Link Salad, the Myth of the Militant Edition
-- Tupac: The Man, Not the Myth - Zach Baron, GQ, Mar. 2015
"He was a man who had more good in him than most of us, and more evil, too. Listen to "Dear Mama," still heart-stopping in its sweetness, its honesty, its blunt conviction. But then there's "Hit 'Em Up," the song he recorded and released at the peak of hip-hop's East Coast-West Coast feud, aimed squarely at his onetime friend Biggie: still among the purest, angriest, and most terrifying dis tracks ever recorded. The force of it still resonates-a force he brought to all things, wisely or not. He was a talented, instinctive actor who, after being fired from Menace II Society, beat up a Hughes brother. When he starred in Poetic Justice, Janet Jackson so feared him that, Tupac later claimed, she tried to make him take an AIDS test before she'd consent to an on-screen kiss. Many of his close friends can still remember seeing him cry, often over very little, and start fights over less. Rap fans will remember his handwriting, full of life. How many strangers' handwriting do we recognize, decades after they're gone?"
-- This American Life - David Remnick, The New Yorker, Apr. 25, 2011
"Yet, when Obama was young and trying to come to terms with his own identity, he read the autobiography and it affected him more deeply than even the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. In balmy Hawaii, at the most prestigious private school west of the Rockies, Obama found something in the narrative of a man who was also of mixed race, had lost his father, and needed to create a self. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me,” Obama wrote of Malcolm in “Dreams from My Father.” “The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.” Obama, who adored his white mother and grandparents, was disturbed by Malcolm’s desire to “expunge” the white blood in him. What he admired was the book’s depiction of Malcolm’s redemptive journey and his redemptive, universalist final year."
"He was a man who had more good in him than most of us, and more evil, too. Listen to "Dear Mama," still heart-stopping in its sweetness, its honesty, its blunt conviction. But then there's "Hit 'Em Up," the song he recorded and released at the peak of hip-hop's East Coast-West Coast feud, aimed squarely at his onetime friend Biggie: still among the purest, angriest, and most terrifying dis tracks ever recorded. The force of it still resonates-a force he brought to all things, wisely or not. He was a talented, instinctive actor who, after being fired from Menace II Society, beat up a Hughes brother. When he starred in Poetic Justice, Janet Jackson so feared him that, Tupac later claimed, she tried to make him take an AIDS test before she'd consent to an on-screen kiss. Many of his close friends can still remember seeing him cry, often over very little, and start fights over less. Rap fans will remember his handwriting, full of life. How many strangers' handwriting do we recognize, decades after they're gone?"
-- This American Life - David Remnick, The New Yorker, Apr. 25, 2011
"Yet, when Obama was young and trying to come to terms with his own identity, he read the autobiography and it affected him more deeply than even the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. In balmy Hawaii, at the most prestigious private school west of the Rockies, Obama found something in the narrative of a man who was also of mixed race, had lost his father, and needed to create a self. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me,” Obama wrote of Malcolm in “Dreams from My Father.” “The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.” Obama, who adored his white mother and grandparents, was disturbed by Malcolm’s desire to “expunge” the white blood in him. What he admired was the book’s depiction of Malcolm’s redemptive journey and his redemptive, universalist final year."