[Marxism] Stop Giving America a Bad Rap (Capitalism Magazine)

["Calvin Broadbent" <calvinbroadbent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The original cover of this record was quite uncanny. Now, the front cover
depicts a cocktail glass with the words 'Party Music' inscribed above.



http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1322

Stop Giving America a Bad Rap
by Michelle Malkin  (December 30, 2001)

Summary: I'm sick of America getting a bad rap from miserable "artists" like
Boots Riley. He belongs in a capitalism-free cave in Tora Bora, spewing his
"poetry" around an al Qaeda campfire.

Even if you have only a passing interest in today's popular music, I urge
you to pay attention to the loathsome record nominated this week by
Washington Post staff writer David Segal as the "Best Album" of 2001. It's a
stomach-turning example of anti-Americanism disguised as highbrow
intellectual expression.

According to Segal, "Party Music" by a rap group called "The Coup" topped
all other musical works produced this year. Segal praises the album's
"jarring ingenuity, soul and wit." The "poetry" of lead rapper Boots Riley
"dazzles." The songs are "masterfully entertaining" and "daggone funky."

Segal seems hardly bothered by the original cover art for Riley's album. The
revolting photo depicted the Oakland, Calif.-based rapper and his sidekick
-- militant left-wing anti-capitalists -- partying in front of a doctored
image of the World Trade Center being blown up. While the twin towers burn,
a sneering Riley poses in the foreground with a guitar tuner being used as a
bomb detonator. His sidekick, "Pam the Funkstress," stands defiantly with a
conductor's baton in each hand while fireballs engulf the buildings.

The rappers posed for the picture, which Riley proudly describes as a
"metaphor for the capitalist state being destroyed through the music," last
spring. Days after the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Riley's
record company pulled the photo. But after paying hollow respect to the
victims at Ground Zero, Riley protested Warner/Elektra's decision to abandon
the cover art. A self-identified "communist" and son of a Black Panther
lawyer, Riley says he wanted to spread the message that "the blood that
happened on (Sept. 11) is on the hands of the U.S. government."

Segal, the enamored music critic, shrugs off Riley's murderous and morally
equivalent imagery as harmless "bad timing." He laments that the uproar over
the photo overshadowed The Coup's lyrics, which he deems "hip-hop's finest
rhymes this year."

Fine. Let's put aside The Coup's bloody terrorist fantasies for a moment,
and take a closer look at the group's "poetry." The first single released
off the album, titled "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO," includes the following
verses:

5 million ways to kill a CEO

Slap him up and shake him up

and then you know

Let him off the floor

Then bait him with the dough

You can do it funk or do it disco ...



Toss a dollar in the river and when he jump in

If you find he can swim, put lead boots on him and do it again

You and a friend videotape and the party don't end



Another track, titled "Lazy**********" (which Segal calls "amusing"),
attacks American entrepreneurs and businessmen -- the very kind who worked
at the World Trade Center and died by the thousands on Sept. 11:

You ain't never learned to drive or tie your shoe

I got my ear to the street and my eye on you

You got a secretary to write down your thoughts

On how to make us work hard and fatten up your vaults ...

You're a lazy ********** ! Lazy **********!

You're a lazy **********! Lazy **********!"



And the song "Pork and Beef" indulges in violent anti-cop-bashing:

If you got beef with c-o-p's

Throw a Molotov at the p-i-g's

Cuz they be harassing you and me

You got to understand that we still not free ...


The Coup has been singing its crude "Hate America" tune -- and earning
praise from media sympathizers like Segal -- for years. One of the group's
most infamous songs, "(Expletive) On Your Grave," includes a scene in which
Riley tours Arlington National Cemetery and stops to urinate on George
Washington's burial ground. Instead of being grateful for a country that
allows him to peddle such garbage for profit, Riley boils with hypocritical
resentment. The American flag, he says, "symbolizes oppression,
exploitation, racism, slavery and murder."

I'm sick of America getting a bad rap from miserable "artists" like Boots
Riley. He belongs in a capitalism-free cave in Tora Bora, spewing his
"poetry" around an al Qaeda campfire. But I'm even sicker of Riley's
cultural defenders in the elite media. Sept. 11 brought home the lesson that
vile ideas have bloody consequences -- no matter how "daggone funky" they
may sound to mush-headed music critics. We continue to ignore the
intellectual enablers of anti-Americanism at our peril.




About the Author: Malkin is a graduate of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.
She lives with her husband in North Bethesda, Md.

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