Word: reals
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Soviet Union: toxic mud and tepid water. But the Red Army went all the way to Berlin in 1945. It blithely crushed revolts in various satellite countries, moved into Cuba, Africa and Afghanistan. Prussia-Germany? In the old days, only the rich could afford real coffee; the masses had to make do with a blend of burnt barley and chicory. But that stuff took the Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow and Cairo...
...fill a void; while rappers and rap-influenced rock groups have been taking hold of the top of the charts as of late, there's a numbing sameness to a lot of the hip-hop that's being pushed on radio and MTV. The music, rather than "keeping it real," seems more interested in catering to suburban stereotypes of urban life: Look kids, isn't DMX scary?!? Certainly there are great hip-hoppers out there--Lauryn Hill and Nas to name two--but as record labels jump on the rap bandwagon, the disposable acts are piling up. As two female...
...lyrical honesty has always been a core hip-hop value--then again, so has exaggeration. On one hand, rappers want to keep their music true to life. On the other, boasting and roasting are also part of the tradition. Lately, exaggeration has ruled. It's often hard to find real experience in the cartoonish raps of many gangsta rappers. Q-Tip, on his new album, Amplified (Arista), brings back the honesty--but doesn't cut back on the fun. This is a party album about picking up chicks (Vivrant Thing), cruising the streets (Let's Ride) and dancing in clubs...
...themselves as Rockwell converts or as closet fans all along. Anytime the higher echelons of the culture industry set out to show how they're in touch with ordinary folks, they risk sounding like George Will when he writes about baseball. But this exhibit is an indicator of a real impulse in the art world lately to find vitality wherever it's to be found, now that the energies that moved modernism have long ago run aground. Perhaps for the first time in history, it's truly possible to ask an essential question: Can you take seriously an artist...
...Senator's life that winds up placing him alongside such other Senate giants as Hubert Humphrey and Robert Taft. In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy by Ronald Steel (Simon & Schuster; 220 pages; $23) is a hard-eyed rumination on the difference between the real (and of course flawed) Robert Kennedy and the popular memory of his greatness...