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best album of 2012?
Killer Mike – R.A.P. Music.

it had one of my favorite verses, ever.

You are witnessing elegance in the form of a black elephant
Smoking white rhino on terraces
Will I die slain like my king by a terrorist?
Will my woman be Coretta, take my name and cherish it?
Or will she Jackie O, drop the Kennedy, remarry it?
My sister say it’s necessary on some Cleopatra shit
My grandmama said nope, never, that it’s sacrilege
Tend to agree because the thought is so disparaging
The Lord give a load, you got to carry it like Mary did
That’s why I’m giving honor to all these baby mommas
It takes a woman’s womb to make a Christ or Dalai Lama
The world might take that child, turn that child into a monster
The Lord’ll take a monster and fashion him a saint
I present you Malcolm X for those who saying that He can’t
Saying that He won’t, when I know He will
You usually don’t know it’s you until you getting killed
For real

which was accompanied by a beautiful video.

here’s what Killer Mike had to say about it in this interview from spin.

“Untitled feat. Scar”
“That woman down there [points to end of bar], that’s my wife. A lot of the things I say, people have been killed before for saying. It challenges people and that’s not always appreciated or liked. It could get your ass an FBI file. It’s something I worry about but not something I fret about. What I do worry about, I don’t want to die a day early on [my wife]. I want to be with her the rest of my life and I don’t want that to be a short life.That first verse is me saying what I feel, that I have the emotion of a Dr. King, as in wanting to do what is right but selfishly not wanting to die. I don’t want that woman living in a shack you know, it’s the fear of my own mortality.”

what else do you need?
oh, how about the reagan video?

not enough? let’s get personal.
about that untitled verse…
2012 brought me face to face with mortality. for those that don’t know, my father-in-law and father both passed away this year. both to cancer. both way too soon. to say it has been difficult on the wife and i is an understatement. simply put, it has changed the way i think about my life and my responsibilities as a husband and father. it’s made me reconsider what i’m writing, what i’m not writing and, of course, why. i’ve wanted to return to writing for awhile now and thought that doing some quick hits about music/ comics/ wrestling/ tv/ movies in 2012 would be an easy little exercise. i may have been inspired by facebook’s yearinreview page, which i feel didn’t paint the most accurate picture of what my 2012 has been like.

when you go to facebook’s year in review, you can see a comment or three about these daughters of mine, a bunch of pics the wife tagged me in and two separate posts on killer mike. i try to keep my facebook ((real life)) george and twitter ((internet)) george very separate. so, although twitter george has spent a good deal of time talking about skyzoo’s latest, flatbush zombies’ “S.C.O.S.A.” and the underachievers, i can definitively say that none had the impact on my real life the way that Killer Mike’s R.A.P. has.

i am a huge fan of Killer Mike’s “Monster” ((“I’m an ungodly figure, when in the company of hard liquor” is a MONSTER way to start off an album)) and El-P’s production, so when i heard they were doing an album together it seemed surreal. this was going to be as unlikely a pairing as Brian Danielson and Kane tagging together but yielded results just as magnificent. ((NO? YES!))

i’m still getting back to the me that “shares.” ((if that person ever existed.)) i figure i’ll start by writing. two birds, one stone, yadda yadda yadda. gonaa end this now. i edited out the detailed notes. i’ll just leave a few quick hits. if i don’t press this publish button now, this may be all for naught.
– cultural capital.
– more “i” in writing.
– patrice o’neal.
– “i don’t want that woman living in a shack.”
– future’s “turn on the lights” is the most romantic song of 2012. no, seriously.

i wrote critiques. i wrote op-eds. i wrote code. i stopped “writing.” i tried writing captions. i’m tired of that. i’m writing again.