JT Tha Bigga Figga, Game Recognize Game (1994):

I feel like one of those old fogies who’s all “94/95 was the golden era for Fillmore rap!” But I mean, it was.

p.s. legend has it my sister used to battle JT in the late 80s. can’t wait to dig up those old tapes!

In fact, Fresno was near the top in every measure of dangerous drinking, including the body count caused by booze-fueled car crashes (Fatality Analysis Reporting System), the number of arrests made for driving under the influence (FBI), the number of people who admit to binge drinking in the last month (CDC), and the severity of DUI penalties (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety).

Gross. On so many levels. Never mind that it’s probably one of the most under resrouced cities in the state. Granted, I take it a bit personally since my family’s from there. But it’s besides the point. It’s just sad — and suspect — when a city only makes bad news.

Anyway, young folks at The Know, a Fresno-based youth media organization, added their two cents. Some agreed with the rating, others didn’t. But it all goes to show that even if the news coming out of Fresno isn’t always that good, the folks who live there can have a say in the matter.

What happened to Eve??

Okay, that actually sounds really whack. Not really something to get down with on a (Superbowl) Sunday night. But real talk, it’s incisive and, most importantly, short. With lots of graphics! Very Jam-friendly in this piece.

Coming Out, Stepping Up: Organizing to Build the Power of LGBTQ youth puts on paper what’s already evident in most queer organizing circles: shit is frantic right now. More concretely: too few resources, not enough services, not enough power:

Organizations are focused on services, but not building power
One respondent said that they “rely on what funding is available and sometimes this drives services.”10 For another respondent, their organization “partnered with other social service organizations and with businesses…to establish a 24 hour safe place sites for runaway youth.” Another respondent outlined the work of the organization to hold workshops for individuals and schools, “provide resources and information to community members,” and produce educational literature on community issues.

Delicious! Not in a good way, but in a “I’m-glad-you-said-that-now-let’s-do-shit” kinda way.

Check out this recruitment film, which must fall somewhere along the spectrum of child porn:

From sports columnist Max Saxon:

Most of the big-time programs rely on scouting services to feed them tape of elite young players. Private instructors like Clarkson seem to be proliferating. It’s a bit reminiscent of how the Eastern bloc countries used to control the Olympics. Identify an athletic kid with sturdy legs; get him or her expert instruction in an academy; and voilà, you’ve got a gold-medal ski jumper six years later. Never mind that the kid had to live a regimented life away from his family and friends.

But here’s a fascinating animated video of how colds spread.

But somewhere between realizing that Eifle 65 and Aqua, despite radio play, actually weren’t okay for Black girls to listen to, I hid them. Trained myself to fall in love with hip-hop. Went through a brief emo-rock phase (Linkin Park, what, what!) and ultimately landed in the underground hip-hop snobbery sect that I’m just now starting to crawl out from under.

Maybe that’s why I love Lady Gaga so much. Maybe it’s that our culture’s changing, or maybe it’s just that I’m changing, but she makes it cool to love pop music again.

There’s something that she’s doing, something more than the outlandish costumes, performances, and constant radio love. The fact that one of her biggest records this year was a collaboration with Wale, a DC rapper who openly embraces the genre’s go-go roots, says a lot about how we’re in an era of shifting genre’s and attitudes about music. But more than what she’s doing is how audiences are reacting. I worked with a young writer this year who routinely writes about his intimate knowledge of street hustles; he broke out of it to write about how Lady Gaga had a bigger year in 2009 than anyone else he could think of.

I wasn’t unique growing up; I know there are tons of Black kids who grew up on pop and rock music. What’s different now is that it seems like the terms of a long-held unspoken racial agreement with the white mainstream are being broken. Nowadays, it’s hard to tell what the mainstream actually is, and thanks to the Internet, folks can test out new unfamiliar music, often for free.

And, let’s be real: Thank you, M.I.A. Without Maya, there is no Lady Gaga. Sure, their sounds are fundamentally different, and they come from two vastly different political aesthetics. But M.I.A. broke musical barriers that Lady Gaga’s waltzed right into. She helped soften the blow for Gaga. M.I.A. is a musical extreme; lyrically, sonically, musically, her shit deviates completely from mainstream music before it. And music industry folks still don’t know how to categorize her: is she pop? Hip-hop? “World?” Shit, Wale’s “Chillin” was written for her.

But in terms of musical categorization, in terms of what’s bought, sold, and to whom, M.I.A. laid the foundation. Granted, Bad Romance definitely ain’t Paper Planes.But the fact that M.I.A. showed the world that Black kids could, and wanted, to listen to something other than traditional hip-hop, is huge.

At the end of the day, Lady Gaga’s a woman who made her mark in a gentrified Lower East Side and grew up with the Paris Hilton. Not an ounce of street or third world revolution cred. She’s not even queer for the spectacle of it. All she does is turn popular tropes of love and desire on their heads, makes them darker, edgier: “Yes, I wanna fuck you, but only if I can get a side dish of that post-break up drama.” She’s a quirky white girl with a bomb ass voice and an eccentric performance style.

Back when I first discovered Maluca and mentioned to my Indian-American co-worker that she’s the “Dominican M.I.A”, my coworker responded to the effect, “I think in the last year I’ve heard of every ethnic variation of M.I.A.” It’s true, and annoying as fuck, I’m sure. So it’s probably unfair for me to call Gaga the white M.I.A, but there it is.

Listen.

“There was an urgent need to have a source of knowledge about black people,” Raye, 89, says while relaxing on a couch just inside the front door of the San Francisco store.

…The store, which stocks 6,000 books by and/or about black people, is on the ground floor of a Victorian built on Laguna Street in 1885. During the 1950s, before being lifted from its foundation and moved to Fillmore Street, it was the home of Jimbo’s Bop City, a famous after-hours club where jazz artists such as John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Art Tatum would come to jam or just hang out. Manager Jimbo Edwards lived upstairs. Today, Raye and Blanche live on the secondfloor, Greg and Karen on the third.”

“My grandma and my mom grew up with la virgen and la malinche and I grew up with la Selena and la Yolanda. Selena – the good, beautiful, straight, daughter of Mexican-America with roots in Texas, the state that fought off Mexico (remember the Alamo?). Yolanda – the ugly, lonely, outcasted, criminal lesbian with no roots, no history, no home.”

More.

To be honest, I didn’t know too much about Selena aside from the commercial hype. I saw the movie. I heard the songs. But I didn’t know the allure, the history.

Even if the queer rumors are just gossip, I think the analysis is still on point. Even though I didn’t know Selena’s allure, I knew enough to know that Yolanda Saldivar was eeevil (and short, stocky, old[er]), and Selena was the sanctified martyr. I think it says a lot about the criminalization of certain types of women, those who don’t fit what it means — commercially — to be a “woman.”