“Lately the ongoing culture wars have centered on women’s bodies and minds and what they’re allowed to do with them, and while congresspeople, clergy, and other ostensibly politically engaged Americans argue—in 2012, mind you—over access to birth control and what qualifies as rape, the country as a whole seems to be working out its issues through female pop stars.”
Happy Leap Day! A Chicago police officer performing a motorcycle jump at Soldier Field, 1929.
Want a copy of this photo?
> Visit our Rights and Reproductions Department and give them this number: DN-0089272.
(via fuckkyeahchicago)
Like most birthing processes the effort to bring the new chicagoreader.com into the world was exhausting, bloody, and involved a lot of begging for drugs to take away the pain, but we’re pretty proud of our new baby. Not only is it significantly easier on the eyes than the last iteration, but it boasts a number of brand new features and new ways to enjoy old ones. Go click around and let us know what you think.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“Dead Presidents” by Jay-Z (1996)
To clarify: there are two versions of “Dead Presidents.” This is the first version, sometimes (erroneously) called “Dead Presidents I.” It was only released as a single. A few months later, Jay decided to re-record the song for his 1996 debut album Reasonable Debut with completely different lyrics. The rapper Nas, whose song “The World Is Yours” is featured on the hook of “Dead Presidents,” was hired to come in and record an in-studio version of the hook for “Dead Presidents II.” He did not show up.
Jay-Z and company forged ahead, recording “Dead Presidents II” with only a sampled Nasir Jones.
I’ve chosen the first version, not because it’s vastly better than DPII (overall, it’s not), but simply because the first verse of this track is one of the best that Jay has ever laid down. Check out the opening four lines:
While others spit that wonderama shit, me and my conglomerate / Shall remain anonymous, caught up in the finest shit / Live out my dreams until my heart give out / Involved with cream, you know exactly what this shit’s about
First of all, it’s just an aesthetically pleasing set of words—the soft consonants and long vowels make it smooth and not to percussive. How great is the phrase “wonderama shit”?
It’s also worth noting that, even though he is not a famous rapper (in fact, he has not yet even cut an album) he is already letting us know that money is important to him and that he has a lot of it. This is another thing that people forget. By the time he started making records, Jay was already making pretty good money as a hustler. He aspired to use rap as a means to make even more money, and in a legal way to boot. Ultimately, he wanted to follow in the footsteps of Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons, to become a CEO (spoiler alert!). In Decoded, he writes that Simmons had “discovered a way to work in the legit world but to live the dream of the hustler: independence, wealth, and success outside of the mainstream’s rules.”
I also really like this part:
Watch how I’m walking ‘cause even the thouroughest ni**as be narking / Trying to strike a bargain, hoping that they might get pardoned / Shit I’m involved with got me pins and needles / And my cerebral breeds the wickedest thoughts that this sport will feed you
Jay’s really at his best when he gets real about the pressures and consequences of his lifestyle. His guilt and his paranoia lend his success and his swagger a greater depth. He is complex and his truthfulness makes him an infinitely more empathetic figure. Once you can see yourself in Jay’s shoes, his triumphs and his power can become yours too. I wonder if sometimes people hear “all that bragging in rap music” and they think the rapper is trying to make them feel bad. They are missing the point. Rap music, or at least a certain type of rap music, has the power to boost you, to temporarily make you feel the confidence of a hustler.
The anarchic globe-spanning hackers network Anonymous has recently declared war on the US government for shutting down the file locker site Megaupload, which aside from being an easy way to legitimately share large files with friends and collaborators is also an easy way to illegally distribute copyrighted material to the public at large. Why Megaupload’s getting busted rather than the dozens of other popular sites offering pretty much the same service is due to a number of reasons. For one, no one at the company seems to have even attempted to manufacture a level of plausible deniability when it came to the pirated material their servers were hosting. For another, the site’s founder, who changed his last name to “Dotcom,” went all in cultivating an image as a gangsterish kleptomillionaire.
Swizz Beatz is probably regretting taking his new job as Megaupload CEO, which when it was announced the other day seemed like a jokey figurehead/endorsement position but which now looks way more real than he probably wants it to be.
Unless you’d like to get in on the major (and quite illegal) distributed denial of service attack that Anonymous is running under the name Project Megaupload be careful of what links you click on today.
Polish “graphic designer, animator, musician and performer” Odaibe used motion sensors to track the movement of a pair of drumsticks through 3D space during a long, booming drum solo. The resulting visualization is a virtual minimalist sculpture whose constantly shifting shape is elegant and beautiful enough to make you consider laying off the drummer jokes for a minute.
