Rap World Quotes

Sneering has gotten a bad rap, he thought, walking rapidly up the hill from his car. All that unleashed adrenaline got his legs pumping. Why is it that only villains are allowed to sneer? Surely such a display of disapproval could be used to better all humankind. If there was more sneering in the world, people might think before they acted.

I don't give a fuck, God sent me to piss the world off.

I love you, Scarlett, because we are so much alike, renegades, both of us, dear, and selfish rascals. Neither of us cares a rap if the whole world goes to pot, so long as we are safe and comfortable.

Look at history,” Eva continued, rubbing a temple. “Roxanne Shanté out-rapping grown men at fourteen. Serena winning the US Open at seventeen. Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein at eighteen. Josephine Baker conquering Paris at nineteen. Zelda Fitzgerald’s high school diary was so fire that her future husband stole entire passages to write The Great Gatsby. The eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley published her first piece at fourteen, while enslaved. Joan of Arc. Greta Thunberg. Teen girls rearrange the fucking world.

But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn't force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you, that you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.

Grandma Baker shook her head. “More lies. What’s wrong with milk? Milk is healthy and great for your bones.” “Yes, raw cow’s milk is very healthy. It’s been drunk for centuries the world over because of its health benefits. That’s exactly why we had to poison it. Like the idiotic fluoride lie about cavities, we informed the public that raw milk contains harmful bacteria and needs to be pasteurized and homogenized to ensure people’s health. After milk is pasteurized and homogenized, it’s not only not healthy anymore, it’s very unhealthy and has the same rap sheet as the other culprits we’ve talked about.” Mrs. Baker shook her head. “Again with the lies. There’s evidence that shows unpasteurized milk may contain bacteria and pathogens that could make people ill. That’s why it’s pasteurized.” “You’re not wrong there, just misinformed on how to correctly fix the problem. Milk being unpasteurized wasn’t the problem, like I said, people safely drank raw milk for centuries. Livestock being subjected to unsanitary and poor hygiene practices in the modern age was the reason milk started containing bacteria and pathogens. To correct this, you fix the livestock issue, the source of the problem. You don’t put healthy raw milk through a process that eliminates possible pathogens by pasteurizing and homogenizing it so it becomes unhealthy and slowly kills you over time. That’s obviously not an intelligent move.” Karver laughed. “But again, thank you for illustrating how effective the great design is at keeping humans weak and brainwashed. The only reason I’m telling you all this is because I’m going to kill you anyway. I’m merely letting you know how stupid you and your species are before I do you in.

You can be the ugliest man in the world but once you got money, you can have all the women in the world.

Anger has a bad rap, but it is actually one of the most hopeful and forward thinking of all our emotions. It begets transformation, manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rational and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder. It bridges the divide between what “is” and what “ought” to be, between a difficult past and an improved possibility. Anger warns us viscerally of violation, threat, and insult.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.' I said, 'Are you a monster? Like Ursula Monkton?' Lettie threw a pebble into the pond. 'I don't think so,' she said. 'Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.' I said, 'People should be scared of Ursula Monkton.' 'P'raps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?' 'Dunno. Why do you think she's scared of anything? She's a grown-up, isn't she? Grown-ups and monsters aren't scared of things.' Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters. And as for grown-ups...' She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, 'I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

Excuse my charisma, vodka with a spritzer. Swagger down pat, call my shit Patricia. Young Money militia and I am the commissioner. You don't want start Weezy 'cause the F is for finisher So misunderstood but what's a world without enigma?

If I make a mistake, she raps me over the fingers with her ruler. But she never hurts my spirit, she only hits me to correct my mistake.

You can blame the politicians, the businessmen, the generals, the machine... But really, if you're looking to blame someone: blame me. I'm the American System. I'm the machine. That's the price of living in a democracy: we all gotta take the rap.

A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.' - James Baldwin

In Kiribati, the unimane and unaine (old women) are considered the guardians of the culture, a state of affairs that sets it apart from the United States, where the final arbiter for all things cultural is the adolescent male, which explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of the World Wrestling Federation, gangsta rap, and Pamela Anderson.

Do you think there outside you are free Do you think chaining me you can flee The rest of the world is outside in a cage I am not gonna give up my case just like this

When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume, even though the lyrics are degrading to women and offend me to my core.

The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they become to engage in reasoned political debate. Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: 'Speaking as an X' . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, 'Speaking as an gay Asian, I fell incompetent to judge on this matter'). It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, 'I think A, and here is my argument', now take the form, 'Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B'. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one "epistemology", black women have another. So what remains to be said? What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck in the world of archaic religion. Only those with an approved identity status are, like shamans, allowed to speak on certain matters. Particular groups -- today the transgendered -- are given temporary totemic significance. Scapegoats -- today conservative political speakers -- are duly designated and run off campus in a purging ritual. Propositions become pure or impure, not true or false. And not only propositions but simple words. Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up Protestant schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.

Just as the body is shaped for movement, the mind is shaped for poetry. Rhythm and rhyme aid recall. Poems are always rhythmic but not always rhyming. In the same way that melody became rather suspect in twentieth-century classical music – atonal fractures being the mark of seriousness – so Modernism re-branded rhyme as pastoral, lovesick, feminine, superficial. Fine for kids and tea-towels, not fine for the muscular combative voice of the urban poet. It has taken a long time for rhyme to return to favour. Rap, and the rise of performance poetry, has been part of that return.

Anger has a bad rap, but it is actually one of the most hopeful and forward thinking of all our emotions. It begets transformation, manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rational and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder. It bridges the divide between what “is” and what “ought” to be, between a difficult past and an improved possibility.

Rap, in all its far-reaching ambition, was now It. Our hardcore punk world simply couldn’t compete anymore. How much louder and faster and rulier could bands get? So much of hardcore is about limits—shorter, simpler, more speed, more volume—whereas breakbeats and hip hop are all about the limitless—limitless possibilities, limitless imagination. Punk rock had changed our lives, but hardcore had served its purpose. Now all we wanted was to be our own version of the Treacherous Three. No turning back.

Eh, it's going to end like it always ends. The internet will have its lb of flesh, this kid will get fired from his internship and then get a speaking spot at CPAC, and we'll all forget about it until he's on The Real World: Scottsdale and comes out of the closet. Meanwhile we'll all move on to the next rapping granny or institutionally abused transgendered kindergartner and concentrate our efforts there and hopefully within the next ten years Skynet will kill us all and we won't have to do this again.

Now what is the will of God? That's the big question. You can't say the will of God is to disrespect your fellow man. You can't say the will of God is to disrespect His creations, and you can't say the will of God is to disrespect the planet that you live on. You can say you're anything [any religion], but if your disrespect comes in any of those three categories, you're not anything, you're whack. I think the principles of religion start from there. Then you get into man's interpretation and bookology.

So much money spent so that between 1969 and 1972 a dozen white men could take the express train to a lifeless world? Why, Negro women and men could barely go to the next state without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, and service stations that wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the bathroom. Now they wanted to talk about a white man on the Moon? “A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the Moon,” rapped performer Gil Scott-Heron in a song that stormed the airwaves that year.

Forgot my coffee on my desk.” True, but an excuse all the same. Her next choice would be PMS, but PMS got a bad rap. Her theory about PMS was that it simply lifted the veil. It wasn’t always pleasant to see the world so clearly, so it only happened once a month.

Louie and Phil were separated again, and Louie was locked in an officer’s cabin. Every few days, he had strange visits from a grinning sailor who would lean into the room, say, “Thump on the head for a biscuit?,” rap his knuckles on Louie’s head, hand him a biscuit, and amble away.

Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century - who do you think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? - you can imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as ‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence. Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but simply because they are ‘black’, and sometimes because they listened to too much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome. The fact that yellow-on-yellow crime, mixed race-on-mixed race crime or white-on-white violence just sound like joke terms but black on black violence has ‘credibility’ speaks very loudly about the perceived relationship between blackness and depravity in this culture.

PAUL IS SOMEBODY WHO DOES THINGS WITH ENTHUSIASM, which makes people feel appalled and insulted at things he chooses to do. If you’re under thirty, you have never heard of a song called “Spies Like Us,” and I am a horrible person for being the one to tell you. It was the theme for a big-budget Hollywood spy comedy starring Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Nobody saw the movie, but Paul’s theme was worse than the movie could have been. MTV played it constantly during the 1985 holiday season, though radio wouldn’t touch it. Paul does a rap that goes something like, “Oooh oooh, no one can dance like you.” In the video he plays multiple roles as members of a studio band, mugging and biting his lower lip. The drumming is where his cheeky-chappy act gets profoundly upsetting. You see this video, you’re going to be depressed for at least ten minutes about the existential condition of Paul-dom. His enthusiasm makes you doubt the sincerity of his other public displays. It makes you doubt yourself. You might think it’s a cheap laugh but it will cost you something.

Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.” I said, “People should be scared of Ursula Monkton.” “P’raps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?” “Dunno. Why do you think she’s scared of anything? She’s a grown-up, isn’t she? Grown-ups and monsters aren’t scared of things.” “Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters. And as for grown-ups . . .” She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, “I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” She thought for a moment. Then she smiled. “Except for Granny, of course.

Voleta surveyed her options miserably. “I think humanity peaked at the spoon, don’t you? A spoon can serve as a fork, a knife, a ladle … A good spoon is all you need, really.” “And I will tell you again, if you ever eat your fish with a spoon, I will appear out of thin air wherever you are in the world, snatch the spoon from your hand, and rap you on the head with it!

A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself.

Let them talk more munitions and airplanes and battleships and tanks and gases why of course we’ve got to have them we can’t get along without them how in the world could we protect the peace if we didn’t have them? Let them form blocs and alliances and mutual assistance pacts and guarantees of neutrality. Let them draft notes and ultimatums and protests and accusations. But before they vote on them before they give the order for all the little guys to start killing each other let the main guy rap his gavel on my case and point down at me and say here gentlemen is the only issue before this house and that is are you for this thing here or are you against it. And if they are against it why goddam them let them stand up like men and vote. And if they are for it let them be hanged and drawn and quartered and paraded through the streets in small chopped up little bits and thrown out into the fields where no clean animal will touch them and let their chunks rot there and may no green thing ever grow where they rot. Take me into your churches your great towering cathedrals that have to be rebuilt every fifty years because they are destroyed by war. Carry me in my glass box down the aisles where kings and priests and brides and children at their confirmation have gone so many times before to kiss a splinter of wood from a true cross on which was nailed the body of a man who was lucky enough to die. Set me high on your altars and call on god to look down upon his murderous little children his dearly beloved little children. Wave over me the incense I can’t smell. Swill down the sacramental wine I can’t taste. Drone out the prayers I can’t hear. Go through the old holy gestures for which I have no legs and no arms. Chorus out the hallelujas I can’t sing. Bring them out loud and strong for me your hallelujas all of them for me because I know the truth and you don’t you fools. You fools you fools you fools…

Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it’s not depression, not even discomfort; it’s a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you, a horizonful of numbly complex vistas in slab-gray and spraypaint-red. Hieroglyphs on walls, people on stoops, hoops w/o nets. White people have always loved to gaze at the ‘real black world,’ preferably at a distance and while moving briskly through, toward business. A view from this remove yields easy abstractions about rap in its role as just the latest ‘black’ music. Like: the less real power a people have, the more they’ll assert hegemony in areas that don’t much matter in any grand scheme. A way to rule in hell: their own vocabulary, syntax, gestures, music, dance; own food; religious rhetoric; social and party customs; that…well-known athletic superiority—the foot-speed, vertical leap—we like them in fields, cotton- or ball-. It’s a Hell we like to look at because it has so clearly been made someone else’s very own….And the exported popular arts! The singing and dancing!…each innovation, new Scene, and genius born of a ‘suffering’ we somehow long to imagine, even as we co-opt, overpay, homogenize, make the best of that suffering song go to stud for our own pale performers.

You came all this way for a whore?” Albert asked, and Royce shot him a harsh look. “Don’t call her that if you want to live a long and happy life,” Hadrian said as they dismounted. “But this is a whorehouse—a brothel, right? And you’re here to see a woman, so—” “So keep talking, Albert.” Hadrian tied his horse to the post. “Just let me get farther away.” Gwen saved our lives,” Royce said, looking up at the porch. “I beat on doors. I even yelled for help.” He looked at Albert, letting that image sink in. Yes, I yelled for help. “No one cared.” Royce gestured toward Hadrian. “He was dying in a pool of blood, and I was about to pass out. Broken leg, my side sliced open, the world spinning. Then she was there saying, ‘I’ve got you. You’ll be all right now.’ We would have died in the mud and the rain, but she took us in, nursed us back to health. People were after us—lots of people … lots of powerful people—but she kept us hidden for weeks, and she never asked for payment or explanation. She never asked for anything.” Royce turned back to Albert. “So if you call her a whore again, I’ll cut your tongue out and nail it to your chest.” Albert nodded. “Point taken.” Royce climbed the steps to the House and rapped once. Albert leaned over to Hadrian and whispered, “He knocks at a—” “Royce can still hear you.” Hadrian stopped him. “Really?” “Pretty sure. You have no idea how much trouble I got into before I learned that. Now I never say anything I don’t want him to know.

Look at history,” Eva continued, rubbing a temple. “Roxanne Shanté out-rapping grown men at fourteen. Serena winning the US Open at seventeen. Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein at eighteen. Josephine Baker conquering Paris at nineteen. Zelda Fitzgerald’s high school diary was so fire that her future husband stole entire passages to write The Great Gatsby. The eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley published her first piece at fourteen, while enslaved. Joan of Arc. Greta Thunberg. Teen girls rearrange the fucking world.” An electrified

In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community, we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment: the lithe beauty of an Ethiopian runner, the bravery of a Swedish girl determined to save the planet, the physics-defying aerobatics of an African-American Olympian, the brilliance of a composer of Puerto Rican descent who can rap the history of the founding of America at 144 words a minute—all of these feats should fill us with astonishment at what the species is capable of and gratitude to be alive for this.

The Baby Boomers were the last generation of Americans who would be taught in school that their country had “never lost a war.” In most things, in fact, they would have more in common with their parents than with their children. They were educated for a pre-computer world. They listened to a combination of folk-rock and vaguely British-inflected rock, which, for their children, would be eclipsed by various kinds of rap. All Boomers were born into a pre–civil rights America, and they were the last generation to grow up wholly outside the shadow of what would be known as political correctness.

As a general observation, I think our high school and college-age students are wonderful, that they’re striving collectively, I think, to be as fine a generation of young people as we have ever had in this Church. But even as I say that, I am quick to acknowledge--and I don’t want to minimize that compliment, but I am quick to acknowledge what you already know--that exceptions to that rule are too many and often far too serious. When our youth sin now, they can do so in such flagrantly offensive ways with ever more serious consequences in their lives. That is the world we are in and it is, by scriptural definition, a world that is getting progressively more wicked. So over time we will continue to see a steady deterioration of what is acceptable in movies, on television, in pop music (which, in the case of rap lyrics, isn’t even music at all), and, perhaps in our most dangerous contemporary foe, abuse of the Internet. I have learned what you have learned--that the door to permissiveness, the door to promiscuity and lewdness, swings only one way. It only opens farther and farther; it never swings back. Individuals can choose to close it, but it is quite certain, historically speaking, that public appetite and public policy will never close it.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water. Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up: “are ghosts dead are ghosts dead or alive are ghosts deadly” but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):

Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you. PSALM 9:10 SEPTEMBER 29 A missionary’s wife in central China during World War II knew the Japanese were approaching her city. She was with her baby girl, two months old, and her son, just over a year old. Her husband had been taken to a hospital, himself ill. He was one hundred and fifteen miles away and would not be back for perhaps a month. The poor woman was filled with fear—she was alone and unprotected, in bitter January weather. When morning came, she realized that she was without food for her children. She pulled off the calendar page. That day’s verse stated simply: “So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children” (Genesis 50:21). There was a rap at the door. “We knew you would be hungry,” said a longtime neighbor, “and you didn’t know how to milk the goats. So I have milked your goats. Here is milk for your children.” Will you try to explain this away, handle it on an intellectual basis as just pure coincidence? When you come right down to it, what is coincidence? It is an act of God in the midst of time.

To understand Bashō’s place in Japanese poetry, it’s useful to have some sense of the literary culture he entered. The practice of the fine arts had been central to Japanese life from at least the seventh century, and virtually all educated people painted, played musical instruments, and wrote poems. In 17th century Japan, linked-verse writing was as widespread and popular as card games or Scrabble in mid-20th-century America. A certain amount of rice wine was often involved, and so another useful comparison might be made to playing pool or darts at a local bar. The closest analogy, though, can be found in certain areas of online life today. As with Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, or Worlds of War and Second Life today, linked verse brought its practitioners into an interactive community that was continually and rapidly evolving. Hovering somewhere between art-form and competition, renga writing provided both a party and a playing field in which intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity might be put to the test. Add to this mix some of street rap’s boundary-pushing language, and, finally, the video images of You-Tube. Now imagine the possibility that a “high art” form of very brief films might emerge from You-Tube, primarily out of one extraordinarily talented young film-maker’s creations and influence. In the realm of 17th-century Japanese haiku, that person was Basho.

My sisters and I giggled at “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three” (“Tits and ass / bought myself a fancy pair / tightened up the derriere”) while our parents sat in the front of the car—my father at the wheel, my mom in the passenger seat—both distracted and nonplussed. We flipped through the Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins hardbacks in my grandmother’s bookshelf and watched The Exorcist on the Z Channel (the country’s first pay-cable network that premiered in LA in the mid-’70s) after our parents sternly told us not to watch it, but of course we did anyway and got properly freaked out. We saw skits about people doing cocaine on Saturday Night Live, and we were drawn to the allure of disco culture and unironic horror movies. We consumed all of this and none of it ever triggered us—we were never wounded because the darkness and the bad mood of the era was everywhere, and when pessimism was the national language, a badge of hipness and cool. Everything was a scam and everybody was corrupt and we were all being raised on a diet of grit. One could argue that this fucked us all up, or maybe, from another angle, it made us stronger. Looking back almost forty years later, it probably made each of us less of a wuss. Yes, we were sixth and seventh graders dealing with a society where no parental filters existed. Tube8.com was not within our reach, fisting videos were not available on our phones, nor were Fifty Shades of Grey or gangster rap or violent video games, and terrorism hadn’t yet reached our shores, but we were children wandering through a world made almost solely for adults. No one cared what we watched or didn’t, how we felt or what we wanted, and we hadn’t yet become enthralled by the cult of victimization. It was, by comparison to what’s now acceptable when children are coddled into helplessness, an age of innocence.

Astrophage has a predator!” There’s a whole biosphere at Adrian. Not just Astrophage. There’s even an active biosphere within the Petrova line. This is where it all started. Has to be. How else can we explain countless extremely different life-forms that all evolved to migrate in space? They all came from the same genetic root. Astrophage was just one of many, many life-forms that evolved here. And with all life, there is variance and predation. Adrian isn’t just some planet that Astrophage infected. It’s the Astrophage homeworld! And it’s the home of Astrophage’s predators. “This is amazing!” I yell. “If we find a predator…” “We take home!” Rocky says, two octaves higher than normal. “It eat Astrophage, breed, eat more Astrophage, breed, eat more more more! Stars saved!” “Yes!” I press my knuckles against the tunnel wall. “Fist-bump!” “What, question?” I rap the tunnel again. “This. Do this.” He emulates my gesture against the wall opposite my hand. “Celebration!” I say. “Celebration!” The crew of the Hail Mary sat on the couch in the break room, each with their drink of choice. Commander Yáo had a German beer, Engineer Ilyukhina had a distressingly large tumbler of vodka, and Science Specialist DuBois had a glass of 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon that he had poured ten minutes in advance to ensure it had time to breathe. The break room itself had been a struggle to arrange. Stratt didn’t like anything that wasn’t directly related to the mission, and an aircraft carrier wasn’t exactly overflowing with extra space. Still, with more than a hundred scientists from all over the world demanding a place to relax, she had relented. A small room in the corner of the hangar deck was built to house the “extravagance.” Dozens of people crowded into the room and watched the TV feed on the wall-mounted monitor. By silent agreement, the crew got to sit on the couch.

rang. “Hello,” said the editor. “London calling,” came the voice of the operator. “All right,” replied the editor. He recognized the voice of Terry Masters, special correspondent. His voice came clearly over the transatlantic telephone. “The Horror is attacking London in force,” he said. “There are thousands of them and they have completely surrounded the city. All roads are blocked. The government declared the city under martial rule a quarter of an hour ago and efforts are being made to prepare for resistance against the enemy.” “Just a second,” the editor shouted into the transmitter. He touched a button on his desk and in a moment an answering buzz told him he was in communication with the press-room. “Stop the presses!” he yelled into the speaking tube. “Get ready for a new front make-up!” “O.K.,” came faintly through the tube, and the editor turned back to the phone. “Now let’s have it,” he said, and the voice at the London end of the wire droned on, telling the story that in another half hour was read by a world which shuddered in cold fear even as it scanned the glaring headlines. * * * * “Woods,” said the editor of the Press to a reporter, “run over and talk to Dr. Silas White. He phoned me to send someone. Something about this Horror business.” Henry Woods rose from his chair without a word and walked from the office. As he passed the wire machine it was tapping out, with a maddeningly methodical slowness, the story of the fall of London. Only half an hour before it had rapped forth the flashes concerning the attack on Paris and Berlin. He passed out of the building into a street that was swarming with terrified humanity. Six months of terror, of numerous mysterious deaths, of villages blotted out, had set the world on edge. Now with London in possession of the Horror and Paris and Berlin fighting hopelessly for their lives, the entire population of the world was half insane with fright. Exhorters on street corners enlarged upon the end of the world, asking that the people prepare

When a middle school teacher in San Antonio, Texas, named Rick Riordan began thinking about the troublesome kids in his class, he was struck by a topsy-turvy idea. Maybe the wild ones weren’t hyperactive; maybe they were misplaced heroes. After all, in another era the same behavior that is now throttled with Ritalin and disciplinary rap sheets would have been the mark of greatness, the early blooming of a true champion. Riordan played with the idea, imagining the what-ifs. What if strong, assertive children were redirected rather than discouraged? What if there were a place for them, an outdoor training camp that felt like a playground, where they could cut loose with all those natural instincts to run, wrestle, climb, swim, and explore? You’d call it Camp Half-Blood, Riordan decided, because that’s what we really are—half animal and half higher-being, halfway between each and unsure how to keep them in balance. Riordan began writing, creating a troubled kid from a broken home named Percy Jackson who arrives at a camp in the woods and is transformed when the Olympian he has inside is revealed, honed, and guided. Riordan’s fantasy of a hero school actually does exist—in bits and pieces, scattered across the globe. The skills have been fragmented, but with a little hunting, you can find them all. In a public park in Brooklyn, a former ballerina darts into the bushes and returns with a shopping bag full of the same superfoods the ancient Greeks once relied on. In Brazil, a onetime beach huckster is reviving the lost art of natural movement. And in a lonely Arizona dust bowl called Oracle, a quiet genius disappeared into the desert after teaching a few great athletes—and, oddly, Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers—the ancient secret of using body fat as fuel. But the best learning lab of all was a cave on a mountain behind enemy lines—where, during World War II, a band of Greek shepherds and young British amateurs plotted to take on 100,000 German soldiers. They weren’t naturally strong, or professionally trained, or known for their courage. They were wanted men, marked for immediate execution. But on a starvation diet, they thrived. Hunted and hounded, they got stronger. They became such natural born heroes, they decided to follow the lead of the greatest hero of all, Odysseus, and

The heart of rock will always remain a primal world of action. The music revives itself over and over again in that form, primitive rockabilly, punk, hard soul and early rap. Integrating the world of thought and reflection with the world of primitive action is *not* a necessary skill for making great rock 'n' roll. Many of the music's most glorious moments feel as though they were birthed in an explosion of raw talent and creative instinct (some of them even were!). But ... if you want to burn bright, hard *and* long, you will need to depend on more than your initial instincts. You will need to develop some craft and a creative intelligence that will lead you *farther* when things get dicey. That's what'll help you make crucial sense and powerful music as time passes, giving you the skills that may also keep you alive, creatively and physically. The failure of so many of rock's artists to outlive their expiration date of a few years, make more than a few great albums and avoid treading water, or worse, I felt was due to the misfit nature of those drawn to the profession. These were strong, addictive personalities, fired by compulsion, narcissism, license, passion and an inbred entitlement, all slammed over a world of fear, hunger and insecurity. That's a Molotov cocktail of confusion that can leave you unable to make, or resistant to making, the lead of consciousness a life in the field demands. After first contact knocks you on your ass, you'd better have a plan, for some preparedness and personal development will be required if you expect to hang around any longer than your fifteen minutes. Now, some guys' five minutes are worth other guys' fifty years, and while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales through the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there *is* something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled and *here*. I'll take Dylan; the pirate raiding party of the Stones; the hope-I-get-very-old-before-I-die, present live power of the Who; a fat, still-mesmerizing-until-his-death Brando—they all suit me over the alternative. I would've liked to have seen that last Michael Jackson show, a seventy-year-old Elvis reinventing and relishing in his talents, where Jimi Hendrix might've next taken the electric guitar, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and all the others whose untimely deaths and lost talents stole something from the music I love, living on, enjoying the blessings of their gifts and their audience's regard. Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways. Plus, to those you've received so much from, so much joy, knowledge and inspiration, you wish life, happiness and peace. These aren't easy to come by.

Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and

If we extrapolate this position as a constant factor at work in the background character of twentieth-century culture, it is clear why a system like Steiner’s has always risked being marginalized. After all, in many ways it is the epitome of uncoolness. Coolness will have nothing to do with improving life and the world. As soon as a dogooder enters the room, the coolness enthusiasts leave. KRIES: Has that changed today? SLOTERDIJK: Today’s zeitgeist allows more scope to specific forms of uncoolness again. Many years ago I read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with my American students. I was afraid it would be too full of pathos for them. But they simply read the whole thing right through like a rap. They didn’t find it at all bombastic and overblown. They had no trouble reading Nietzsche’s extreme flights of rhapsodic style, which are difficult for people educated in old Europe, straight off the page.

since she drove the car off the Long Beach lot three days earlier and headed east. Each mile driven was one mile farther away from Nick and the shadowy world of drugs and dealers that was turning him into a frightening stranger. Now, as she was daring to breathe again, that red light mocked her. “Really thought you were going to make it this time, didn’t you? Nice try.” “Nope, you’re not doing this.” Lainie swallowed fear with a practiced gulp and kept her voice light. “It’s just a little electrical short, that’s all.” She gave the glass a sharp rap with her knuckle. The light flickered and

And like the abortion controversy or the jihad against gangsta rap, the battle over evolution seems almost to have been designed to keep Kansas polarized, keep its outrage levels high and its Con pot boiling, while changing the way things are actually done not a bit. The combat was purely symbolic ... The real object of their anti-evolution gambit, I believe, was not getting Kansans right with God but getting themselves reelected. As we have seen, conservatives grandstand eloquently on cultural issues but almost never achieve real-world results. What they're after is cultural turmoil, which serves mainly to solidify their base. By deliberately courting the wrath of the educated world with the evolution issue, the Cons aimed, it seems, to reinforce and to sharpen their followers' peculiar understanding of social class. In a word, it was an exercise in anti-intellectualism. (206-208)

In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.” Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores. Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.” Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.” So

You'd be the first to complain if people didn't write,' Judd rapped out. 'Here's your egg. Boiled for three minutes exactly. I saw to it myself.' Taking his egg, 'On the contrary,' Fanning answered, 'I'd be the first to rejoice. If people write, it means they exist; and all I ask is to be able to pretend that the world doesn't exist.

It is easy to blame television or the movies or rap music for desensitizing our children to human suffering, to violence, and even to death. Yet the fundamental invulnerability does not come from commercialized culture, reprehensible as it is for pandering to and exploiting children's emotional hardening and immaturity. The invulnerability of peer-oriented kids is fueled from the inside. Even if there were no movies or television programs to shape its expression, it still would spring forth spontaneously as the modus operandi of peer-oriented youth. Though peer-oriented children can come from all over the world and belong to an infinite number of subcultures, the theme of invulnerability is universal in youth culture. Fashions may come and go, music can change form, the language may vary, but cool detachment and emotional shutdown seem to permeate it all. The pervasiveness of this culture is a powerful testimony to the desperate flight from vulnerability of its members.

hosts get a bad rap. If we believed everything that came out of Hollywood, then ghosts would throw hatchets, push people over cliffs, and possess entire kitchens that just happen to be full of sharp knives. After several years of doing this job, I can verify the exact opposite is true. Sure there are demons and wraiths who seek to harm the living, but there are just as many virtuous, misunderstood spirits with good intentions as there are mischievous and evil ones. Crossing over from the physical realm to the spiritual side does not instantly make someone a bad person (and let’s remember these are still people in a nonphysical form). There are spirits whose desire to help people carries over with them. There are confused spirits who just want answers, and there are child spirits who just want to play.

I assumed that with puberty my classmates might also gain a tolerance for other people’s interests, or at least notice the revolutionary work taking place in the rap world during an era now widely considered its golden age. I was wrong.

But as for us, as for our group commonly known in the World as “Hip Hop,” this gospel acknowledges and celebrates the Love that has saved OUR people from self-destruction. It is time to repent and grow up! Rapping about crime and murder may sound good amongst those who have never committed such acts, but for those of us who are REAL IN THE FIELD, we send this message to our young people—YOU DON’T REALLY WANT IT!

And Ella starts rapping: Straight A's, good grades, that's the plan Study hard, top of the class Doing the best you can You won't need it but you're studying algebra Won't use Japanese, world history or calculus You follow the path they tell you to Go straight to college when you finish school If there's no scholarship take out a loan Clock up a debt kid, you're on your own Take all your stuff, you're leaving home The big wide world is yours to roam The crowd roars. She is seriously so good! Damon picks up his guitar and starts singing: But life can give us lemons and not ice cream And the path we take is not what it seems But we can't give up and cry and scream We have to turn up and change our dream Ella raps again: Science, physics and chemistry Make sure you ace your SATs Gotta get into an Ivy League Make my parents proud of me The say the road is straight and clear No need to wait, choose a career Doctor, lawyer, engineer Need to make a hundred grand a year And Damon sings: But life can give you lemons and not ice cream Find yourself against the current going upstream And all you wanna do is cry and scream Because you realize this ain't your dream You realize you have to change your dream Ella raps: Sat in class reading Romeo and Juliet But never understanding a word of it It's so old fashioned, it just doesn't fit You hate it so much, you wanna quit That's the stuff they think you need to learn But what happens when you crash and burn What happens when life deals you a blow What happens when you sink so low? And Damon sings: When life gives you lemons and not ice cream When you find yourself without a team When it throws you things that are too extreme When you can no longer chase your dream Then know it's time to change your dream And together they sing: When life gives you lemons and not ice cream When you wanna cry and shout and scream When you've fallen off your balance beam Then you know it's time to change your dream And you can do it You Can Change Your Dream

with regard to the misogyny issue. RM adds: ______This was because I’d received clear comments and criticism about the raps I’d written as well as my views. The Gangnam Station murder31 happened around that time, and so from a woman’s perspective I think there was no choice but to speak out even more. Someone I know said, if you call a situation of equality “0,” and the world’s injustice is at as much as “+ 10,” then those experiencing injustice have no choice but to emphasize not “0,” but “–10” in order to achieve equality. Those words really hit home for me.

I’m a project manager by day and a rapper by night, but it’s all fading into the morning, because I’m tearing off my shades and walking into the light.

Unable to stop himself, he leaned forward and rapped on the window. Because she jumped a good foot into the air after the rap, he knew perfectly well she’d heard it, but Millie did not turn. “Open the window.” Bending over, she straightened with another book in her hand, which she immediately tossed into the flames. “What are you doing?” he yelled. Turning, she narrowed her eyes, marched over to the window, unlocked it, and then pushed it up. “Go away.” “I need to talk to you.” “We have nothing left to say.” “We have plenty left to say. At least I do.” “You should be saying things to Caroline, not to me.” “Caroline and I have nothing else to say to each other.” “You’re both from the same world. You should have plenty to say. Whereas you and I, well . . . we’re just too different.” Millie began pushing down the window. “I didn’t propose to Caroline, and from what I’ve been able to learn, she lied to you about everything.” Millie stopped pushing. “Why would she do that? I’m just the nanny.” “You were a threat, and one she wanted to get rid of, so she lied. Told you all sorts of horrible things.” “She also allowed me to see the truth. You’ll be ostracized from all of your good friends if you continue associating with me.” “That doesn’t bother me in the least.” Millie let out a snort. “It does, or at least it will when you’re friendless.” “I’m not friendless. I have you, Lucetta, Oliver and Harriet when they get home, and I could go on and on.” “You’ve run out of names, haven’t you?” “May I come in?” Frowning, Millie leaned closer to him. “Why didn’t you just use the door in the first place?” “Mr. Kenton slammed it in my face.” Millie grinned. “How delightful! But . . . oh, very well.” She pushed the window open again. “Couldn’t you simply go and open the door for me?” “And incur the wrath of Mr. Kenton? Not likely.” Grumbling

My reclamation would be accomplished, like Malcom's, through books, through my own study and exploration. Perhaps I might write something of consequence someday. I had been reading and writing beyond the purview of the schools all my life. Already I was scribbling down bad rap lyrics and bad poetry. The air of that time was charged with the call for a return, to old things, to something essential, some part of us that had been left behind in the mad dash out of the past and into America.

Why won’t you give up this silly idea of homesteading?” Gertrude went on. Her tone of voice was moderate, but her blue eyes were snapping. “I can’t help thinking you’re just being stubborn, Lily. Caleb is well able to provide for you, I assure you. He comes from one of the finest families in Pennsylvania—I’ve known the Hallidays a long time.” Lily looked down at the floor for a moment, gathering her courage. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said softly. Gertrude sighed. “Do sit down,” she told Lily kindly, taking a chair herself. “Now what is it that I would find so difficult to understand?” “I love Caleb very much,” Lily began in a shaky voice, “but I’m not the woman for him.” Mrs. Tibbet raised her eyebrows. “Oh? And why not?” Lily leaned forward in her chair and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I think I may be like my mother.” “How so?” Mrs. Tibbet asked, smoothing her skirts. “She was—she drank. And there were men. Lots of men.” “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Tibbet seriously. “And you drink?” Lily swallowed. “Well—no.” “Then there are men.” “Only Caleb,” Lily said quietly. “But he can make me do and say the most shameful things. I’m so afraid it’s because I’m—er—hot-blooded.” Mrs. Tibbet looked as though she might be trying to suppress a smile. “You wouldn’t be the first girl who’d given herself to a man before marriage, Lily. It isn’t a wise course of action, but it happens often enough.” Lily drew in a deep breath. “I suppose the drinking would come later,” she said, discounting Mrs. Tibbet’s remarks as mere kindness. “And then the men. No, I’m sure I’m better off going on with my life just as I’ve planned.” There was a rap at the door, and then Velvet put her head inside. “Pardon, missus, but dinner’s ready, and the men say they’re going to eat without you if you don’t hurry.” “We’ll be there in a moment,” Mrs. Tibbet answered. “And tell the men that if they don’t wait, they’ll have me to deal with.” “Yes, ma’am,” Velvet replied with a hint of laughter in her voice. The door closed with a click. Mrs. Tibbet turned back to her guest. “If you were my own daughter, Lily, I would tell you the same thing. You couldn’t do better than Caleb Halliday if you searched the world over for a man. Don’t throw away a chance at real happiness—it might be the only one you get.” Lily pushed herself out of her chair and went to stand at the window. From there she could see the moon rising above the roof of the house next door; it looked as though it had just squeezed out of the chimney. “Sometimes I think I know what I want. I’ll decide that I want to marry Caleb and forget all about having a homestead. But then I remember what Mama was like.” “Lily, you’re not your mother.” “No,” Lily agreed sadly, turning to face Mrs. Tibbet, her hands clasped in front of her. “But Mama was young and happy once, and she must have thought she was in love with my father. She married him, she had his children. And then something changed, and she began to drink. Papa went away—I don’t even remember him—and the men started coming around, one after the other …” Gertrude came to take Lily’s hands in her own. “Things will be different for you,” she said quietly. “You’re strong, and so is Caleb. Oh, Lily, don’t be afraid to take a chance.” At that moment the colonel thundered from the hallway that he was going to have his supper right then whether the women cared to come to the table or not, and Lily smiled. “I promise I’ll think things through very carefully, Mrs. Tibbet.” “Don’t take too long,” Gertrude answered, ushering her toward the door of the study. “Fate can take the strangest twists and turns, sealing us off from someone when we least expect it.” At

When it comes to music and the general question of style, the only style God seems to be concerned with is lifestyle.

The gospel that is transcultural can be encultured into any culture—through nearly any area of human endeavor—as long we realize that no culture or subculture owns the gospel outright.

rap that dishonors God does not ruin all rap. God is redeeming rap.

Busywork generally gets a bad rap in our real lives, but when we choose it for ourselves, it actually helps us feel quite contented and productive.

The cities change. The bus line is different. The train runs on another track, but the scene is the same. Everyday in America, South Africa and other places in the world like them. Black people. My people. Travelin. To be cooks, janitors, housekeepers, porters, days workers, servants, Black boys, Beige girls, Brown daddies, Ebony mothers.

The results are consistent with the worldview divide. The fluid reported that they love rap and hip-hop, along with a remarkable range of other favorites that include both widely popular genres (such as pop, rock, and classic rock) and a lot of niche interests. For example, a smattering of people identified world music, Korean pop, and electronic dance music, all of which have their roots outside the United States, as their favorites.

To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize? We all know who it is that we are not permitted to criticize. We all know who it is that it is a sin to criticize. Sodomy is no longer a sin in America. Treason, and burning and spitting and urinating on the American flag is no longer a sin in America. Gross desecration of Catholic or Protestant religious symbols is no longer a sin in America. Cop-killing is no longer a sin in America - it is celebrated in rap "music." The degradation of beautiful young girls in disgusting pornography is no longer a sin in America. The killing by the multiple millions of the next generation in the womb is no longer a sin in America. But anti-semitism is the ultimate sin in America. But as things get worse and worse, we are losing our fear of this silly word. We all know who it is that controls the wealth of our nation through their exchanges and counting-houses in New York. We all know who it is that has deformed the minds of two generations of Americans with their television programs.

The world calls on us to listen. Listen, says my daughter, who is writing a paper on Emily Dickinson. Listen, says my son, tucking an earbud in my ear so I can hear the angry rap song that he loves. Listen, says a friend, I have to tell somebody what just happened. . . .

Us yokels who majored in beer and getting the skirts off Tri-Delts bear no responsibility for Thoreau’s hippie jive or John Kenneth Galbraith’s nitwit economics or Henry Kissinger’s brown-nosing the Shah of Iran. None of us served as models for characters in that greasy Love Story book. Our best and brightest stick to running insurance agencies and don’t go around cozening the nation into Vietnam wars. It wasn’t my school that laid the educational groundwork for FDR’s demagoguery or JFK’s Bay of Pigs slough-off or even Teddy Roosevelt’s fool decision to split the Republican Party and let that buttinski Wilson get elected. You can’t pin the rap on us.

I believed love was all you need. I believed you should be here now. I believed drugs could make everyone a better person. I believed I could hitchhike to California with 35 cents and people would be glad to feed me. I believed Mao was cute. I believed private property was wrong. I believed my girlfriend was a witch. I believed my parents were Nazi space monsters. I believed the university was putting saltpeter in the cafeteria food. I believed stones had souls. I believed the NLF were the good guys in Vietnam. I believed Lyndon Johnson was plotting to murder all the Negroes. I believed Yoko Ono was an artist. I believed Bob Dylan was a musician. I believed I would live forever or until I was 21, whichever came first. I believed the world was coming to an end. I believed the Age of Aquarius was about to begin. I believed the I Ching said to cut classes and take over the Dean's office. I believed wearing my hair long would end poverty and injustice. I believed there was a great throbbing web of cosmic mucus and we were all part of it somehow. I managed to believe Gandhi and H. Rap Brown at the same time. With the exception of anything my mom and dad said, I believed everything.

It’s not a mistake I’m an alien experiment, I was born and placed in a tube. When I fuck girls in the ass, I do it without lube. I don't even have to look at the page to write this dude. The spirit of God is how I move. This shit's too easy, especially when you live eternally. I'm a fucking Wolf, the Alpha, and I was locked in a zoo It's just beginning, I'm sinking my teeth deeper inside of you Into your soul Where we're going only I know Connecting all your dots Never-ending Driving the wrong way on the street Hydroplaning through 4 feet Of water, like Paul Walker, the fire's getting hotter And I can't get out

I spent a lot of time in an incubator as a babe The save of my life the doctors made After months in the hospital I was taken home To eat with big boobies on my dome What I mean by that is that they were always on my mind Keep writing, boy, you’re getting it right this time Don’t give up now, keep writing, you’ll be happy in the end The truth is in the end you are your greatest friend You are an introvert and you live inside of your mind Express yourself to the world, you’ll find more friends in time As I grew, time passed and things were really great My mom she always kept me fed, kept food upon my plate I ended up real fat, I was a chubby baby I ate to satisfy my id, that’s psychology, ladies

I know studying literature or rhetoric in general can get a bad rap," I said. "There are a lot of people who ask what's the point, poring over words that were written twenty, fifty, two hundred years ago. And doing it again and again, after there's already been so much written on the subject. But ultimately I think it's about learning to pay attention. Learning to examine something closely, and ask questions, and place it in different frameworks to see how it might change. As a culture we are what we write about, and examining those texts can teach us a lot about how we see the world.

Roxanne Shanté out-rapping grown men at fourteen. Serena winning the US Open at seventeen. Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein at eighteen. Josephine Baker conquering Paris at nineteen. Zelda Fitzgerald’s high school diary was so fire that her future husband stole entire passages to write The Great Gatsby. The eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley published her first piece at fourteen, while enslaved. Joan of Arc. Greta Thunberg. Teen girls rearrange the fucking world.

Despair is a paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bottom of Onondaga Lake. But how can we submit to despair while the land is saying 'Help'? Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It's not enough to grieve. It's not enough to just stop doing bad things. We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It's time we started doing the dishes in Mother Earth's kitchen. Doing dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows that that's where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms relationships.

When we listen to our rage, we pay homage to our anger. While raging at our loved ones is not ideal, we are entitled to all our emotions. “Anger has a bad rap,” says Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her. “But it is actually one of the most hopeful and forward-thinking of all our emotions. It begets transformation, manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rational and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder.” Part of inviting my rage to tea is about healing my perfectionism and the hateful ways I treat myself when I don’t hit that “perfect mother” bar. If I pull back the curtains on my rage, poke around and locate my needs, fears, and hurt places, I understand myself better. I witness my vulnerability and am able to offer myself compassion. With this additional access to empathy, I don’t pounce on myself as quickly. Instead, I practice my mothering skills—Whoops, there’s that rage popping up again. Let’s see if I can give myself what I need. By inviting my rage to tea, I am doing what I need most: I am mothering myself. Maybe I can be precious, too.

From where I lay, I listened to the low, resonant, steady rap-rap-rap, stone laid on stone, rising like a column to support the vault of heaven. Those who believe in such things say the sound represents the footsteps of a lost soul treading across the Bridge of Siraat, thinner than a strand of hair, sharper than a sword, straddling precariously the void between this world and the next. At every step, the soul jettisons yet another one of its innumerable burdens, until finally it lets go of everything, including all the pain stored within.

I may have affected the future … no, I have affected the future. And I don’t know how, and that’s what frightens me so much.” “Um.” Anselm grunted thoughtfully, and motioned to a passing lay brother, who hastened over with a fresh pasty and more ale. He refilled both cups before speaking. “If you have taken life, you have also preserved it. How many of the sick you have treated would have died without your intervention? They also will affect the future. What if a person you have saved should commit an act of great evil? Is that your fault? Should you on that account have let that person die? Of course not.” He rapped his pewter mug on the table for emphasis. “You say that you are afraid to take any actions here for fear of affecting the future. This is illogical, Madame. Everyone’s actions affect the future. Had you remained in your own place, your actions would still have affected what was to happen, no less than they will now. You have still the same responsibilities that you would have had then—that any man has at any time. The only difference is that you may be in a position to see more exactly what effects your actions have—and then again, you may not.” He shook his head, looking steadily across the table. “The ways of the Lord are hidden to us, and no doubt for good reason. You are right, ma chère; the laws of the Church were not formulated with situations such as yours in mind, and therefore you have little guidance other than your own conscience and the hand of God. I cannot tell you what you should do, or not do. “You have free choice; so have all the others in this world. And history, I believe, is the cumulation of all those actions. Some individuals are chosen by God to affect the destinies of many. Perhaps you are one of those. Perhaps not. I do not know why you are here. You do not know. It is likely that neither of us will ever know.” He rolled his eyes, comically. “Sometimes I don’t even know why I am here!” I laughed and he smiled in return. He leaned toward me across the rough planks of the table, intense. “Your knowledge of the future is a tool, given to you as a shipwrecked castaway might find himself in possession of a knife or a fishing line. It is not immoral to use it, so long as you do so in accordance with the dictates of God’s law, to the best of your ability.

I took a black and white photograph, which I also posted on Instagram. Her New Balance shoes and her feet crossed, hanging as she sat atop the pile of aluminum chairs, against the backdrop of the many legs of the chairs shining in the street lights in contrast to her dark shoes and leggings, were so captivating. There was a lightness in the way she sat there with her crossed legs dangling, as if she was perched on a cloud and it was the most natural thing as she was my angel. I was still unsure if she really existed or if I had only made her up with Pinto cat one night. It was all like a lucid dream. I was so glad for us and for us becoming rich soon too. I was so glad I could provide her with a future in Europe. I was so glad we would be rich and happy and we would be able to make all our dreams come true and travel the world freely together. I can show her Italy and Hungary and Europe. We can pick where do we want to live or make family. I knew all my life, all my work had led to this girl, this moment, and this future. Ours. She started to rap in Spanish in the Rioplatense dialect as I started to record her. „Loco, loco…” - she was so cute, it sounded like she had learned it on the streets of Buenos Aires, skipping school. She was amazing - so young, so true, so natural and pure and cute. I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to make kids with her. With only her. Nobody else. By the wall of the church and the bar tables, there were a bunch of metal mobile railings with the Ajuntamiento de Barcelona logo in the middle of each of them. I told Martina to squat down to the level of the Ajuntamiento sign, and before I could finish my sentence, she was already doing it. She posed with the mobile railings, making a funny, cool and happy face while squeezing the Ajuntamiento logo between two of her fingers and pointing at it with her other hand, as if we were mocking the authorities of the Ajuntamiento. She was reading my mind. Like she knew magic. She was such a good girl. She was so pretty, smart and sexy. She was smiling, biting her lower lip, excited, turned on, and in love, I thought, looking like a bunny, or like Whitney Houston on the Brazilian live concert video, so I began to call her “Bunny”. I showed her how Whitney was smiling the same way. I was so blind to see the connection. (“The Cocaine Queen”) I was so much in love with her, so under her spell, I just really wanted her to be the One, I guess. I explained to her that the Camorra was one of my costumers and they had a club close by too and they were taking away other people's coffeeshops, menacing their lives and their families'. I explained to her that we were going to do all demolition and remodeling without any permit, without telling a word to anyone. I told her that we would lie to the residents of the building above us about what we were going to do there for months and months. I told her that she must keep it as our secret. She was nodding happily and she seemed happy that I trusted her. I explained everything to her, I told her about Rachel and Tom and I signing the founding document at Amina's office at the beginning of the same year, 2013. She seemed to understand the weight of all I told her and the reasons why I told her about it all, so she would know, so she wouldn't make a mistake saying the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I asked her to pay attention to her surroundings in Barcelona from then on, as there were a lot of criminals, and she was a very pretty girl - not only my girlfriend. She seemed to take it as a privilege to be my girlfriend, and she seemed eternally happy, as was I. I told her that she was the only person I fully trusted. I wanted to send the video of Martina rapping on WhatsApp to Adam, but Martina told me I shouldn't because it was late and, at the end, Adam was my boss. “Yeah but he is not really my boss, in Spain, I am the boss.

But when I landed in college, I noticed what looked like a gleaming. A goofy, doofy, curly-haired man with broad shoulders brushed by me in the hallway one day. He smelled like cinnamon. He had teddy-brown eyes and performed in the college’s improv group. He was the best one by far, made big gestures, made jokes from a place of kindness and whimsy, pulled ripples of laughter out of this cold, hard world. I used to sit in the audience and marvel. He seemed like an impossibility. It took years. Years of slowly befriending him through mutual friends. Years of calling into his late-night, freestyle-rap radio show, daring my tongue to try… to rhyme on the fly! I even joined the improv group. And eventually, one night I told him how I felt and instead of flinching away, as I had assumed he would, as the boys in the hallway had made it seem that he would, he kissed me. After graduating college, we moved in together, to a small one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with a red Formica table and a great front stoop. I finagled my way into a job helping produce a radio program all about science and wonder. He was continuing with comedy—stand-up and improv and writing—and working as a yellow-cab driver to support himself. We stayed up late into the night, sipping beers on the stoop, talking about our days, turning awkward moments and missteps into jokes. I felt like I had found the thing I had thought could never exist. Refuge. It smelled like cinnamon and its walls were made of bad puns and cheap rhymes, piling higher and higher against the chill of the world. My head became full of visions for the future. The TV shows we would write, the tree houses we would build, the way the grass would curl between our toes as we chased our kids through the yard. Until, seven years into it, I toppled the whole thing. Late one night on a beach five hundred miles away from him, possessed by moonlight and red wine and the smell of a bonfire, I reached out for the bouncing blond girl I had been trying not to eye all night. She was wet from swimming; she was prickled in goose bumps, hundreds of goose bumps, that I wanted to press flat with my tongue. She smiled as I placed my hand on her waist, as I touched my lips to her neck. The stars wrapped around us. Her steam became mine. When I told the curly-haired man what I had done, he told me it was over.

The house itself bore the same attention to detail that made the garden so charming; the doorstep had been neatly scrubbed and the brass knocker polished to a high sheen. The knocker was a charming little dormouse, and my hand went instinctively to the tiny velvet mouse in my pocket. Chester had been my most constant companion, much loved and carried around the world and back. The fact that he had been mended once or twice with Stoker’s painstaking stitching only made him the more valuable. I stroked his back with a fingertip while Augusta rapped at the cottage door.

Not everyone shared Cronkite’s exuberance. All that money—and for what? many wondered. So much money spent so that between 1969 and 1972 a dozen white men could take the express train to a lifeless world? Why, Negro women and men could barely go to the next state without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, and service stations that wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the bathroom. Now they wanted to talk about a white man on the Moon? “A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the Moon,” rapped performer Gil Scott-Heron in a song that stormed the airwaves that year.

I understand not everyone believes in God with a capital “G”, or god or gods – whether it be Allah, Krishna, Ra, Jesus Christ, Eminem the “rap god”, or any other deity, or alleged deity, I have not mentioned. I do. I don’t believe in a purposeless multiverse. I believe the purpose of the multiverse is to grant any number of sentient beings their greatest desires and wishes if they are willing to work for them without fear. I believe that the fun of doing so comes in the challenge; in the striving for the goal, the striving for the betterment of the multiverse and understanding that the fulfillment of our dreams doesn’t always materialize in a way we expected. To me, that’s one of the most beautiful tenets of life. What fun would life be if we knew every answer?

I’m so fucking grateful for his existence, for being my brother, my true family. Now’s not the place in my story for this but shit, damnit, fuckit, when he started writing lyrics over my bass lines his artistry gave me new life. My heart grew a couple of sizes. The color of his words, the sharp sound of the syllables cracking together. Both his lyrics and my bass lines pulsed together, same as the heartbeat of our friendship. It was the conversation we’d started in the Fairfax gymnasium translated into music. When his words met my grooves they flowed together unconsciously, like they’d always been together, like baby wolf twins bursting out of the dark den of their infancy, joyfully embracing the infinite light of the outside world for the first time. When he wrote “Green Heaven,” a long and dynamic rap narrative over our hard funk, I was on the phone for hours, trembling with emotion, calling everyone I knew and excitedly reciting the entire song.

The ego has gotten a bad rap. Contrary to modern Western thinking, it isn’t inherently negative. In fact, without it, our soul could never manifest its consciousness in this world. Furthermore, the ego is the fundamental creative tool of the soul within this dimension. You could think of the soul as the writer of reality, and the ego is the pen that inks the higher self’s energy onto the paper of the world.

Many of the Fox family’s close friends were discovering their own gift for mediumship. Isaac Post found that if he entered a trance, he was guided by the spirits to write down their messages. In 1851, the year that Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared in serial form and Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables and Melville’s Moby Dick were published, Isaac compiled messages from William Penn, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Emanuel Swedenborg, and others into a three-hundred-page volume called Voices from the Spirit World; Being Communications From Many Spirits by the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium. The messages, Isaac said, had been transcribed through automatic writing that sometimes occurred in the presence of “A.L. Fish (a rapping medium).” In 1852 Charles Hammond, the Universalist minister who had watched in awe as the furniture danced and floated in front of him at one of the sisters’ early seances, produced a book called Light from the Spirit World; The Pilgrimage of Thomas Paine, and Others, to the Seventh Circle in the Spirit World.

Rapper NoClue set the world record in 2005 for fastest rapper by rapping 723 syllables in 51.27 seconds.

William Shakespeare's character Hamlet said it best: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” It is how we interpret these emotions—and choose to handle them—that makes the difference. Anger, for example, gets a bad rap. While many let it lead them to violence, others let it lead them to positive action. Many of the most significant, positive changes in this world came about because someone became angry about an injustice and let that anger drive them to do something about it.

Whatever music you were into, it was exploding in the Nineties. Guitar bands, hip-hop, R&B, techno, country, Britpop, trip-hop, blip-hop, ambient, illbient, jungle, ska, swing, Belgian jam bands, Welsh gangsta rap—every music genre you could name (or couldn’t)—(and a few that probably didn’t really exist) was on a roll that made the Sixties look picayune and provincial. We can argue all day whether Nineties music holds up, but fans devoured—and paid for—more music than ever before or since. The average citizen purchased CDs in numbers that look shocking now, and even shocking then. Every week, thousands of people bought new copies of the Grease soundtrack, from 1978, and nobody knew why. Even critics had trouble finding things to complain about (though we sure tried).

Anger, for example, gets a bad rap. While many let it lead them to violence, others let it lead them to positive action. Many of the most significant, positive changes in this world came about because someone became angry about an injustice and let that anger drive them to do something about it.

In his first class of the day, correlated language arts, a class for students at least two years below their grade level in English, Boobie Miles spent the period working on a short research paper that he called “The Wonderful Life of Zebras.” He thumbed through various basic encyclopedia entries on the zebra. He ogled at how fast they ran (“Damn, they travel thirty miles”) and was so captivated by a picture of a zebra giving birth that he showed it to a classmate (“Want to see it have a baby, man?”). By the end of the class, Boobie produced the following thesis paragraph: Zebras are one of the most unusual animals in the world today. The zebra has many different kind in it nature. The habitat of the zebra is in wide open plain. Many zebras have viris types of relatives. He then went on to algebra I, a course that the average college-bound student took in ninth grade and some took in eighth. Because of his status as a special needs student, Boobie hadn’t taken the course until his senior year. He was having difficulty with it and his average midway through the fall was 71. After lunch it was on to creative writing, where Boobie spent a few minutes playing with a purple plastic gargoyle-looking monster. He lifted the fingers of the monster so it could pick its nose, then stuck his own fingers into its mouth. There were five minutes of instruction that day; students spent the remaining fifty-odd minutes working on various stories they were writing. They pretty much could do what they wanted. Boobie wrote a little and also explained to two blond-haired girls what some rap terms meant, that “chillin’ to the strength,” for example, meant “like cool to the max.” Boobie enjoyed this class. It gave him an unfettered opportunity to express himself, and the teacher didn’t expect much from him. His whole purpose in life, she felt, was to be a football player. “That’s the only thing kids like that have going for them, is that physical strength,” she said.

end of the class he stood in the doorway to block the Frenchman’s exit. “You’re going around the world showing people pictures of how to use condoms?” Cool B asked mockingly. “I’ll show you what to do.” He snatched away the man’s prospectus and, reading from the text, improvised an anti-AIDS rap on the spot in the manner of LL Cool J. The Frenchman was impressed. Within a couple of days, he had arranged for Cool B to record the rap at a downtown nightclub, and the song made him a momentary celebrity among Abidjan youth. It also began his long association with white people—among them Petra, his girlfriend, who eventually went back to Germany, and Éliane de Latour, a French filmmaker who employed him for a while as a researcher on a feature about Abidjan youth. Cool B keeps pictures of them on his wall, and he tries to figure out why, in spite of these connections, he remains stuck in Koumassi. He spends his ample free time and his limited funds at a local Internet café, surfing international dating sites and chat rooms where people he knows have found marriage opportunities that got them out of Africa. Or he visits

What kind of world had I descended into that nearly getting rapped had fallen to the bottom of my list of concerns?

Blame the world if you wish, but counting tears will not make you rich.

From a young age, football was my passion, and this love for the sport led me to pursue a career as a professional footballer in England. While it was a dream come true, the financial rewards weren’t as substantial as I had hoped. Realizing the need for financial security beyond my football career, I began exploring alternative investment opportunities. At the time, Bitcoin was a hot topic among my colleagues, and their enthusiasm sparked my interest. With growing curiosity, I decided to invest £8,000 in Bitcoin, and over time, my investment grew to an impressive £50,000. This financial success gave me the confidence to expand my business ventures and take on larger projects. However, my excitement was short-lived when I fell victim to a sophisticated phishing scam. One day, I encountered a website that looked identical to my trusted trading platform. Believing it was legitimate, I entered my login details without hesitation. Shortly after, I discovered that my Bitcoin wallet had been emptied. Years of hard work and financial growth vanished in an instant. I was devastated and felt completely helpless. A friend in the crypto community recommended Rapid Digital Recovery, a team known for helping individuals recover stolen cryptocurrency. Desperate for a solution, I reached out to them, What sapp Info: +1 41 4 80 7 14 85, hoping they could help me reclaim what I had lost. From the very first interaction, I was impressed by their professionalism, expertise, and efficiency.The team at Rapid Digital Recovery thoroughly investigated the fraudulent activity, and to my immense relief, they managed to recover most of my stolen funds. Beyond their technical expertise, they also took the time to educate me on essential security measures. They recommended using hardware wallets for added safety, enabling two-factor authentication (2FA), and double-checking website URLs to avoid phishing scams in the future. Their guidance proved invaluable, not only helping me recover my funds but also ensuring that I could better protect my investments moving forward. My journey with Bitcoin has been a mix of success and challenges. While I’ve experienced the joy of financial growth, I’ve also learned the harsh realities of the digital world. Thanks to Rapid Digital Recovery, I now approach cryptocurrency with caution and confidence, armed with the knowledge to navigate this complex space securely. Email INFO: rap iddi gita lrecov ery @ exe cs. com

Investing in cryptocurrencies can seem like an exciting way to grow wealth, but it comes with its fair share of risks. I learned this the hard way. After diving into the world of crypto trading, I quickly became entangled with a company that promised huge returns, only to find myself swindled. Trying to recover lost funds in the world of crypto can be incredibly frustrating, especially when you're unsure who to trust or where to turn. I had heard about the lucrative opportunities crypto trading offered and got involved with an online platform that seemed legitimate at first. They presented themselves as experts, offering professional trading strategies and helping users navigate the volatile crypto market. However, over time, things started to unravel. The platform began showing signs of suspicious activity, and before I knew it, I had lost a substantial amount of money. I was devastated when I realized that I had been scammed out of over $82,050. The experience was emotionally and financially draining. I spent countless hours trying to reach out to the platform for explanations, but my efforts were futile. I was left with little hope, facing the grim reality that my money might never be recovered. I almost gave up, thinking there was no way to reclaim what was rightfully mine. But fate had other plans. Through some online research and a bit of luck, I came across Rapid Digital Recovery, a company specializing in helping individuals recover funds lost to online scams. At first, I was skeptical after all, I had already been scammed, and the idea of trusting another service felt risky. However, after learning more about their track record and seeing numerous success stories from others who had been in similar situations, I decided to give them a try. From the moment I reached out to Rapid Digital Recovery, What sapp Info: +1 41 4 80 7 14 85.. I knew I was in good hands. The team was professional, empathetic, and knowledgeable. They explained their process clearly, keeping me updated every step of the way. They worked diligently to trace my funds and communicate with the fraudulent company, negotiating on my behalf. To my surprise, they managed to recover 90% of my lost funds, along with some of the profits that had initially lured me into the scam. It was an immense relief to see that, despite the challenges, there are still organizations like Rapid Digital Recovery who genuinely care about helping victims of online fraud. My experience with them was nothing short of life-changing, and I am incredibly grateful for their support. Email INFO: rap iddi gita lrecov ery @ exe cs. com...If you find yourself in a similar situation, I wholeheartedly recommend reaching out to Rapid Digital Recovery. Good work deserves recognition, and I can confidently say that they are the reason I was able to recover a significant portion of what I had lost.

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So you’re both going in, maybe not exactly trading lines, but you’re both the leads. Like all of those girl rap duos that’ve been so big. You’re showing each other up, but you’re wanting the same thing…” He struck a pose. “Back to back at times, then facing each other, then one of you steps forward.” He did a confident walk across the room. “Push her behind with the fingers, a little bitchy, you know? But, you’re both there. You’re both killing it. You’re both showing the world how much fucking hotter it is to be 29 than it is to be 19

BATTLE RAP, n. A type of performance art where two or more rappers engage in a verbal competition, using improvised or pre-written lyrics to showcase their skills in wordplay, lyricism, and delivery. The aim is to outwit the opponent and awe the audience. While it’s one of the few forms of creative language application that excite teenagers, schoolteachers tend to trivialize the work of 2Pac, Biggie Smalls, Jay-Z, and Eminem and idealize Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, and Harper Lee instead.