So i could spend it on something to put in this cup

I show this to anyone that says they like Daveed Diggs and their reactions every time are hilarious

this album was my shit back in the day and it will never not be smth i enjoy when i need it

midcity

Death Grips - Whatever I Want (Remix)

Our new track “Knees On The Ground” might benefit from an explanation. This is the most unguarded I ever intend to be when writing about Clipping.

What had happened was this: our very brief UK/Europe trip got called-off the day before we were supposed to get on a plane to London. Since we didn’t have any other plans, we met up in the studio with an idea to crank out a new track. On our list of songs to finish was one particular piece aimed directly at the club (or, at least, our twisted idea of what clubs should play). But none of us were in the mood for it. Each of us had spent the previous several days following the news of protests in Ferguson, MO. It was the only thing on our minds. We couldn’t bring ourselves to think about anything else, so we decided to direct our fear, our revulsion, our heartbreak into a new track.

The problem was that we’d defined our band — in interviews and to each other — as decidedly-not-an-activist-project. Diggs’s lyrics have been criticized for seeming apolitical, at least in comparison to what many listeners (perhaps rightly) expect to hear from an ‘experimental’ rap group. I have many times said (perhaps naïvely) that our politics lie in our structures, in our formal engagement with the rap genre. We love its conventions, its clichés, and we’re not above them. We see our participation in rap as something resembling an old punk flyer — an out-of-context collage of charged images with an fractured, contradictory, multiple point-of-view. I hope that our more dedicated listeners hear this and understand that we’re not interested in spoon-feeding them a position. At the same time, I’ve always assumed that they pretty much agree with us on most issues anyway. (We have yet to meet the misogynist, homophobic, white supremacist Clipping fan with an MBA and an NRA membership).

So what do we do when all we can think about, all we can feel, is a profound injustice — yet another young unarmed person of color is murdered by a police officer? How does a band, which overtly rejects affect and the emotions, address something that is, for its authors, a deeply felt, deeply affecting topic? Well, we don’t entirely know. But the fact is: there’s more truth in Diggs’s lyrics than we generally let on. “Inside Out” describes a drive-by shooting in Oakland, “Chain” is about three stick-ups. They are presented with a lot of detail and specificity (perhaps the result of personal experience). But at the same time, they represent archetypal scenarios within rap music. One trope we had yet to explore as Clipping was the anti-police rap — the lineage of Public Enemy, NWA and Paris, straight through The Coup, and all the way into the ‘stop snitching’ panic of the early 2000s. “Knees On The Ground” is a paradigmatic white-cop-kills-an-unarmed-black-kid-and-gets-away-with-it tale — a story that happens all the fucking time in the US. What we have learned — from our first hand experience in Oakland in 2009, and from the media coverage of Ferguson in 2014 — is that the second part of this story involves a police response better suited to a war zone than to an American city. Cops think they’re playing Call Of Duty when they’re supposed to be part of a community. If Ferguson were in Iraq, Obama would have sent in an airstrike already.

This is the least obtuse Diggs’s lyrics will ever get. We’re embarrassed by the timeliness of this track. We do not intend to capitalize on what is, undoubtedly, a terrible tragedy. But journalists make think-pieces and we make songs. Writers write what they know, and this is what we know right fucking now.

— William Hutson, Clipping.

Knees On The Ground

OTT and Skin on Skin (1997 Bootleg) mashup

Burn Dem Tower (Mashup)

loud

think for yourself 

add us on steam: blackhandpath 
book us in your dumbass city: theblackhandpath@gmail.com 
tell us we're ugly on twitter: @blackhandpath

Margaret Ozierski

The Primitives Talk

Bodyguard

49er Lighter

Quietly Being The Best

You think the economic situation in the Congo is bad? Wait until you hear about government funded sex abuse in the Korean pop industry. Sell your bong for guns while you still can. The human body is the most effective killing machine ever designed by mother nature and it is unlikely that it is a coincidence that your soul resides in this particular vessel. Is Kim Kardashian a greater global force than juche ideology? You think the economic situation in Greece is bad? Wait until you hear about the working conditions of the peasants who build snowmobiles in the Caucus mountains. Avoid paying child support by converting all your assets to cryptocurrencies (E-mail me and I'll do it for you for 9 percent of gross, 8 percent if converting to Etherium.) Shouts out to the girl on the treadmill in front of me. Wowee!! What's the chemical formulation of fluoride this week? Next chick I see in boot-cut jeans is getting spin kicked in the fucking jaw. How many antique nightstands do you think Jimmy Iovine can buy with the money he's made from releasing compilations of negro spirituals? The primary concern with being a degenerate is that there is always someone who will sink lower. Bring back violence.

loud

clipping.

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