hiphopmusic.com:

Some thoughts on whether Barack Obama will find some white voters disappearing due to "Tolerance Fatigue" aka "The Bradley Effect." Obama's win in the (very white) Iowa caucus seems like a good sign, but I don't think we should get too happy just yet.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy for Obama, encouraged that he won Iowa, and will be even more so if he takes New Hampshire. I think an Obama win is more than symbolic. It actually speaks to huge changes in American culture since the 1988 campaign of Jesse Jackson, most importantly the ability of white Americans to allow themselves to be led by black Americans, one of the leading indicators that multiculturalism has gained significant ground in the last 20 years (disregarding for the moment those pesky Black unemployment, incarceration and education disparities).

Good news aside, let’s not get carried away. People have been raving about Obama’s victory speech after Iowa. But when I hear Obama speak, it’s the same political pabulum that George Bush spews. Just take a look:

Ice Cube tells Conan O'Brien he's looking for the Mr. T / BA Baracus role in John Singleton's rumored A-Team movie:

(via nah right)

The first time I saw the Palestinian hip-hop group D.A.M. was in 2005, when they did their first gig in New York.

A lot has changed since then for this Jewish-American hip-hop writer. Now that D.A.M. released their first album (which I reviewed in the Washington Post), apparently the change shows.

I went to the West Bank in 2006, and saw some things that I needed to see — the Deheisha refugee camp near Bethlehem, Israeli settler terror in Hebron, the streets of Ramallah, and of course, the Wall, the Wall everywhere. It was a sobering counterpoint to my trip to Israel proper the year before, something that I wrote about in my-yet-to-be-published-Masters-Project-because-I’m-neglecting-everything-else-in-my-life-but-this-book

In it, I described my outlook in the years prior to the West Bank trip...

Yesterday I went to the Kara Walker exhibit at the Whitney, and found the actor who plays Chris Partlow on "The Wire" there browsing the work. Having those two worlds intersect was so surreal and so perfect, I decided to commemorate by mixing some of Walker's images with The Wire theme song. (Some of the footage came from here.)

I'm still processing the Kara Walker exhibit and what I take from it, how her work and the reaction it generates (and the generational divide therein) can be related to hip-hop.. perhaps to be discussed in a future video. Make sure to catch if you;re in NY though, it ends Feb. 3rd and a youtube vid does no justice to her craft. Have any of y'all seen it already?

Hoping BET founder Bob Johnson's train wreck stump speech for Hillary Clinton will serve as a wake-up call for our nation.

I really really care about this.