The Merchants Of Cool

In his sophomore album The Cool, Lupe makes the following insights on Cool that this documentary clearly manages to explores:

• The Cool is recycled, it never completely dies.
  
• The Cool can be any and everything, its manufactured.
• The Cool is driven by profit motive(The Game) and social inclusiveness(The Streets).

This documentary focuses on how Cool is developed by Corporate America tap in the $200billion worth of teen spending dollars in North America. This documentary also points out the feedback loop, Lupe talked about in his explanation of The Instrumental. Great Watch!



And every freedom denied
Every dream is designed and broadcasted
From the masters to the masses
From the antennas on top of the shrines
As far as the receiving planet during a panic is shorted
It reports back everything in your mind

-Streets On Fire

The World Water Crisis

As Lupe embarks on Kilmanjaro mountain climb to bring awareness to the world water crisis, he had a few choice words to about the issue:
"It's a universal problem; it's all mounting to the point where eventually there's no clean water left"

The world's water crisis due to climate change, pollution, industrial growth and a surging population is of such magnitude that close to two billion people now live in parts of the world running out of water. Over 1 billion people lack access to a safe supply of drinking water. The leading causes of deaths in the world, water-related diseases are responsible for the loss of 14,000 lives a day and 80 percent of illnesses around the globe. I know most of us are thinking "that must be in the third world". My only answer is that it's a lot closer to home that we think.

I found this very interesting article courtesy of Mumia Abu Jamal that does a great job in bring to light the related economic and political implications of this crisis.

The Water Wars
The recent visions of the tsunami rushing, raging, tearing through the Asian coasts has given us all some interesting insights into the truly stunning, and indeed awesome power of water, and how nature’s fury is virtually boundless when unleashed.

Yet there is another watery war that is being waged, that may affect the lives of millions, but it garners neither the concern, nor really the attention of the world’s media. The electronic media, especially, thrives on drama and conflict, and seeks pictures and stories which reflect
these features.

It also affirms the positions of the privileged, as opposed to the plight of the poor, and powerless. Yet all across the globe, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America -- and even here -- in North America-- people are living under the very real threat of the corporatization of water
and water systems. The waters of the earth, which have been, since the dawn of human civilization, for the collective usage of the community, is fast becoming just another commodity -- something to sell. If you can afford it, cool. If not, tough.

Michael Stark, a senior executive at US Filter, a subsidiary of the multinational corporation, Vivendi, put it this way: "Water is a critical and necessary ingredient to the daily life of every human being, and it is also an equally powerful ingredient for powerful manufacturing
companies."*

Veronica Lake, a Michigan-based environmental activist, has noted that corporations acquire the world’s water by three major methods: a) by "water mining" the underground aquifers, or deep sources of many of the world’s streams or rivers; b) by leasing state and government water systems and collecting revenues; and c) by "managing" city water systems.

In short, there's money in water, and where money is, there too are corporations, trying to get paid.

That's the dark, unforeseen and treacherous side of the globalization movement among western governments and corporations.

That's also what privatization really means -- taking the common inheritance of nature, and making it into someone else’s private property.

In South Africa, this movement has resulted in more misery for the poor. Indeed, cholera rates are higher now there, than in the days of apartheid. It's often the result of tough austerity
measures imposed by the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, where governments are privatizing essential services, and the costs of living now means the right to buy water, to live.

Nor is this merely a story for the distant Third World.

In Detroit, Michigan, today, some 40,000 people on the southwest side have had their water shut off for non-payment. In many older buildings, water isn't just the stuff that's supposed to run through faucets; it also provides steam heat through old radiators. So no water means, no heat. In Detroit.

Scholars say that the next world wars will be fought, not for oil, but for water, for it is infinitely more precious.

Thankfully, people, all over the world, in South Africa, in Plachimada, India, in Bolivia, in Brazil, in France, Ghana, and Canada, are fighting both their sell-out governments and the
corporations for the human right of free access to water.

Those of you who have read my earlier pieces may remember my piece on the Bolivian water wars in a place called Cochabamba. There, a popular group calling itself La Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y la Vida (Defense Committee in Defense of Water and Life), organized the poor, the homeless, the street walkers, and everyone they could to oppose the corporatization of their water. They ran out the Bechtel corporation. It must spread.

Or else water will become as rare as gold; and as expensive.

Free Mumia

The Instrumental Explained

"The Instrumental" is a take on two individuals in similar objective circumstances but with very dissimilar subjective frames of mind, one of immense admiration and the other intense abhorrence but the end result being both individuals rationally addicted to the irrational circumstances they find themselves in.

The television and the radio have been deconstructed to simple boxes each sending endless streams of information both useful and useless.

Th first individual constantly observes the box under the faint pretext he will observe information that will instruct him on how to discontinue his obsession with the box. He is caught in a feedback loop (also a principle of marketing) which has an inherent mechanism that infinitely justifies its own existence to the observer by playing on his or her ignorance (which speaks on the nature of the observers limited pre-existing circumstances & conditions before their encounters with the box) as well as the observers gullibility, natured or nurtured. The incessant need for this information that will somehow bring about the observers liberation reactively makes him a slave. A self fulfilling and self similar element that reflects the paradoxes of life i.e. A Slave To The Idea & Act Of Being Liberated From One's Own Slavery. The chains & lock represent the strong connectivity & attachment to the box but can also be interpreted from a couple perspectives. My favourite is that they are bonds of love even though the tethering was a product of hatred. 'Love' because of the prerequisite of strong connectivity that is in the definition and description of the act and idea of being in love. The paradox being in that it was all done out of hatred. This is a very " what-is-on-the-surface" based interpretation.

The Doctors are us. In the sense that they are observers but also within their observation they are distorting and effecting what they are observing with just their very presence (see Theory Of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics etc.)

The removal of the voice is a very deliberate act and speaks to the act & idea of interpretation itself. The voice of what is being observed has been silenced and replaced with the voice of the interpreter who goes on to redefine the motive and intentions of the observed piece based own their own knowledge and experiences. The world is merely an instrumental where the vocals are provide by the observers who critique and associate value thus completing the score.


The second individual is less theory and more realistic in origination. Maybe later...
The rest i leave to your dare i say 'interpretation'...

"Nice with the blah, blah, blah..."

FNF UP!!!

FYI...We are also both of the individuals...The song is based on real life events...Just look at what you are doing now...looking to the box for answers...

Source

Disease = Falsehood

When asked by a fan what 'disease' is being talked about in the song Streets On Fire. Lupe's only reply was "Falsehood".

Really... Who has the patent to TRUTH?

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

The Streets "The Peacock Mentality"

This is a great speech Dr. Cornell West gave and he touches on two things I find very interesting. First, the notion of "History's debt to humanity" and secondly materialism which led to Lupe tagging The Streets as "My darling fraudulent Angel". Here's some food for thought....



"I am not Cornell West, am Cornell Westside" - Lupe Fiasco(Just Might be OK)

Lupe Talks Streets on Fire

This is what Lupe had to say about his motivation and conception of the song Streets on Fire. What I find very interesting with his explanation is that it clearly relates to the theme of The Cool concept the we have been looking into lately. That of "Sin as Disease". And also manages to capture the controversies and debates over the existence of a God and also who is really responsible for setting the moral code. This debate was at the center of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, though Nietzsche thought the solution to this whole problem was the "Over-man" or the increased reliance on the self in order to realize man's true power. And again this discussion is channeled in questions of "what is real?", "what is the truth?" and "who decides on the truths?"

“Streets of Fire” is pulled directly from the pages of [George Orwell's] 1984 -- more the mood of it. The First verse is talking about a disease, but there are all these questions about whether the disease is real. It’s the same rules as doublethink. Is there really a war or was it something that they created to keep the public in check? I injected those really basic structural ideas that were set up in 1984. I always love to have triple and quadruple meanings. I learned in the process [of making The Cool] how to do it on a macro level. I’ve always been able to do it with my rhymes, where a metaphor means many things, but that song represents AIDS, it represents the hysteria around coolness.
But “Streets of Fire” is really the story of The Streets, the breakdown of that particular character, that temptress. The Streets is a walking, talking temptress with dollar signs for eyes and tattoos of her dead boyfriends across her chest. She’s the age-old temptress who tempted everybody from King Tut to Al Capone. But that’s just the literal level. Figuratively, she’s the [real] streets. I represented her as a [female] because it goes back to a biblical story where Jesus asks God to show her the world, and God shows him the world in the form of a woman. She was a princess, she was beautiful. She had these long robes and jewelry. But as he got closer, he saw that she was ancient. Her eyes were sunk in, and she had a skeletal form. Her robe was tattered. Her jewelry was dull and looked fake. Don’t take everything for how it seems, you know.
One thing is that there is no such thing as absolute, not even absolute weather. It’s a false construct. But how much falseness do we chase? One thing that Nietzsche said was that we live in a world full of falseness. It’s weird to believe in the things we believe. To me, the dopest thing that [Nietzsche] ever said was we allow ourselves to be lied to every night, every time we go to sleep.

From Rhapsohy

Streets On Fire Week - SIN EQUALS DISEASE

(With this article the main focus of the discussion is going to be the similarities between "sin" and disease. Lupe gives off the idea that The Streets' role in the The Cool is that of a temptress for sin. The glamor or lights lead one into committing sin in pursuit of respect and admiration of the streets."With the logo of our dreams, the purpose of our sin(scene)"- The Coolest. So does this mean The Game takes on the role of the devil/ Satan/ Lucifer? Is the actual disease Lupe is talking about actually "sin"? What does alcohol and drug addiction treatment have to do with this concept of sin as disease? Can these questions even be answered? This is a nice article thats shades some insight on some of those questions) 

Written by Pernell Johnson

Advertising campaigns specifically targeted at African-American communities attempt to delude us into thinking that smoking or drinking will make us more prestigious, smart, attractive, or popular. Research has shown that we as African Americans spend an inordinate amount of time in front of the television set. Therefore, we are disproportionately exposed to television’s grandiose, yet false, and ultimately harmful message; that grave personal problems can be effectively resolved in thirty minutes or less. What if there were a drug that could chemically induce feelings of upper classness? It would be a lot like crack.

In recent years, "addiction" has become an extremely popular term for describing a wide range of behaviors formerly called "sins." Many would agree that defining sin is best left to religious communities, but convergence of religion and science in the 12-Step recovery movement has brought us full circle to a most pernicious mind trap called "addictive disease."

The common meaning of "sin" in America is "an offense against God or against religious law, or a state of separation from God." Among the religious denominations, ones with more liberal theologies trust the person’s subjective relationship to God as the final guidance in matters of personal conduct. As a general rule, the more fundamentalist a religion is and the more it relies upon the objective content of scriptures, the more objectively "sin" is defined. The dynamic interplay of theology and politics is one of the most admirable aspects of the U.S. Constitution, which has been called "The Great American Experiment." Because of the separation of church and state, we have become a great nation---not so much in the economic sense, but in our ethical stance among nations.. that priceless separation insists that while laws may regulate behavior, sin cannot be objectively defined, and government has no business combating sin.

Alcoholic and other drug abuse/dependence is a behavior that has been assigned the designation of a disease or the disease concept of addiction and still it has not been relegated to the physicians and clinicians but is subject to the law of the land and mandatory minimum sentences. It is the belief of this writer that the above described behavior is a sin and all of the related disorders and behaviors should be addressed by the religious community and the medical community i.e. American Society for Addiction Medicine.

Without question the African-American community is hit the hardest and disproportionately by what is called the disease of addiction (sin). The 12-Step recovery group movement, however, has vaulted over the U.S. Constitution by disguising itself as a treatment program for a disease epidemic. Sin-disease has infected the American consciousness to such an extent that the government has undertaken to stamp it out. Once again, our courts are hearing cases pertaining to sin, and sentences are being handed out requiring religious indoctrination.

A great, government-supported industry, the treatment community, wages war on sin. The disease concept of addiction is an article of faith. The experts are divided, having the same doubts and confusion as the general public. remember, also that the addictive disease idea has been around for hundreds of years, but it became accepted only through strenuous propaganda efforts by the recovery group movement. In the absence of supporting evidence, the disease concept gains acceptance on other grounds.

Doctors say it’s so, and they should know. The American Medical Association says alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases. People in recovery, the survivorsthemselves, say they have a disease. It is vital to the survival of alcoholics and drug addicts to accept that they have a disease, so that they may receive life-saving treatment. Challenging the disease idea is dangerous, resulting in suffering and death for others.

Employment in certain jobs and holding public office requires endorsement of the disease concept of addiction. One may receive leniency in court and be granted early parole from prison by admitting to addictive disease. Community programs based onthe disease model are more favorably reviewed and funded than if based on other concepts. Addicted people are told that unless they label themselves accordingly, they will die. Typically, they are under great stress, seeking anything that will help. Family members are told that addiction is a family disease that will destroy them all unless they admit they have it and get treatment.

The profit motive accounts for much of the enthusiasm for the disease concept of addiction. Addiction is an incurable, insurable disease. The addiction treatment industry is an expansion of the 12-Step recovery group movement into the money economy.