Andrew Lansley, greedy,
Andrew Lansley, tosser,
the NHS is not for sale you grey haired manky codger. (x4)
So the budget of the PCTs, he wants to hand to the GP’s,
Oh please. Dumb geeks are gonna buy from any willing provider,
get care from private companies.
They saw the pie and they want a piece;
Got their eyes on the P’s like mice for the cheese.
I talk truth when I ride the beat, you talk shite when you speak,
see money when you close your eyes to sleep.
So fall back — your face looks like a shrivelled up ball sack.
The stuff that you chat is bull crap, I’m sure Andy Pandy snorts crack.
Health minister, I mean sinister.
You know your public will finish ya,
is your brain really that miniature?
Give yourself an enema.
Made filthy rich by those who represent Walkers Crisps,
Mars and Pizza Hut, proved your a health slut and your always talking shit.
A hundred and thirty four pound an hour every week, that’s quite a lot of quids;
and you came to the conclusion that the food industry should be a little less
strict.
Scandal disclosed that you flipped your second home.
You said your claims were within the rules, filled your pockets, took us for
jokes;
so how would you cope when broke folk get ill, injured and broke,
but don’t have the dough,
to get their life back on the road, so poor die slow, and the rich take control.
(Chorus x 4)
Lansley’s white paper: “Liberating the NHS”
sets out a plan where we’ll become more like the U.S.
and care will be farmed out to private companies,
who will sell their service to the NHS via the Gps,
who will have more to do with service purchase arrangements
than anything to do with seeing their patients.
He’s been given cash
by John Nash,
chairman of Care UK:
a private healthcare provider,
who, if they have their way,
will be the biggest beneficiaries
of conservative Lib Dem policies
to privatise healthcare and pull apart the welfare state.
These plans have been slagged by patient organisations,
charities and unions,
nursing and medical institutions.
The Royal College of GPs even joined the attack,
looked closely at the proposals
and said they were crap.
Say yes for the NHS, Andrew Lansley can suck on David Cameron’s breast.
His quest is for the rich to pay less, and the poor have to stress, it’ll be one
big mess.
smooth-talking and cheerful rapper
who
billed himself as “the overweight lover M.C.”
(...)
in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
Heavy D was one of hip-hop’s most popular and charismatic figures,
a girthy slickster who was an eager seducer and was unafraid of the dance floor.
He was the frontman of Heavy D & the Boyz,
which became the first act signed to Uptown Records,
the label that was integral in building the bridge between hip-hop and R&B.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/arts/music/heavy-d-rap-star-dies-at-44.html
Plan B, or Ben Drew,
is emerging as one of Britain's most imaginative and dexterous artistic talents.
A singer, musician, writer, actor and director he first made his name
as a hip-hop artist with the release of his critically-acclaimed debut album in
2006.
Two years later he appeared in his first film, Adulthood.
Later this year sees the release of iLL Manors, his first film as
director-writer,
charting the lives of a group of young people living in East London. Meanwhile,
in the autumn,
he will appear alongside Ray Winstone in the remake of the 70s TV classic The
Sweeney.
In an Observer interview last year Plan B said that much of his film and music
work
is inspired by injustice and much of it reflects on his life and upbringing as a
youth in east London.
About TEDx, x = independently organized event
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local,
self-organized events
that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.
At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep
discussion and connection in a small group.
These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently
organized TED event.
The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program,
but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and
regulations)
Emerging from the hard-core punk scene in
New York in the late 1970s,
the Beastie Boys were the first white group to successfully sing rap songs
and have remained popular for more than a quarter century.
The group was founded by Adam Yauch
with Mike Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock)
as a punk band in 1981 and first began experimenting with hip-hop the following
year,
when they released a 12-inch vinyl rap spoof “Cookie Puss.”
All three were teenagers from affluent New York families when they met.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/beastie_boys/index.html
April 23, 2009
The New York Times
By JON CARAMANICA
It’s hard to say when, exactly, 50 Cent crossed the line in
his feud with the Miami rapper Rick Ross. The more apt question might be: How
many lines are there? He tracked down the mother of a Ross associate, DJ Khaled,
at work, filming her sleeping on the job. He taped himself taking the mother of
one of Mr. Ross’s children to buy a fur coat. He acquired and posted to the
Internet a pornographic video starring another of Mr. Ross’s ex-girlfriends.
Rick Ross must have seemed an especially easy mark — it had already been a tough
few months for his fourth wall. Before he was Rick Ross, the drug boss M.C., he
had been William Leonard Roberts, and last summer a photograph surfaced of him
from the mid-1990s, graduating from a corrections officer academy. He denied its
authenticity — until The Smoking Gun got hold of his Florida Corrections
Department personnel file, which included a certificate for perfect attendance.
The facts of Mr. Roberts’s life were getting in the way of Mr. Ross’s career.
To all this upheaval, Rick Ross — who, while he has been popular, has never
quite been great — has replied, improbably, with art. “I see no reason to run to
the dark,” he said in a recent interview in the Manhattan offices of his label,
Def Jam. His songs aimed at 50 Cent have, hands down, been sharper and wittier
than those of his rival. And the just-released “Deeper Than Rap” (Maybach
Music/Slip N’ Slide/Def Jam), his third album, is unexpectedly fantastic, by far
his best.
If albums were all that mattered, that would be that. But Mr. Ross’s persistence
and the fact that though over the last nine months he’s been all but stripped
bare, he’s emerged from the fray relatively unscathed, which indicates something
much more noteworthy. Impenetrability of image, that old signal of hip-hop
authenticity, somehow no longer seems to count.
And what a relief that is. Like all great pop music, rap is theater, and Rick
Ross, now 33, is one of its most ambitious characters. He arrived fully formed
in the summer of 2006: the busting-out gut, the outsize presence, the scratchy
voice, the always-there sunglasses. At worst he was a Young Jeezy clone, spewing
empty drug talk in comically repetitive fashion. At best he was an utterly
believable and improbably charming exponent of the cocaine-rap making the rounds
at the time. Clipse may have done it with more technical precision, and Jeezy
with more magnetism, but Mr. Ross sounded in charge, his voice a gravelly
threat.
“Deeper Than Rap” is just as certain as his first two studio albums, “Port of
Miami” and “Trilla,” but reflects the view from the top, not the bottom. Now,
instead of climbing up to success, he’s achieved it. Produced largely by
J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League and the Inkredibles, this album is lush, erotic, entitled,
a stunning leisure-class document of easy wealth and carefree sex. It’s a
throwback to a time of sonic and attitudinal ambition in hip-hop — the Bad Boy
era of the mid- to late ’90s, with its warm soul samples connoting the new
hip-hop luxury comes to mind. Few rap albums have sounded this assured, this
sumptuous, in years.
Also, unlike before, Mr. Ross can now rap, impressively: either he’s been
studying or is having his hand held. It’s the only thing at odds with this
album’s casual ethic; rapping well need not be a priority, but Mr. Ross seems to
take his newfound affinity for polysyllabic rhyme schemes as a point of pride.
On “Usual Suspects” he raps:
“Seventeen, trying to man up
Feed the fam, boy, I put that on these canned goods
All I got was diabetes and a damn hug
People talking down, calling me a damn scrub.
What’s also notable about “Deeper Than Rap” is what’s not there. 50 Cent is a
target on at least three songs, but Mr. Ross doesn’t belabor the battle nor does
he touch on the aspects of his personal life that have lately haunted him.
In an age of routine tabloid invasions and the microrevelation as celebrity
news, it’s become commonplace to expect access to all aspects of the lives of
the famous. But in the hip-hop world, the stories behind the stories can be too
grave to tell.
“Right now as we speak, I got two of my best friends that’s on the run from two
separate cocaine conspiracy indictments,” Mr. Ross said. “This is a reality that
I can’t glorify. The relationship I have with these people is deeper than rap.
“When I say something like ‘deeper than rap,’ that’s possibly death involved.
That’s possibly prison time involved.”
The idea of “deeper than rap” has become a hip-hop touchstone of late. When the
rapper Crooked I was shot, or not, earlier this year — he wouldn’t confirm or
deny reports — he demurred from discussing the situation, saying, “It’s deeper
than rap.”
Last month, on the MTV show “T. I.’s Road to Redemption,” that rapper calmly
detailed the criminal activities that led to his arrest in 2007 on weapons
charges. Coming from T. I. himself, it was shocking, an alternative history of
his career that had nothing at all to do with music. (He is scheduled to begin
serving his year-and-a-day sentence next month.)
Though his life beyond rap has been used against him, Mr. Ross still teases
about an unknowable dark side. On the new album he name-drops Harry O, a Los
Angeles drug dealer (who claimed to have provided the seed money for Death Row
Records), and Big Ike, a Miami street kingpin.
Mr. Ross took his name from Freeway Rick Ross, a Los Angeles drug lord, and was
mentored by Kenneth Williams, known as Boobie and now serving a life sentence.
On “Gunplay,” from the new album, Mr. Ross raps “Boobie Boy still/ Boobie Boys
real/ You can name a lot of lames that the Boobie Boys killed.”
Perhaps he’s overcompensating. Mr. Ross’s outing as a former corrections officer
was the most spectacular and public implosion of a rapper’s self-styled
tough-guy image — the hip-hop blog NahRight.com gleefully refers to him as
Officer Rawse — since The Dallas Morning News picked apart the looser sections
of Vanilla Ice’s biography during his rise to fame in 1990.
But Vanilla Ice’s songs weren’t filled with homage to the drug trade and its
leading lights. And no one expected unvarnished truth from him. Mr. Ross must
submit to a different standard.
Or at least he still acts as if he must. Of his stint on the side of the law,
Mr. Ross said, “The truth is more sinister than the obvious,” suggesting an
undisclosed layer to his time there.
Miami, he said, is a city where young go-getters “sell dope, buy Lamborghinis
and get buried in them.” This month he filmed a video for “All I Really Want,” a
collaboration with The-Dream, in Medellín, Colombia. In footage from the trip,
available on YouTube, he stands outside the house where Pablo Escobar was
killed, sunglasses off, soaking in history.
Whether it’s a validation of Mr. Ross’s extramusical credibility or an
elaborately staged pose might not matter: creating this scene allows for a
productive ambiguity in how he is perceived by outsiders. All the revelations
about him get dwarfed by the question of who Rick Ross might be when he steps
away from the microphone.
Asked how he’d explain to his children the more insidious of the ex-girlfriend
videos 50 Cent has disseminated, Mr. Ross was philosophical: “I’d say she was an
actress for a day. I love actresses.” In other words, an acknowledgment that
sometimes it’s acceptable to just be playing a role.
October 22,
2008
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Rudy Ray
Moore, whose standup comedy, records and movies related earthy rhyming tales of
a vivid gaggle of characters as they lurched from sexual escapade to sexual
escapade in a boisterous tradition, born in Africa, that helped shape today’s
hip-hop, died Sunday in Akron, Ohio. He was 81.
The cause was complications of diabetes, his Web site said.
Mr. Moore called himself the Godfather of Rap because of the number of hip-hop
artists who used snippets of his recordings in theirs, performed with him or
imitated him. These included Dr. Dre, Big Daddy Kane and 2 Live Crew.
Snoop Dogg thanked Mr. Moore in liner notes to the 2006 release of the
soundtrack to Mr. Moore’s 1975 film, “Dolemite,” saying, “Without Rudy Ray
Moore, there would be no Snoop Dogg, and that’s for real.”
Most critics refrained from overpraising “Dolemite,” with the possible exception
of John Leland, who wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that it “remains the
‘Citizen Kane’ of kung fu pimping movies.” The film, made for $100,000,
nonetheless became a cult classic among aficionados of so-called blaxploitation
movies — films that so exaggerate black stereotypes that they might plausibly be
said to transcend those stereotypes.
Very little of Mr. Moore’s work in any medium reached mainstream audiences,
largely because his rapid-fire rhyming salaciousness exceeded the wildest
excesses of even Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor. His comedy records in the 1960s
and ’70s — most featuring nude photographs of him and more than one woman in
suggestive poses — were kept behind record store counters in plain brown
wrappers and had to be explicitly requested.
But Mr. Moore could be said to represent a profound strand of African-American
folk art. One of his standard stories concerns a monkey who uses his wiles and
an accommodating elephant to fool a lion. The tale, which originated in West
Africa, became a basis for an influential study by the Harvard scholar Henry
Louis Gates Jr., “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary
Criticism.”
In one of his few brushes with a national audience, Mr. Moore, in a startlingly
cleaned-up version, told the story on “The Arsenio Hall Show” in the early
1990s. Other characters he described were new, almost always dirtier renderings
in the tradition of trickster stories represented by Brer Rabbit and the cunning
slave John, who outwitted his master to win freedom.
Mr. Moore updated the story of an old minstrel show favorite, Peetie (which he
changed to “Petey”) Wheatstraw, a k a the Devil’s Son-in-Law and the High
Sheriff of Hell. Others in his cast were Pimpin’ Sam and Hurricane Annie. Mr.
Moore became a master at “toasting,” a tradition of black rhymed storytelling
over a beat in which the tallest tale — or most outlandish insult — wins.
Rudolph Frank Moore was born on March 17, 1927, in Fort Smith, Ark., where he
was soon singing in church. He moved to Cleveland at 15, found work peeling
potatoes and washing dishes and won a talent contest. He was drafted in 1950 and
performed for his fellow soldiers as the Harlem Hillbilly, singing country songs
in R&B style.
After his discharge, he resumed his pre-Army act as the turbaned dancer Prince
Dumarr. He made some records as a singer under the name Rudy Moore, doing songs
like “Hully Gully Papa,” who liked to “coffee grind real slow.”
His life changed in 1970 when he found himself listening to the stories of Rico,
a regular at the record store in Hollywood, Calif., where Mr. Moore worked.
He was particularly captivated by Rico’s rude, rollicking stories of Dolemite, a
name derived from dolomite, a mineral used in some cements. Mr. Moore perfected
the Dolemite stories in comedy routines, most of which he recorded, then spent
all his record earnings to make the movie “Dolemite.” A sequel, “The Human
Tornado,” followed. A second sequel, “The Dolemite Explosion,” also starring Mr.
Moore, may be released later this year.
Fallout Entertainment bought the rights last year to remake the original movie.
Bill Fishman of Fallout said some of Mr. Moore’s famous lines would be used.
Mr. Moore is survived by four siblings; his daughter, Yvette Wesson, known as
Rusty; and his 98-year-old mother, Lucille.
Violent scenes in Mr. Moore’s movies included a man’s guts being ripped out by
another character’s bare hands in “Dolemite.” Almost none of the dialogue in any
of his movies can be printed in a family newspaper, not to mention the language
of his more than 16 comedy albums — or even many of their titles.
But what is probably his most famous line is also his most typical:
