a people?

Personally speaking, I’ve decided to refocus my effort to publish my views, opinions, perspectives, experiences, etc., in an effort to make even the slightest dent in the discourse surrounding our roles as American citizens.

What motivates me? Pick your poison: the War on Terror; the Rove/Plame/Wilson scandal; the Bolton push-through appointment; the Cindy Sheehan vigil. It seems that every day a new flow of bullshit only fuels the righteous indignation I’ve come to hold regarding this administration.

Is it even possible to imagine a more visceral description of an Aristocracy at play?

For me, the complete disregard of the intelligence and voice of the American citizen begins to explain the groundswell of blogging that has occurred over the past four years, specifically the political blogs and mainstream media watchdog sites.

Sure, the potential for capital gains plays a large role in the motivation to advance technology or any other industry. The web, though, is a bit different due to it’s low cost of entry, so I believe that moral conviction plays a role in both driving the evolution of technology and the passion to leverage it to it’s fullest degree.

So what’s the connection between geo-political events, blogging and the tactical fervor of Web 2.0? (social bookmarking, tagging, open source, open content, etc.)

In a nutshell: everything.

Without a true social democracy in the real, we’ve evolved to create one on-line — where boundaries can be broken down, hierarchies can be dissolved, control can be minimized, etc.

I blog in order to get my voice out into the ether of this new social construct; I tag my blog posts to provide context and semantic relationships on numerous levels, yet with a similar purpose:

1. On the base object level to provide a succinct description of how I perceive this content from a conceptual perspective, perhaps creating a) a greater connection with the reader on a discernible level and b) connections on associative & relational levels with other objects (within my domain and elsewhere)
2. On the categorization level to establish context within a particularly defined category or across a faceted classification scheme. If I were an actual brand, this would be how I’d ensure my position was reflected within my editorial construct and navigation scheme.
3. On the retrievable object level to allow for more avenues of findability (four, well-thought descriptive tags exponentially increase the odds of object retrieval rather than none or even one, either in straight queries or in contextual presentation on the base object level)

These are tactical strategies in the information revolution.

The same principles apply to tagging even more granular object such as photographs, video and sound files, as well as the macro-level social bookmarking of URLs. The effort, I believe, is based on the desire of individual voices to be heard amidst the shelling of the mainstream media. While technically speaking, Web 2.0 is about the creation of richly defined object models and attributes — the more good data we entrench within our objects (be it content, files or URLs themselves), the better the chance for a semantic web experience — the movement behind it is much more compelling, much more philosophical in nature.

After leaving Ameritrade in April, I spent a month digesting Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power, which introduced me to the specifics of his propaganda model thesis, which I fully digested by watching the documentary Manufacturing Consent. Recently, Dave Sifry (CEO, Technorati) posted a graph on the Technorati Blog displaying the impact that blogs are making within the once dominated realm of entrenched, funded, mainstream media.

I’m only guessing that if Chomsky has studied the progression of the web, he’s smiling up in Cambridge right about now.

The legitimization of the individual (creative and political) perspective is being sustained in the 21st century by the conviction of the blogosphere, passionate focus on the possibilities of 2.0 revenue models and domains, such as Technorati, taking a leadership position. The concept of social dialog, networking and organization and the elemental foundation of capitalism are beginning to shift in exciting ways.

Imagine a near future where:

• Individual perspectives can be made more readily sustainable through a common revenue model, reversing the big money/power structure of publication and media saturation? How would that impact the politics of our nation? Our wage labor practices?
• Algorithms and interfaces allow for rich, precise retrievals of topical queries, with just as precisely retrieved contextual objects presented within a usable format, based on better clustering techniques and taking richer and more valuable attributes into account? How would this impact the way we learn and connect to one another?
• Information domains allow topically defined objects to be rolled up into navigable concepts by users (through customization) instead of predefined categories by information architects? How could this seamlessly raise the bar for common folk in their efforts to research online? To manage information across numerous domains?
• Mainstream media articles and blog posts are presented on the same level (query or article), ensuring checks and balances of mis/disinformation, without a partisan bias? How important is it for check and balances to be rooted within the last bastion of traditional governmental checks and balances — the media?

And the great thing is that we’re not too far away from this revolutionary existence.

Blogs are beginning to bridge the social and communication gaps between nations. My peers are thinking differently when developing this medium, even in traditional business development circumstances. The tactical approach to producing, managing, sharing, finding and using information objects — defined from the bottom up — is finally getting it’s due.

Yes, these are tumultuous times, but they’re exciting as well.

purpose to the point of the matter exists.
the fact that remains is at the top of the list.
which often changes daily,
but somewhat less than before…
our slutting days are over now that we’ve moved up to whore-
ing direct
me to the system’s ways…
direct me to the system’s grays…
expose the in-between wrinkles which make the system pay…
my faux mo fro’ stylin’ has me on a different wave-
length of focus can sprout an early grave-
yard markers can only count so much-
more can be known through a simple touch…
a beat (or two)
a drop (or three)
mirrors in my pupils reflect eternally.

a different type of code.
a bass line to corrode.
the old…
the new…
the positive…
the shrewd…

a la mode.

the context of the game,
acted out in no ones name…
except hours,
spent on the dimes,
exposing the crimes,
a sign of the times,
puffs worth times nine;
algebra’s property leads to mine:

in capitalism, a man’s value is equal to the amount he produces.
yet, production value has been reduced to service (inconclusive…)
a service based economy is ripe for leadership betrayals.
furthering the agenda of an administration which derails:
the creative life juices.
the spirit of the common man.
the community in which he lives.
the extent to which he lends a hand.
all planned…
all plotted…
all groomed…
all hatched…
the test is open book!
the formula is up on the board!
the calculators have been made available!
it’s time to hit a chord:

the bloodsuckers "leverage."
the meek "turn the other cheek."
a third party exists.
exposed for a peek…

a BOO!

up is down
left is right
it’s time to move on
time to reach for new heights
got change for a dollar?
how about a match for my five?
sense
it’s a common drive
to pass on the right
and look to the left
riding a broad shoulder
trouble cleft
bassline theft
deft movements abound
around the town goes the sound
of a pound
of flesh
of blood
brothers switch up
retake the fight
retake the plight
retake the might
y
problemas del hombre comun
the time is soon
a half past June
three months in on the out
i hold my breath in order to shout!…

carolina

the time is here
yes, now is the time
to make water out of wine
like the real extracted from rhyme
the haves and the have mores
ceilings are their floors
while working on their secret knock
they straight up kick down doors
you see, terror is pushed nightly
to establish our core fear
an appetite for the here
and now just doesn’t matter
we’re all well fed consumers and their pockets keep getting fatter
what, you think shit is gonna change
with a dollar?
or a dream?
wipe out your eyes
unplug your ears
wake up to the screams
from indochina death teams
from nicaraguan insurgent regimes
from vietnamese bloodstreams
from terrorist state schemes
power is power
green is green
you see?
deeper than a lost soul
you find the blue collar toll
trained to corrale the buck
to scream "what the fuck!?"
when capitalism capitalizes on fear
giving proud men deaf ears
you hear?
this society makes american sheiks
who pro-actively partake in high-risk stakes
to retire by 45
no matter who wakes up or not…
a shot to the head
a timely blood clot

my feet stand firm on the floor
as they pass by in multiple takes
the tension in my body relaxes
refusing to bite on the head fakes
shots whiz by my ears and eyes
my palms face upwards to the roof
slow motion moves and prefabricated lies
so just where exactly is the proof?
in the pudding
in the whispers
in the minds
in the wind
the vinyl is simply scratched
cross-faded
knowing
jaded
hatched…
a 45 revolution
a soon to be released patch

alright, i’m looking straight inward to myself
to pull me out of this funk
and restack my mental shelves
but now i find myself stalling
like a flooded engine on start
some would say it’s in my head
but i’d insist it’s in my heart
the world is in fluctuation
terror riding it’s evil broom
and being alone in this city
feels like being gunless at high noon
and on top of all this madness
i’m searching for a professional turn
something to make me grounded
allowing myself to learn
so about face is where i’m headed
back into the fray and mix
trying to make a living
like a good natured mr. myxlplyx