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