Hype Level Crazy: Missives from Trapistan

Eat Pray Thug is going to be the biggest hip hop album of March 2015 and my advice is you go and listen to it immediately, and, if you can, bang it. If the title doesn't strike you as clever or funny it may be time to give up on humor – the songs may change your mind anyway or they might make you angry, saddened, or incredibly hyped-up. It's out on 10 March and it's probably not going platinum (I hope I'm wrong) but I'll be damned if a more important record drops the same day or even this month. The stream is up on NPR, the PR/hype campaign is in effect, and creator Himanshu Suri has repeatedly pondered quitting rap during its creation. What's not to love?

What's it about? A kaleidoscopic amount of things, all of which deserve to be heard. A description would be insufficient. Listen to it: it's big, it's deep, it's love, it's honesty, it's drugs, it's fear, it's freedom, it's excruciating awareness and painful memories. First listen I was torn between appreciative laughter and stunned silence, the whole time the production, delivery, and content repeatedly wowed me. It made me troubled and giddy. I am currently rationing my plays so I can enjoy the album when it drops... it's so enjoyable ('Flag Shopping' is raw and real and awesome - classic Heems) that the danger lies in overdoing it.

Clocking in at under 40:00, this is Himanshu's most consistent and focused work to date, and it builds up to some incredible moments. There is a plethora of serious business to be alarmed about and a few very nice irreverent lines to chuckle about (sometimes the two collide), and it may or may not be discussed to death in a week's time so do yourself a favor if you give the smallest shit about rap and listen to the stream. It helps to know the artist and fortunately he's got two excellent mixtapes (Nehru Jackets, Wild Water Kingdom) to introduce you to his perspective. If you like the above, there's always Das Racist to listen to – if somehow you've been asleep for the past five years and missed out.

You shouldn't've been sleeping on Heems: Eat Pray Thug proves that much. When the hype settles, the qualities of this album will stand strong, its content will still ring true, and its creator will probably disappear into a humble life of giving back to the community, appreciating and creating art, and joining the young adult cult. Still, if that's the price we pay for Eat Pray Thug, it was all worth it.

If you can't feel this album you're a square, you're part of the problem, etc... you don't even have to like it to get the sense it's important, maybe even urgent. It is important. I might even drop a review next week to celebrate, and maybe three people will read it. It'll be alright. Life goes on. Nobody ever needed my help to sell records or anything.

User Comment Rodeo: One Very Stupid Internet Conspiracist (and Some Other Dummies)

This won't surprise anyone, but the internet is a proven haven for the undesirables of the world. More importantly, it is a place where legitimate discussion falls into disrepair - a great new arena where populism can continue to strangle the truth. The whole NeoPatriot Act debacle unfolding (as if it hadn't been reported on or a known factor since 2005) in the USA has brought out many of the stupidest users of comment systems. Firstly, since it's public record published on known narc/rat Google: surveillance culture is getting out of hand, it's shitty and regressive and will not solve the problem of terrorism. However I think I wrote about surveillance culture before, NSA agents will do the sifting and perhaps, if they're nice enough, will tell me where. 

In any case what matters to me at this moment is not the potential erosion of a so-called democracy or the blatant transformation of North America into some kind of paranoid, military-industrial, authoritarian, police state, corporatist plutocracy. That's old news. You either know it's true or delude yourself with happy feelings of consequence-free freedoms that don't really exist. Society is pretty... well it's boned right now. However, it doesn't feel like that on the street. You can go out, get drunk, pick up drugs, protest the system. Generally you don't get beaten up too badly, and you don't disappear.

What matters to me at this moment is what the public at large is thinking. As usual, the public at large is making me want to side with the plutocrats, because the public at large has some really, really odiously stupid people in it who are maybe not capable of independent thought. I wonder is the public even taking this seriously? Are they all joking when they use the comment boards? Sometimes, a very special individual with a loose grip on reality will post some interpretation of events that absolutely wipe away accumulated feelings of unease and doom. Some people are so out of it that I can't get angry at them. It would be like getting angry at a special needs person. No, all I can do is laugh and wish I saw the world so naively... then I could stop worrying and start hating.

It goes without saying that this man (no woman ever would be quite so proud of being so stupid as to publicly assert it) is an overblown idiot. Ignoring the 2008 recession and the bail-out of the finance industry (aka 'upperclass americans') and the ultimate reasons for the decline of the middle class (somehow the middle class hasn't figured out the giant, decades-long joke that is still being played on them and their complacent sense of entitlement) this guy out and out imagines that the IRS, NSA and Obama Socialists are plotting against their own. People like 'NoMoMaggots' should... write books? Work in Hollywood? Their fantasyland version of reality is too good for politics.