From his public playlists featuring artist like Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Cardi B and J. Cole to the various winks and nods to the culture in his speeches, Barack Obama has made it clear that he is a fan of hip-hop music.

 

But thanks to famed drummer for The Roots, Questlove, we have an even more clear idea of just how well-versed the 45th President of the United States is in hip-hop music and culture.

 

On an appearance on Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin’s ‘Broken Record’ podcast, QuestLove told the story of then-president Obama interrupting QuestLove’s 6-hour set at the final White House party, to request a song by French Montana.

 

“[Obama’s] coming up to me like, ‘Do you have French Montana?’ And I’m like, ‘Sir! I don’t have the clean versions of that.’ He’s like, ‘We’re all adults here. Play it!’ I’m like, ‘Sir, I’m not gonna play ‘Pop that pu**y, b***h.’'” Questlove recalled, paraphrasing the hook of Montana’s 2013 lead single “Pop That.”

 

Read more, here: https://bit.ly/2uBM3hC

 

Crazy fun. Loved it.

Having not read any Conan stories since my mid teens it was nice to find there was some free on Gutenberg. Even better the original Robert E. Howard stories.

It has everything you would expect from a Conan story, scantily clad wenches, bulging biceps, swordplay and black cloacked wizards and Conan in a girdle, didnt expect that bit...

And the cover they have used is great from Weird Tales Magazine.

Rock My Soul is about self-esteem in the African-American community. I’m not African-American and therefore some of the points she makes in her book do not apply to me, though they were interesting to read about. The main point the book makes is that, as a group, blacks have internalized so much negativity and falsehoods, dating back from slavery times, and also compounded by media images (especially eurocentric ones which paint any black features and characteristics as bad) that self-esteem is very low. Of course low self-esteem leads to a host of problems in society, and they are seen in the black family, in relationships between black men and women, and so on, so it’s definitely something that needs to be addressed.

A quote that really stood out to me went as follows:

” Any African-American who watches television for more than a few hours a week is daily ingesting toxic representations and poisonous pedagogy. Yet the ingestion of constant propaganda that teaches black people self-hate has become so much the norm that it is rarely questioned.”


And finally, to end with a great quote from Toni Cade Bambara:

“We often overestimate the degree to which exploitative behaviour has been normalized and the degree to which we’re internalized these norms. It takes, then, a commitment to an acutely self-conscious practice to be able to think and behave better than we’ve been taught.” – Toni Bambara