Good Ass Blog

Black Sabbath- Black Sabbath

Mortal Kombat’s selfie finisher is the poor man’s...

Tekken selfie finisher.

Ewoks

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Source: Forget Me Nots- Patrice Rushen

Give Me Tha Ass- The Beatnuts 

Men In Black- Will Smith (produced by Poke and Tone)

Crash (2004) 

Ludacris, portraying a carjacker, attempts to steal a Lincoln Navigator from Terrence Howard, a TV director.

Result: Terrance Howard beats up Ludacris and takes his gun.

Hustle & Flow (2005)

Ludacris, an established Memphis crunk rapper, hires Terrence Howard, a pimp, dealer, and aspiring rapper, as his weed man for a Fourth of July homecoming party. Howard takes the opportunity to give Luda his mixtape. Luda accepts the tape, but later dumps it in the toilet behind Howard’s back.

Result: Terrance Howard takes Ludacris’ gun and beats him with it.

Empire "Without a Country" (2015)

Ludacris, a corrections officer, confiscates a laptop from Terrance Howard, an imprisoned record label owner, that contains the masters to a track he recorded while serving time. Finally, a situation where Terrance Howard can’t lay a finger on Ludacris or his gun without some serious repercussions.

Result: Terrance Howard’s lawyer has his men on the outside pistol whip Ludacris into submission.

The Jazz Brothers

It’s a well known fact that an interpolation of “Good Times” by Chic is the primary sample used in “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang.

But what about that intro? It isn’t in “Good Times.” Did the Sugar Hill house band just make it up themselves to give the song an intro and to help differentiate it from the source material? Nope (well possibly to that last part, I don’t know), surprise, it’s more source material. An interpolation of the intro to another disco song; “Here Comes That Sound Again” by Love De-Luxe. 

Black Jack- The Raunch Hands

The Golden Lords

“With a little bit of gold and a pager”

Hot Line: N.W.A- “Fuck tha Police”

Hot Song: The Cool Kids- "Gold and a Pager"

It's a long story but I watched Empire on Fox as part of my day job and I'm pleasantly surprised to see a primetime soap based on Shakespeare's King Lear about a hip hop record label (with a bunch of  Kehinde Wiley and Basquiat paintings floating in the background no less) do so well on network TV. A few years back I had an idea for a hip hop adaptation of my favorite Shakespeare play and one of the greatest plays ever written, MacBeth. The story goes: three witches tell MacBeth of his future as king and he and Lady MacBeth force their hand by killing King Duncan and anyone else in the way. This includes MacBeth's bestie Banquo, who also had his future told to him but knew how to leave well enough alone. MacBeth and Lady Macbeth rule over Scotland but descend into madness from guilt, hallucinating ghosts and uncleanable bloodstains, then they die. Lady MacBeth commits suicide and MacBeth's treason catches up with him when MacDuff, a Scottish thane who never bought a word MacBeth said, kills him in a sword fight. I think this play could work as a concept record, specifically a sequel to Jay-Z and and Kanye West's 2011 classic Watch The Throne. Kendrick Lamar and Ghostface along with Adrian Younge have already released a couple stone cold classic rap operas for this decade, but Kanye's never told an album long story and I've always wondered how he would approach that. So I'm fancasting MacBeth with rappers now, I call it Watch The Throne II: Throne of Blood as a nod to Akira Kuroswa's MacBeth adaptation of the same name.  I know I teased a South Park cast last time I did this but I decided I'd rather do this one first. I wrote a sad black people post last month and now I would like to counterbalance that with something positive. Deal with it.

Kanye West as MacBeth

MacBeth is completely in line with the publics image of Kanye West as well as Kanye's self image. MacBeth is an ambitious, power hungry, and prideful king who's too caught up to ever appreciate his kingdom and so is Yeezy. MacBeth has his future handed to him on a silver platter and only manages to set himself up for a fall. Kanye had a dream he could buy his way to heaven, when he awoke he spent it on a necklace. They both have deep insecurities that humanize them, but while Kanye made having feelings a thing that rappers could do, MacBeth, being a eleventh century king of Scotland, buries his emotions deeper throughout the course of the play until there's nothing but murderous hatred. I think everyone is down with Kanye portraying an anti-hero. He’s already a wicked king in many of people’s eyes, but to feed off of that and get into character like a rap game Daniel Day-Lewis would be the best kind of terrifying.

Nicki Minaj as Lady MacBeth

Lady MacBeth wants to be queen worse than MacBeth wants to be king, she's more ruthless than him, she's basically his murder coach. He's killed countless men on the battlefield but cowers at the idea of killing the guy who told him to kill them all. Lady MacBeth gives no such fuck, she's a gracious host to King Duncan knowing full well he won't survive the night, she even drugs the guards and smears blood on them to make it look like they did it. When it all comes crashing down however, she loses it the hardest. Nicki Minaj's whole thing is switching personas on a dime mid-song, you can call it gimmicky but not if you're praising Kendrick Lamar as a genius when he does it. She can go from ruthless, to fake-gracious, to certifiably insane on a record in a way that a lot of actors would be afraid to do on stage.

Jay Z as King Duncan

King Duncan is a good old fashioned benevolent king, he's the totally fictional ideal of what a king should be. As a result, he isn't particularly dynamic, but then neither is Jay Z. Jay Z is more figurehead than identity now, he was good, he got better, became one of the best but never really went out there musically and just kind of settled into his legacy status. I know Jay Z is one half of Watch The Throne and Duncan doesn't live past the second act of a five act play, but if they kept his early appearances memorable, let him really soak in his reputation as the “greatest rapper alive”, and maybe take the liberty of bringing him back later in the album with Banquo when MacBeth is seeing ghosts it would do enough to make his presence satisfying and necessary. Beetlejuice was only in fifteen minutes of Beetlejuice, folks.

Q-Tip as Banquo

Just as Banquo learns he will never be king from the three witches , Q-Tip never got the mainstream success he sought after the dissolution of A Tribe Called Quest. Banquo is told that his son Fleance will be the first in a line of kings, which gives him importance in retrospect, and because of ATCQs influence, Q-Tip has inherited the same kind of retroactive adoration in the mainstream today. Banquo isn't as quick to buy into these predictions as MacBeth so instead of tempting fate he just lets things happen. He winds up dead, but his kid gets away. Q-Tip's Banquo would provide a too chill for his own good offset to the absolute absence of chill that is Kanye's MacBeth.

Willow Smith as Fleance

I'm not trying to say that Willow Smith is the future of hip hop by casting her as the eventual ruler of Scotland. Fleance is just a kid whose dad died in front of him, he's not king yet, he only has two lines in the play, there's more talk of him than from him. I've been impressed with some of Williow's moody teenage SoundCloud mopings and I wanted to pick a very young person who's likely to be around for a decade or two for this glorified guest spot. Even if she stops making music, I figure Willow will be around for a long ass time in some capacity or another.

Kendrick Lamar as MacDuff

MacDuff is checks and balances. On the night Duncan is killed MacDuff grief stricken but still the most astute guy in the room. He questions MacBeth after he kills Duncan's guards but before he can go in depth Lady MacBeth faints, at which point he's sharp enough to realize something is up and leaves the country in the morning to handle business with Duncan's sons. Kendrick is not only a clever observer in his own right, he's Kanye’s only credible challenger. There’s one rapper working today with personal vision and universal critical acclaim on par with Kanye, and he isn't on GOOD Music, but he opened on the Yeezus tour because he belonged there and Kanye knew it. He needed an opener that he would be competing with every night he followed him in order to elevate his performance. That’s the guy that ultimately winds up taking you out.

Jhene Aiko as Lady MacDuff

Lady MacDuff is really only around to question why her husband took off without her and the kids before they're all killed by MacBeth's hit men. She gets just enough time and characterization in her scene to make us feel remorse when she's murdered. That’s enough for one track, Jhene Aiko calls to ask Kendrick why he disappeared and she gets killed as he’s warning her. It’d be a tight little self contained story. Jhene Aiko really blew up in 2011 when she was collaborating heavily with TDE rappers. Because I became familiar with her during this period, she will always be the Nate Dogg of Top Dog to me. However, she and Kendrick never really made anything too outstanding together, and it’s clear they have the ability, all they need is a strong concept.

Erykah Badu, Lauren Hill, and Lizzo as the Weird Sisters

Weird Sisters, damn, that name is too perfect for this. In truth, of all the casting choices I wrestled with while writing this (oh man, maybe Pharrell or FlyLo should have been Banquo), the Weird Sisters were the most difficult. Missy Elliot, Rihanna, and Sia didn’t make the cut, at one point I even considered Destiny’s Child (or hell, Outkast and Cee-Lo or Killer Mike). The other day I heard a Queen Latifah mix on the radio and I considered going back to the drawing board, but there can only be three. I decided I needed three women that could rap and sing with equal measure and I needed them to be suitably weird. Erykah Badu and Lauren Hill should be obvious to you, they both have otherworldly vibes and as artists they can’t be pinned as hip-hop or R&B or neo-soul because they transcended all of those things. So why Lizzo? Sometimes you just see that spark in a person, like maybe it hasn’t entirely clicked yet for them but there’s enough there that you know when it does they could be a game changer. These were my feelings on Lizzo when I saw her on Letterman last year. Her album was a lot of fun and deserved more attention, she is fearlessly weird, and if she was partnered with two legends like Hill and Badu, she’d have to sink or swim. These three are the witches who talk to MacBeth in riddles and visions which he interprets as “kill a bunch of people to stay on top”. On an album, they can provide an even better Greek chorus than they do in the play. They don’t necessarily need to be limited to three appearances. They could provide small punctuations throughout the proceedings to provide narration or to further haunt the protagonist.

Pusha T as Ross/Lennox the other thanes

Ross is the messenger and that’s pretty much it. He tells MacBeth he’s been promoted to Thane of Cawdor and he tells Siward his son has died in battle. He also tells Lady MacDuff why her husband is gone, then tells MacDuff she’s been murdered, but we have phones now, so I say we leave that one to Kendrick and Jhene Aiko. Lennox is sort of a goon who jumps to whoever’s team is winning, he defects to MacDuff and Malcolm after he figures out how bloodthirsty MacBeth is, but not right after, he feigns loyalty until the right time. Obviously, Pusha T is not a man who feigns loyalty but he fits right in there as a sort of friend to the throne. If you combine the two characters he gets to be both noble and perceptive. The other two thanes, Menteith and Caithness, are just two guys who are ready to ride on MacBeth at the end, that’s definitely in Pusha T’s wheelhouse.

Earl Sweatshirt and Chief Keef as Malcolm and Donalbain

The King’s sons leave the country the night he’s murdered. Donalbain doesn’t say much in the play, but it’s his idea to leave. Malcolm is bothered by the whole scene and especially by the fact that he and Donalbain are the least upset of anyone there, so he agrees and puts together an army while he’s away in England. Donalbain goes to Ireland and does whatever. To me that’s Chief Keef on house arrest and Earl in boarding school. Malcolm has to grow up fast while he’s in exile, so did Earl when he was sent to a Samoan reform school for troubled boys. The disparity between Earl and Doris makes it clear, he went from a kid making rape jokes in his songs to having to work with victims of sexual abuse. Both Earl and Malcolm have a kind of “can I do this?” moment before they decide that they very much can. Donalbain doesn’t have a plan like his brother but you can tell he’s grimier because after their dad is killed he says “Let's away; Our tears are not yet brew'd”, that’s some gangster shit to say after such an occurrence. I bet when he went to Ireland he just made mix tapes with his friends and smoked weed and rode four wheelers all day until things died down. As for Malcolm taking the crown in the end, Sterling Plumpp, the poet who introduced Earl’s parents, wrote a poem about Earl when he was born called "Poet: for Thebe Neruda", a line towards the end reads: “How you gon do anything but rule?”

Nas as Siward

Siward is Duncan’s brother and the man who provides Malcolm with an army for his return to Scotland. Who do you call when you need to avenge the death of Jay Z? Beanie Sigel? Freeway? Memphis Bleek? The answer is clearly Nas. Part of the reason Nas and Jay Z’s feud was so engrossing was how personal it felt at times. In the third verse of “Ether”, after straight up calling Jay his brother and saying he loves him. Nas says “They called you ugly? Well life is harsh, hug me” because he knew that most women thought t Jay was too ugly for them before he blew up and that’s why he was always bashing women on his records. Then he offers a him hug because he realizes it’s still very much a sore spot and he maybe went a little low, that’s more brotherly than simply calling him his brother. 

Migos as the Murderers

These are the guys that MacBeth hires to Kill Banquo, Lady MacDuff, and their kids. MacBeth seems pretty adamant about convincing them they want to do it too. Not just to move up the ladder, but because Banquo has supposedly ruined their lives. He’s talking to himself though, the murderers are desperate men who are there to get paid. If Kanye promised the world to Migos and tried to get in their head, I doubt it would work on them the way it would on someone with pretensions like Childish Gambino’s. Migos are trap to the core, and trap is what the majority rap is right now. Migos do the feature, you pay them, that’s it. They grew up listening to Hot Boys and Master P, you can’t glamour them with sonically rich musical interludes and whatnot.

Danny Brown as The Porter

The Porter shows up after Duncan dies as comic relief. He’s drunk and going on about hell and how he’s suffering from that mentally horny but physically impotent kind of inebriation. I don’t know that there’s ever been a rapper who’s drug intake was as tied to his persona as Danny Brown. One day we’ll think of him the way our parents think of Keith Richards or Rick James. He’s also a huge music nerd, so I’m sure he’s more than capable of giving us his answer to “Too Drunk To Fuck.”

There was a lot of writing last year about police brutality after the lack of indite the cops that killed Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO and Eric Garner inNew York, NY. There wasalso a lot on Ridley Scott's out of touch, historically inaccurate, gradient color scale caste system used for the actors in Exodus: Gods and Kings, and the racist emails movie execs sent each other from the Sony hacks. These events are not separate examples of systemic racism, not entirely anyway. They compliment and inform each other.

After the Isla Vista shooting in May of 2014, and it's misogynistic motivations, plenty of writers were quick to point out how toxic pieces of popular culture like that rape scene in Revenge of the Nerds contributed to a culture that has warped men, jocks and nerds alike, into thinking we should just have a woman because we're special and great. I couldn't really find anything of the sort on how negative media portrayals of black people shape the ways we're viewed by the culture at large, except for this pretty okay Esquire thought piece. Hell, Pitchfork had to write a piece just pointing out how little the pop culture world had to say about the unchecked mistreatment of blacks by the police force and the overwhelming public outcry that has resulted.

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter made me wince because of how obvious it should have been. It's a shame that it's necessary to remind people, while I agree it is necessary. Watch a major studio motion picture, black lives are as cheap as ever. I love movies, but there's usually certain level of casual racism I'm going to have to put up with to enjoy them. When black people are used as cannon fodder on film and the whole world sees it, the idea that our lives are somehow worth less than others is reinforced. When black people are always relegated to the sidelines (unless it's one of “our movies”), it reminds the viewer that we don't matter. I grew up watching countless debasing larger than life images of black people, and eventually it makes you self conscious, you struggle not only with how society views you, but with how you view yourself.

It didn't start out that way for me. I was lucky to be born right at the very beginning of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rise to popularity in late 1987. At least part of the Turtles enduring popularity has to be attributed to the fact that even though they're all dudes, as turtles, they have no racial identity. Though all the non-animal characters are white (save The Shredder) the Turtles themselves are just four distinct archetypes, every kid has one they most relate to and they get to choose based on only that and which headband color they prefer. I was the only black boy at my preschool but when we played Ninja Turtles, I got to be Leonardo, the born leader. By 1993 the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers would take the Turtles place as the under 10 set's superhero fad du jour. As much as I loved them as a kid, it's difficult for me to look at those “five teenagers with attitude” today and see anything but cold calculating cynicism.

The black guy wears black and dance fights, the Asian girl

wears yellow and is quiet and reserved, the white girl wears pink and talks in valley girl speak, white guys 1 and 2 wear red and blue, a jock and a nerd respectively. The choice was being made for most kids, I know I for one wanted to be the black guy, even if that meant I couldn't be the leader anymore. A cousin of mine once told me the Black Ranger was “sorry” and he liked the Red one better. I didn't understand why another black kid would say that back then, but now I do. I used to think he was a traitor. In reality, he probably waned to look up to the main guy, the one they make look the strongest. The trouble is, unless the entire cast is black, the main character is virtually never black.

When you try to push diversity in front of the camera but everyone behind it is still some white dude, you're bound to alienate anyone who isn't also some white dude. Doug had a multicolored cast of ethnically non-specific characters, but the protagonist was still clearly a white guy. Hey Arnold was probably one of the most accurate depictions of city life and growing up around all kinds of people. It's also just one of countless examples of a white guy with a cool black best friend in a supporting role. So while black people are being treated as second class citizens in reality, the things we watch to escape reality only remind us of it by constantly making us play second fiddle.

Movies are even worse than Television when it comes to this. At least TV has Shonda Rhymes now, If it isn't Will Smith or Denzel Washington (or Eddy Murphy in the 80s, or Blade) the idea of a black lead in a multiracial cast is still a tough sell on film. Most Hollywood movies don't use much time developing supporting characters, so black friends are often more hollow and servile than their TV counterparts. Even worse, they have a higher morality rate. TV shows are still killing black people in droves, but movies do it more formulaically. Sometimes the death is used to give depth and motivation to the white protagonist, like Bubba in Forest Gump or Luther in The Sting. However, more often than not the death is used to make a credible threat out of the villain, like Dick in The Shining or my personal favorite example, Darwin in X-Men: First Class.

To be clear X-Men: First Class is a movie from 2011, based on the X-Men comic book series. When X-Men started in 1963 mutants served as an allegory for puberty and the culture clash between Baby Boomers and their parents, but the racial tensions of the era quickly became the primary source of inspiration, mutants would come to be known stand-in for oppressed people everywhere. First Class was set in the early 1962, a year before the book debuted, and it uses the racial turmoil of those times as inspiration for the discrimination mutants experience from homo sapiens. Still, there are only two black characters in the movie, Darwin and Tempest. The former has the ability to adapt for survival, and couldn't even kill himself, but somehow gets killed my the main villain without explanation in the middle of the movie. The latter was an ex-stripper with dragonfly wings and acid spit who joins the bad guys in the same scene they killed Darwin in. In the sequel, Days of Future Past, we find out she died offscreen a few years later.

This was a complete betrayal of what the X-Men are supposed to represent, and it's absurd to me that I have to point that out. You can tell a story about a fictional marginalized group of people that actively marginalizes a real group of people, and hardly anyone will notice. Moreover, the few who do notice will have their reality denied by clueless white people. Those denials will be treated with as much if not more consideration as opinions formed by people who actually understand what discrimination feels like.

The person of color as an afterthought is widely accepted as authentic racial diversity. Not just in movies either, it's the way we're employed, it's the way we're enrolled in universities, it's the way we get appointed as elected officials. Systemic racism is obviously a lot bigger than television and film but when a racist sees his or her fucked up ideas validated in popular culture, they're going to be more comfortable with acting on them.

A lot has to happen before a police officer feels comfortable with taking a black life and not a white one. They have to hold contempt for community they were sworn to protect. Before that, they might have a bad experience with one black person that they now apply to all black people. But even before that they were conditioned to dehumanize black people by their society. That's what guides those other steps into place. Not everyone's parents dropped N-bombs and listened to conservative talk radio. Sometimes lifetime of being shown where black people belong, how one dimensional they are, and how easily they die is enough to twist someones perceptions. It can start with denying instances of racism and end with justifying murder. Violent movies and video games don't encourage people to kill, but they do desensitize us to violence; we're just as desensitized to racism. Let enough irresponsible media wash over you and racism will become second nature.

I use the word “irresponsible” because this is not propaganda, it's just an old stubborn and lazy mindset. No one is willing to challenge these things because it isn't about making the most accurate movie or even the highest quality movie, it's the movie that makes the most money. White leads are supposedly more bankable than black ones but Tom Cruise has as many bombs under his belt as Denzel Washington. The difference is when Tom Cruise bombs no one is going to tie it to his race and question the viability of other white actors. The Hollywood system has been contributing to racial hierarchy since it's inception, while it could  be (and often fancies itself) one of our greatest tools for destroying that hierarchy.