in lieu of the new terror alert warning by the United States Homeland Security Department, I thought I would post the lyrics of a song/speech I came across a few days ago. This is a song by Immortal Technique. However, it is not actually sung by him (it's just on his album), it is actually a recording of a piece by Mumia Abu Jamal. The piece is called "Homeland and Hip Hop". Here are the lyrics:

Homeland and Hip Hop

To think about the origins of hiphop in this culture and also about homeland security is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well to do and another of the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security it is seen in the gritty roots of hiphop.

For the music arises from the generation that feels with some justice that they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools feared on the streets and almost inevitably destined for the hellholes of prison.

They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved and this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry, one senses very little
hope about the personal goals of wealth, to climb above the pit of poverty.

In the broader society the opposite is true, for here more than any other place on earth wealth is so widespread and so bountiful that what passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. Their very opulence and relative wealth makes them insecure and homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoron as crazy as say military intelligence, or the US department of Justice.

They are just words that have very little relationship to reality.

Now do you feel safer now? do you think you will anytime soon?

Do you think duck tape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safer?

From death row,
this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

If you would like an audio version of this song/speech, check out an mp3 file called "Immortal Technique -- Homeland and Hip Hop". It's really good.

laters...