11:38am
After my last little reference to hip-hop, one regular commenter recommended a link to a clip on YouTube. It turned out to be Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" , which I remember enjoying when it first came out all those decades ago.
At the time, I was half-willing to believe it might open the door to a wave of creativity. But I've never been particularly thrilled by any rap that I've stumbled across since then. Ta-Nehisi Coates' interesting essay on Bill Cosby, celebrity turned social campaigner, takes him to task for condemning rap, and argues that jazz suffered the same opprobrium a couple of generations ago. Well, there's an element of truth in that. Some critics, for instance, thought commercial swing induced sexual mania. (And they may have been right.) But as Ross Douthat points out, it was the milieu, the drugs and the booze that unsettled the puritans most of all.
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11:35am
A sceptical Douthat goes on to ask whether rap will one day become a highbrow pursuit. I can't resist borrowing the clip of Ben Folds channeling Dr Dre. Be warned: bad language ahead...
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11:31am
"He is already on to the next big thing in his career, with the premiership (in Alan Bennett's wonderful phrase) merely a stage in his spiritual journey..."
Robert Harris is on good form this morning.
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10:10am
While The American Spectator accuses him of being a card-carrying Palestinian, the Senator engages in a thoughtful Q&A with Jeffrey Goldberg:
Sometimes I’m attacked in the press for maybe being too deliberative. My staff teases me sometimes about anguishing over moral questions. I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives. The point is, if you look at my writings and my history, my commitment to Israel and the Jewish people is more than skin-deep and it’s more than political expediency...
The other irony in this whole process is that in my early political life in Chicago, one of the raps against me in the black community is that I was too close to the Jews… When I started organizing, the two fellow organizers in Chicago were Jews, and I was attacked for associating with them. So I’ve been in the foxhole with my Jewish friends, so when I find on the national level my commitment being questioned, it’s curious.
[Via Real Clear Politics]
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1:21pm
A displaced Burmese girl helps her family cook in Kyauktan, some 30 miles southeast of Rangoon. Parts of the country are still cut off more than a week after it was struck by a devastating cyclone. [Photo credit: Khin Maung Win/AFP/Getty Images]
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