Kanye West’s video Jesus Walks has been on my mind. I was reading some stuff on the web about people’s reactions. It was wild how many kids that said they were atheist, but there was something powerful about the video. Any one read or got information on the world wide impact of hip-hop and rap music in the world? I read some stuff on the counter-culture movement in Cuba by rappers. I saw it in the Washington Post. I thought was interesting.
Last night I saw Channels of Rage at the Vancouver International Fillm Festival. The movie was hard to follow. It was hard to keep up with the subtitles, I think I need to see it again for me to really understand it. It was interesting to follow the life of these two teenage rappers that were on opposing sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I thought that throughout the movie MC Tamer was shown as always on the fringes of the rap scene, but in the end he seems to break into Europe and goes on tour. While Subliminal the Israeli rapper stays in his country, but seems to be making a better living than Tamer. The rap in the film seems to be weak. The flow seems to be forced and the ideas seem not go go anywhere. I did like how Subliminal stopped the crowd from chanting, “Death to the Arabs”. I had a hard time following Subliminal and Tamer’s positions on the conflict. It seems like Tamar’s arrest in the film was a rallying point for the people in Lod. It gave them pride to stand up when he was arrested. I would like to seem some of the rappers in America visit their home and compare the situations in the cities in American with those in the Palestinian and Israeli sections.
