Yo, in April when the fallin' rainJust go read the whole thing.
Comes down through the dirt and hits the roots again
The spring, it's the thing that makes 'em sing and have a fling
The breeze, or what they used to call the zephyr,
Blows away the clouds and freshens up the weather...
With just days to go until Election Day, the back-and-forth of political mudslinging is in full effect, as it always seems to be during this part of an even-numbered year. And nowhere is the phenomenon more prominent than in the plethora of negative campaign ads targeting every point along the political spectrum.
[...]
In honor of this realization, asap sifted through heaps of this season's best (worst?) negative campaign ads and turned them into a 3-minute original audio montage -- an asap attack ad remix, if you will.
When those of us who grew up with rap saw signs that it was turning ugly, we turned away. We premised our denial on a sort of good-black-girl exceptionalism: They came for the skeezers but I didn't speak up because I'm no skeezer, they came for the freaks, but I said nothing because I'm not a freak. They came for the bitches and the hos and the tricks. And by the time we realized they were talking about bitches from 8 to 80, our daughters and our mommas and their own damn mommas, rap music had earned the imprimatur of MTV and Martha Stewart and even the Pillsbury Doughboy.
And sometimes it can seem like now, there is nobody left who is willing to speak up.
Why I Gave Up On Hip-Hop, Washington Post, Lonnae O'Neal Parker, Sunday, October 15, 2006
